Progress update- lots o' spine stuff (Patreon)

Okay, here we go! 

I've been ADHD-writing this post for a few days. That is, I go "oh crap I didn't finish that post", then start working on it, and then... well I'm not sure what happens but apparently I don't finish it. Gonna make an effort to do a little daily summary of my tasks after work from now on. That way I'll already have most of the weekly post written up. Since it's not integrated into my normal routine right now, it gets lost like everything else >.<'

What's being worked on?

Animations!

Struggles and wiggles and stuff. Just... doin those. I notice a lot of the way the npc struggling feature works is designed around the old limitations of the animation rig. This new update erases so many of those limitations that it feels silly to stay trapped into the old paradigms. But I'm resisting overhauling things for now. Scope creep bad. 

Also, animations.

Touch-based reactions are more obvious now. 

I like the results of this, so it's worth iterating on the idea further. The feature was added in a previous update but it was hard to balance. Gotta remake all the animations anyway so I pushed them a bit further.

Using additive animations instead of layered bones means I can do anything from minor to major movements based on individual body part interaction. This required a new full layer of bones in the past for any additional movement; now I'm only limited by how much time I want to put into it. 

Currently it's just a touch-based reaction, but each individual body part tracks all sorts of data, so there could be unique animations for all kinds of interactions. They could even be conditional based on any aspect of the npc's state. I doubt I've fully grasped the range of possibilities here. I need to delve into this again later.

Toy errors cleanup.

Ran checks on all toys in all configurations to make sure there are no errors. Lots of edge cases cleaned up. Not a lot to talk about, just checking off boxes for release!

Cleaning brush toy.

Testing out a more sensible attach-to-body type toy for tickling purposes. 

The normal hairbrush toy used to fill this role but it didn't make much sense. Now they're separate things! Eventually I want to have toys like this attached by restraints n stuff instead of magnetically sticking to them.

Mouse rig

I'm turning the mouse into its own mini Spine rig. Right now, toys are static and transparent when held on the mouse. But now they can wiggle!

So yeah. Main thing here is making it easier to match a toy's appearance across different states. The old way requires a completely separate set of assets and code to manage. This change puts the assets into Spine, and uses the toy's already-written code to operate it. There are many many reasons why this is a good idea, but right now it just speeds up the process of making toys work. 

A nice side effect is that the toy will be better-synced between on-mouse and on-npc states. It'll look the same size, color, have the same mess on it, play vibrate anims, etc. It also exists in the same world space, which is neat for many reasons.

Future benefits include being integral for using living body parts in portals, adding transitionary animations for Immersion(tm), adding much more visual information to the toy a player is holding without needing menus, angling toys in anticipation of what they're about to do, and lots more. This is another feature I doubt I've grasped the full potential of yet.

Part of this process included abstracting Spine rig code into its own extendable class for more ability to use animations. It's a little dry and technical, but I realized in doing this that there's a lot of non-npc animation potential coming out of this small change. It also leads well into my attempts to convert the base of this game into its own engine. :3

Oh and I got distracted during the stream and tried to make the toys bend a little when moved for Immersion(tm). As expected, the results were very professional.

Q&A

Will there be textures added to toys? Yep! Actually a very easy thing to do since it's all the same mesh, but I haven't explored it much yet. You'll see a huge jump in toy options during the portals update, since I'll be working directly on toy appearance-related mechanics.

Will we be able to use real penises and not just dildos? The next big update will add this feature using portals! :3

That's all for now! From this week on, I'm gonna start recording stream VODs and linking them in these posts. I can't make any quality promises there cause I'm not exactly a pro streamer >.>

Thanks for reading! <3