Faces of Emily

I often get asked about the facial animation for characters; I thought I'd go through and show how it's set up. Emily's by far the most expressive character; side-characters usually have 3, major characters 5-8; Emily has 14.

Each expression is made up of 4 images; the base layer, blink and eye movement, and a mouth movement. These are blended in on top of the base-layer to give the feeling of movement. Each animation is ~10 seconds long (300 frames), to avoid it looping/blinking too fast.

There's two bones involved; the clavicle bone (blue) and the head (pink); that lets the system blend smoothly between them in the areas in between. The attachments are all anchored on the Head bone, so they move with it. That let's me do a slight animation as the head moves.

Apart from that; I've started work on Day 116, and book 2. If you're on Steam and the beta branch you can see how it will show up once it's released (the current Beta build is just a stripped down Book 1... hopefully I'll have an actual build tonight that completes Day 116).

All 3 games are part of the same Steam purchase; I'd rather I have a single community, rather than one scattered across multiple steam apps. It'll remain on the Beta Branch until I reach the end of Act VII (We March!), at which point it'll push this change global for everyone.

As always; if you're a Patreon just ping me if you want a free key. While free keys aren't counting towards the game's review score, the reviews do show up and people do read them, so leave a review if you liked the game. I'll go out on a limb and guess that most of the patreons like it ;) If nothing else, I read every review... it's been really rewarding to see all the happy players, both from Patreon and new Steam users.

I'll do a slightly more indepth article focused on the steam launch, lessons learned, some figures and walking you guys through the Steam experience, a little later. Now... back to writing Day 116 :)

As always... thanks for being there. 2020 would have been a very different year without all of you, and all the people in Discord keeping me sane and grounded.

Droid.