Facial expressions and fighting (progress update)

Hey all, I'm back with another progress write-up.

tl;dr: added Erisia facial expressions to her new dialogue, continued work on fighting system, finished improved/taller idle animation, released a new bugfix build

First off I'll start with: I've just released a new bugfix build. This is available to Insiders right now, but a lot of the changes here are also making their way into the public/demo build eventually - I still have a few things I want to get done before I release another public/demo build, but it's coming. I delayed this write-up by a couple of days so that it could be paired with the bugfix update, which took a bit longer than I hoped, but they're both here now.

Erisia dialogue

A thing I've been meaning to do since I noticed a pattern of those bubbles with facial expressions is to make them into a system. So I've done that for Erisia, and paired it with the dialogue system - this means Erisia now has both a bunch of text dialogue, facial expressions paired with the text, and her mouth synchronizes with the text like she's speaking. Most of her lines are shown during animations, but there are a few quick lines when she speaks to NPCs too now. This is already in the bugfix build, so you can check it out right now.

In the future I'm hoping to add NPC/Entity facial expressions, and hopefully improve Erisia's face by increasing its resolution and hopefully animating it a bit more to make it seem more fluid.

Fighting system

I doubled down and did quite a bit more work here. There are now four fighting moves work-in-progress, and the plan is to have 8 when I first release a fighting test build at some point - two for each stat/level. Currently, two of those 8 are the work-in-progress ones, which means there's two bonus ones already. The plan is you unlock more moves as you progress in the game - maybe through shops, maybe through quests, maybe through hidden chests, we'll see how it ends up working :)

There's a lot of work ahead here: I have to animate not just fighting moves but also reactions to fighting moves (e.g. getting stunned, knocked over/falling) as well as fighting moves for the Entities too. I've got one Entity fight move in progress right now (the Plant Walker), but I'm aiming to limit myself to the Jungle Entities for the first test fight build so that it can be released earlier than otherwise.

Loosely related, I've also made a new idle animation that is 144px tall instead of 128px - this means there's more detail, and Erisia is taller. Because of the height increase, I'll also have to redo the jump/fall and run animations too, before I can release the new idle animation. I'm already accounting for the 144px height in the fighting animations above.

Optimizations

I've got two pretty nice optimizations that are work-in-progress. The first is the new chunk loading system that loads environmental stuff (lights, interactables) and entities. I intended to get this in the bugfix update, but the system didn't work quite as flawlessly yet so I've delayed that. The second is a little less noticeable, but it's how animations/sprites are synchronized with the player/entities physics bodies, which the Godot game engine can handle much better now so I'm using its internal system instead again.

And that's it for this one. The next progress update should write-up be between Xmas and New Years, so I'll see you then!