State of the Game - August 11, 2025

Hey, all!

Now that most of you have had time to experience the broken mess that is 1.3, it's time to dive into the progress on the new attempt we previously talked about. And yes, this is the last time I'm doing this, I swear.

Forgive how WIP everything looks. I didn't want to make an update until I got more done. But I need to get used to keeping you guys informed more often. Even if the news isn't that exciting. So with that, let's get into it.

First off, I took the opportunity to go back to the main model again. I tried to make the proportions a bit cuter like the original chibi model, without losing the body real estate of the newer model. So overall, it's a tad shorter. Head is the same one used in 1.3, since it already solved the initial flat face problem. The poly count is still higher than I would like, but that might just be the price to pay for players to get super huge sizes without looking insanely polygonal.

Moving on, you might already be aware of the "texture clothing" approach from previous devlogs. That's still being used here, just a little modified. Though this time, I've gone and made a template for myself that should hopefully make the process way easier and consistent this time around.

Now let's move over to Unity for the rest of this report. It's a little harder to show progress here because most of it is just code. But I'll do my best to give a brief synopsis.

I'm basically doing a bunch of base system rewriting. But this time, without a bunch of overlapping dependencies. Trying to be way more liberal with Actions and Events. And when script dependencies are needed, information is passed through a "Character Brain" of sorts, which then communicates with whatever system on the body that it needs to. One single entry point, rather than having a bunch of crossed wires.

I've also started retooling the character creator. A lot of it is re-implementing my previous code, because that part isn't in an unusable state, heh. It's a bit hard to tell in the WIP image below, but it's actually previewing a new addition: being able to choose your "skin pattern".

Given how most of the clothing (aside from elements that still need 3D models) works now, adding the option wasn't too much of a headache. If all goes well, you should be able to make characters' whose skin isn't all one single color, more easily. Furry characters, or ENA for example.

But that's all I have to share for now. See you (hopefully) within a week with more progress to share.