State of the Game - October 22, 2022

Woah, this was supposed to be a weekly thing, whoops! Sorry for the hold up!
I've been fairly busy on my end taking on sketch commissions to keep things afloat, but I definitely still have progress to share!

Assets! Assets! Assets! One of the main things I've wanted to get out of the way recently is getting all of the new character creator assets "game-ready". It's a tedious  job that has to get done sooner or later.

"Getting assets game-ready? You mean like, modelling them?"

Not quite! While I did have to model a good handful of them since the last devlog, getting them game ready is a whole other subject. For my personal project pipeline, getting a character creator asset game-ready consists of the following steps:

• Clean Up: Making sure the asset's transforms are set to zero, closing open caps on hair meshes, decimating and subdividing when needed.
• Organizing the Materials: Since you are able to choose any color you want for any asset (cough Sims 4 cough), I have to make sure the base materials are set properly and in the right order. I tend to make the primary color black and proceeding colors white and shades of gray, for consistency.
• Attaching the Armature: Making sure the assets actually follow the rig correctly.
• Blendshapes: This is it's own barrel of trouble. I might make an entirely separate devlog on this step if there is interest for it. But for now, this is basically making sure the clothing actually grows and scales with the body.
• Masking: Ever since 0.4 (most of) the articles of clothing also come with masks that are applied to the body that makes the part of the body the clothing covers invisible. This is to avoid clipping. This isn't an automatic process though. The masks for each piece of clothing still need to be drawn manually (aside from hair, hats and certain accessories).
• Icon Capture: Getting an icon preview image for the character creator.
• FBX Export: Exporting the assets with the correct settings.

And all that doesn't even include importing them into Unity, which is a bit of another slog, but at the very least, the worst of it is done! All these steps aren't too bad with a single asset. But 0.5 has over 30 new character assets coming in. So time definitely adds up quickly. Making it a fairly lengthy process to get through. If you're interested in watching it get done, there is an 11+ hour stream up on Twitch archiving me getting through a majority of it!

The other thing I've been working on has been Badges. In case you aren't aware, badges are essentially tokens you can apply and stack on your character to they gain special attributes. Think of them similar to how badges work in the first 2 Paper Mario games.

During the last devlog, there were only about 12 planned badges for 0.5.

There are now 35.

I'm actually in the middle of programming them as I write this devlog.

If you want a sneak peak you can see all their planned primary functions HERE.

And here are previews of the badge icons as well (how many references can you spot):

Aside from little fixes here and there. That's pretty much it for today's devlog. Here's hoping we'll actually have another next week! Many thanks for your support!