May 2021 Progress Update!

Hey everyone!

We're inching our way closer to our next major goal for Pure Onyx -- getting the actual gameplay loop in place so it's well >_> a game, and not just a simple wave-based mini-game thing.  Before we get into that though, know that there will be an updated $5 tier release before the end of the month, featuring an improved version of the new Chain Splicer scene, and much more detailed sounds for the Runt + Thug scene.

We have a couple good pieces of news to report as well!  After his vision began deteriorating a couple of months back, our rigger and geometry expert, TK, has had his first of two corrective eye surgeries this month, and is actually able to see clearly again :D.   

Secondly, we're no longer mired by obscene Unity load times thanks to some wizardry by AltairPL.  The four of us that use Unity daily have been dealing with half hour waits for Unity to import changes, and since this happens a lot toward releases, we were wasting hours a day.  Troubleshooting and overcoming the problem was a team effort, and as such this update has a bit more of a technical side than usual.  Check below for details on this and more :D.

Topics for this Update!

• May Test Release Details
• May Release H Scene Progress
• FemCop H Scene Concepts
• Male Police Enemy Progress
• Syndicate Bunnygirl 3D Concept
• FemCop Liquid FX WIP
• Brum's New Loading Screen
• Improving the Unity Editor
• Missions, Maps, and the Gameplay Loop

May Test Release Details

Tentative Changelog (** indicates items added since the May 13 Inner Circle test release):

• ** Adding secondary motion (jiggles, hair and clothing animation) and fixes to all Chain Splicer H scene animations
• ** Adding liquid FX finisher to the Chain Splicer H scene animation
• ** Added many more detailed sound FX for Runt/Thug double team scene. 
• ** Added even more detailed sound FX for the new Chain Splicer scene.
• ** Added oral, H insertion, and H pullout SFX.
• ** Improved performance for Chain Splicer (?) -- we have a fix, but depends on if we can implement it in time.
• ** Upgraded Unity version
• ** Fixed issue where sorting inventory doesn't update currently selected item (would cause incorrect item to be used directly after sorting)
• ** Clean Rag item can now actually be used (woops)
• Added Chain Splicer + Onyx H scene to the game and to the gallery.
• New belly bulge for Onyx added to Street Lord Wraxe H scenes.
• Onyx's belly piercing no longer gets absorbed into her when her stomach bulges >_>.
• Added the first version of the new loading screen.
• Upgraded basic Hit FX graphics.
• Wraxe can now summon Chain Splicers
• Wraxe now summons more minions at once, but his summon skill has a longer cooldown.
• Street Lord Wraxe should no longer get stuck in place when walking.
• Vioreaper no longer spams stingers.
• Onyx will no longer get a weird burst of speed when skidding to a stop after dashing.
• Actor State Viewer (debug text above characters' heads) will no longer appear backwards in the Sewer map.
• Street Lord Wraxe now steps back properly after missing a grab instead of sliding across the ground
• Removed stop-motion ("lag") from Wraxe's grab animation
• Fixed glitchy liquid pooling on the Runt+Thug double team outro
• Increased footstep volume

May Release H Scene Progress

We added the first Chain Splicer H scene to the Inner Circle release this month! Penapsquat and I are hard at work at knocking out a big list of improvements and the secondary animation (jiggles, hair and dangly bits animation, etc.) for it.  This scene has been extra work because it's the first example of rigged props being used in the game -- a big team effort to get rigging capabilities and code done.  This will come into play a lot for things like tentacles and traps later.

It may interest you to know we've also been developing sort of multi-team versions ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) of the scene :D.  Both the Splicer Runt and Thug are compatible with it, totaling four different versions of the scene (Chain Splicer + Runt, Chain Splicer + Thug, Chain Splicer + Runt + Thug).  More specifically, it's a tag team train scenario, which should be a lot of fun.  We already have a significant amount of work on the animations done, but don't count on it by the end of the month -- too much to do still!  

Lastly, we've added the improved bulge to Onyx's rig and updated all of the Street Lord Wraxe H scenes accordingly :D.

FemCop H Scene Concepts

Gifdoozer has been working recently on concepts for potential FemCop H scenes!  We're in the early stages here, brainstorming ideas and doing pose drafts.  The next step is to merge the poses into a project and continue storyboarding to create something sequential, and edit the poses so that they interpolate nicely in 3D space.     

Male Police Enemy Progress

Kame did it!  He finished his first high poly sculpt for us, and it came out great.  

TK has been hard at work on making the low poly version, and while I would've loved for it to have been rigged and ready to show off with Unity materials, his eye surgery recovery comes first, since a blind rigger isn't very useful :D.  As such, the above preview is still in ZBrush, so the cel shading isn't representative of what it will look like in game.

Kame will most likely be finishing up the Police Boss next, but he's also started on a 3D concept for the Syndicate Bunny Girl!

Syndicate Bunnygirl 3D Concept

Kame's been wanting to show his sculpting skills on a female character, and was able to bang out a great rough draft of the Syndicate Bunnygirl in a single night.  Hopefully we can expect more on this one next month :D!

FemCop Liquid FX WIP

We've started the process of converting and editing the body liquid FX models over to FemCop!  It's possible we'll have this in game as early as next month, so expect more on it in next month's update~.  

Brum's New Loading Screen

Brum and AltairPL have completed the design of and implemented the new loading screen! The plan over time is to add more art and motion graphics to be randomly selected from during these sequences.

It may seem unnecessary at the moment, but at its core it is an extension to our UI that allows for animated and relatively seamless transitions.  Having this capability early means we can design more of the UI around it, which should make for some stylish FX.  

Improving the Unity Editor

We've noticed over the past 6 months or so increasingly bad Unity editor performance.  At its worst, launching Unity took between 5-30 minutes, and it took minutes to access our game database. With all of us passing edits around remotely, this was eating up a lot of our time.  Unity's support has a lot of unanswered issues with this, so after the test release on the 13th we decided we had to fix it ourselves.

After a few days of research, we found a big piece of the puzzle was due to how Unity stores animation files (which started ramping up exponentially in our project in December).  It stores these as human readable text by default, which as it turns out is bad news.  Anything readable by humans is slower for a computer to process, so
AltairPL developed a technique to force Unity to store animations in binary.  The result was an immediate 1000% faster loading times.

We didn't stop there though, because as it turned out, Unity was also loading every single character model in our game into RAM when we opened our custom game database =_=.  Unity's solution was actually to divide the game into separate projects, which is an absurd hassle, but as we deepen our knowledge of advanced game development, we find more and more of these exist in the industry.  Turns out though they added support for... you know, not doing this very obvious thing you shouldn't do... in a later Unity version.

Generally, once a large scale game project is underway, it becomes a nightmare to upgrade the engine, since it can affect dozens of tiny details that snowball.  But since our growing character library would mean we'd eventually run the risk of serious issues, we underwent the task.  We had to pause code development about a week, but after days more of testing, we've come out relatively unscathed!   

Missions, Maps, and the Gameplay Loop

As mentioned at the beginning, we're now putting focus on getting out of the whole wave-based minigame thing and broadening the gameplay loop to something that will resemble the actual game.  Though interrupted by the Unity junk, AltairPL is the one pushing this forward by adding the necessary structures to the code and database.

He made a lot of progress earlier this month, as the game database now has the following categories:

• Maps - sections of a stage; such as the two currently available test maps.
• Stages - A full collection of maps representing a zone in the game.  Currently, six stages are planned for the main release of the game: Slums, Junkyard, Sewers, Red Light, Labs, Skyline.
• Missions - An instance where the player progresses through a stage, where its maps, events, and encounters are organized and assembled based on a script or randomization. 
• Mission Modifiers - Scripts that alter a mission's properties, usually adding difficulty for a greater reward.
• Tasks - Side quests that may be completed during missions.

APL's added the ability for the player to move between maps, and soon we will be able to add a basic version of the game's world map, as well as the main "hub".  

Currently he's making the item system (with randomized stat bonuses and so forth) compatible with the save system.  There's still a few months of work to be done in this area beyond the above, such as adding an event and encounters system, so expect to hear ongoing progress on this over the next few updates!