eromancer

Inner Circle Update for June 28 2019!

Added 2019-06-29 04:06:07 +0000 UTC

Hey guys!

I wish we had something playable to post, but we've got good news and some significant progress nonetheless.

The biggest news is that Mr. Kittyhawk has the revamp of the combat system working, and with it he has overcome the remaining player input issues. I'll explain the details in the programming update section below, but the big thing to know is input and AI will be much more solid soon, and we can finally get on with all of the other important features we need to add :D.

The second bit of progress is that we've figured out how to properly combine traditional animation with Spine's interpolated animation. It should vastly improve our animations in the long run, and is the missing link for making believable transitions. Check below for more info!

Splicer Boss H Scene Preview

Here's some work-in-progress art for the first boss H scene!

After experimenting, we've increased the boss' size significantly since it provides for much more "dramatic" H animations. We have a few days of work left on the art for the grapple stuff and first H scene, but it will be in the next monthly build for sure.

I'm working toward better transitions and more interesting progression in the H scenes, and as mentioned above being able to use traditional animation elements makes this a lot easier. I've never done traditional animation, so it's a lot to wrap my head around, but things have clicked for me and I feel good about it. The GIF I included at the top of this post is an example of how we're using it in the boss H scene. Utilizing frame-by-frame components will allow for more complex angles than we can do with Spine animation alone, and it only increases memory consumption a bit (only the boobers and belly require sprite sheets, not the entire character).

Big Programming Progress!

Mr. Kittyhawk has finally gotten over all the hurdles of revamping the state machine. If you recall the previous updates, the state machine is what keeps track of each unit's current action, and drives animations / combat logic / AI behavior. In doing so, he's eliminated remaining input issues, such as the 3 frame lag we had to introduce in order to ensure the physics engine stayed synced. The cooldowns on attacks are also much more solid now, and there's no more pose flickering between actions.

Instead of having a separate state machine for the player and enemies, both are now driven by the same code. He's eliminated the need for complicated coroutines (multi-threaded code) that were causing a lot of the bugs in previous builds, which should speed up adding new attacks and logic to enemies.

There's still some debugging, but the next major task is to convert existing enemy AI behaviors to this new system. After that we should be able to finally move on to animation metadata, which will give us way more control over how animations play (very important for improving H scenes).

Syndicate Enforcer Progress

Aside from a few more elements to finish up, we now have a really solid 3D reference for the Syndicate Enforcer enemy. TK has reworked and rigged the Syndicate coat model we made for MATM to match Limbo's design for Pure Onyx. Limbo has started working on pose concepts as well.

Sewer Level Concepts

Not a whole lot to show yet, but Limbo and I were able to bang out some concepts for the sewer level this week. Obviously, the most the interesting thing we could do in this level is include water, and I had some cool ideas for how we could make things fun. One is that these areas could have underwater tentacle traps, which would cue the player as to where they are about to appear with bubbles/ripples. These wouldn't only be limited to affecting players however -- as we could allow for Onyx to knock enemies into them to trigger H scenes for females or for the tentacles to pull other enemies under, removing them from the battle.

I'm curious to hear any ideas you may have for this environment :D.

Dedicated SFX Designer Joining the Team!

I decided I need to delegate some audio work if we're going to get this thing polished quickly, and to fill the void Lewd K will be joining us to help out with SFX. He's worked on a bunch of other H games, including Cloud Meadow, Future Fragments, and Lewdest Labyrinth. He already has the first round of combat SFX for the Chain Splicer and boss done, and we will continue to focus on this kind of stuff until we improve the audio framework for the H animations, at which point we'll start to focus on that :D.