Inner Circle Update for April 28 2019!

Hey guys!

I'm stopping in to update you on the status of the update.  We've made a ton of progress, but are still working on achieving more stability with the AI before we wrap up the easy stuff.  In particular there are a couple difficult bugs to track down, and I'm posting a list of all of the remaining things we've got left to tackle.  I've also posted a clip from yesterday morning of the enemy AI doing its thing.  We hadn't loaded up the updated animations yet, and we still haven't fine tuned parameters like the jump physics or enemies' walk animation playback speed, so it's all very clunky looking.  I wouldn't post something as unpolished as this normally, but I want you to see some of the progress in action.  Some of the things you'll see if you look closely in the video: 

• Enemy navigation around obstacles 
• Physics based collision between enemies and Onyx.  
• Enemy behaviors such as juking, charging, and flanking Onyx.

Feel free to point stuff out and ask questions :D. Here are the remaining bugs / things on our to-do list we need to tackle before the release.  Some of these sound pretty scary but a lot are just left-overs from recoding the combat system: 

• Fix bug that sometimes causes enemies' AI to fail to restart after a struggle scene.
• Fix bug that inhibits struggle scene from starting, but leaves enemy stuck in struggle state.
• Fix bug where Onyx drags around a knocked down version of herself if she entered into a struggle and escaped while knocked down.  
• Add infinite wave mode
• Tune animations that need it
• Draw order is incorrect for the H skeleton 
• Finish implementing post-H scene gameplay reinitialization after a finisher.
• H animation sound FX system needs extending to play multiple sounds on single keyframe (will have to wait for next update), need to add merged SFX for now
• Fix issue preventing some other SFX to trigger
• Tweak attack cooldowns
• Tweak hit-boxes for new enemy animations
• Enemy health gauge displays incorrectly after restarting game from main menu
• Game Over screen locks up
• Enemy knockdown messed up
• Jump kick operates differently behind the scenes with our new code.  Need to add Jumpkick hit box and test.
• Onyx goes sky high if she gets knocked down just as she's jumping up (yay physics).

The only really bad bugs in here are the first two, which are difficult to track down because they all involve multi-threaded code.  That being said, I've gotten some strong leads and figured out how to repeat one of them in the last few hours, so hopefully we'll get somewhere on them when Mr. Kittyhawk wakes up. 

Junkyard Level Artwork

In other news, Ubercharge has finished the first map of the junkyard level, and I think it may be my favorite environment to date.  This one has four parallax layers, so it should look great in motion.

For the next map in this level, we're looking at doing a vista with a graveyard of giant mechs poking out of the fog in the background.  

Check out the high res screens here:

• Junkyard Level 1 
• Junkyard Level 2 
• Junkyard Full Map (35 MB image) 

Onyx Promotional Painting WIP

Lastly, I've been working on the Onyx promotional artwork from last week when I've had time.  Here's a tiny teaser :D. I still have a ways to go on it.  

Sorry again for the delays with the update ;(.  The good news is once we're past this big overhaul we will be able to very easily do bite-sized updates, and I can finally get you more of those Inner Circle exclusive builds I've been promising.