January 2019 Progress Update!

Happy New Year!

As promised, we will have a new Pure Onyx build for you tomorrow! For now, here’s the monthly progress update!

With Pure Onyx development well underway, we’re getting ready to come out of our shell and start showing what we’ve been working on publicly. With that in mind it’s time to start updating the Tumblr and Blogspot again. I also haven’t been doing a great job of curating the rewards pages, so I’ll be reformatting that to better show new and potential patrons the rewards available. 

Contents for this Update

• Unity H System Progress
• Stage 1-1 Map Artwork
• Stage 1-2 Concepts
• Stage 1-5: Boss Battle Concepts
• Backdrop Quality Improvements
• Animation Progress
• Dynamic Pose/Animation Blending
• Limbo’s Latest Enemy Artwork
• TK’s Asset Conversions

Unity H System Progress

Kittyhawk here! I was away for a couple weeks at the beginning of the month, but work on the H system is well underway. The Unity component of the H system controls the playback of multipart H scenes, and when called it positions actors in 3d space, transitions them into the first cycle in the H sequence and controls progression and playback speed through the H set. We’ve yet to tackle the integration of it into the combat system, but one step at a time!

Ero and Limbo haven’t completed the H artwork yet, but we’re at the point where we should have the flexibility to not worry about tech limitations when coming up with poses or scene ideas involving multiple characters!

Stage 1-1 Map Artwork Update!

Uber has blown it out of the water again with the environment artwork.  It’s tricky as hell to get the 3D models to conform to this wonky perspective, but the results remind me of some of the SNK fighting game backgrounds we took inspiration from :D. He also redid the road, and now that we have Limbo to help out with the language, we were able to create some custom signage that fits the look. We still have the background and foreground to finish, but those will go quickly. Check below for a full-size map render (24000 px!).  It's 17 MB so it may load slow o.o

• Full Map Render  
• Distant Background Mock-up

Anyone catch the reference to the first release of MATM in here? I don’t think anyone in the IC group found it :D

Stage 1-2 Concept Art and Preview

Stage 1-2 is the underpass. I tried to show we can be a little more comfortable with the wacky perspective here by making a design that transitions between indoor and outdoor scenes. The background will consist of a few parallax layers, and yup, that’s the wreckage of our favorite giant robot from MATM. 

Above is a quick preview render of Uber's current progress on the underpass map!  Here's the higher resolution version. 

We're planning on a total of five maps in the first stage. It will look something like this: Streets > Underpass > Police Roadblock / Boulevard > Industrial Park > Warehouse. 

Stage 1-5: Boss Battle Concepts

The scene at the top of the post is our concept for Pure Onyx’s first stage boss battle with the big wrench-axe Splicer guy (I’ll think of a real name soon x_x). Limbo prepared a set of variations which we will borrow elements from, since our 3D version will likely have some differences. 

Backdrop Quality Improvements

We spent a full day troubleshooting quality issues with the backdrops. Turns out Unity was downscaling our textures to 8096 px, which resulted in really blurry backgrounds (here’s the difference, shown with a character sprite to make it really obvious). This is happening in the demo stage as well, so you may have noticed Onyx’s character sprite being overly sharp against the blurry background. To resolve it we will need to break the backgrounds down into chunks in-game.

Animation Progress

I spent a week or so documenting and teaching Kitsune my process for breaking down the artwork for Spine while maintaining nondestructive workflow (here’s the process if anyone’s interested) It takes longer, but this will allow us to further develop the artwork later if we so choose with soft shading or normal maps for lighting, without having to remake our meshes for animation in Spine.  Kitsune is now in the process of creating the actual animations for the Splicer.  So far she has Walk and Idle finished :D.

Limbo’s been working on H artwork concepts for the Splicer minions. He's been developing sketches for the progression of the scenes (these will be in the concept gallery int he game version we release tomorrow), which we can turn into frame animations and eventually into keyframes which we will use for Spine animations. With a little elbow grease, we will have our first high quality H artwork that we can experiment with pretty soon :D.

Dynamic Pose/Animation Blending

One of the goals this month was to get the full moveset for the Splicer Thug into Spine so that we could answer the remaining questions we have about the animation tech stuff and workflow – the largest of which was automated animation blending. This is a pretty imperative for making good H scenes, so we needed to knock it out first. 

It took some work, but we’ve now got it functioning, and have a solid idea for how to make it look good. We even have it working with the shadows :D (this was something I was worried about). Keep in mind this image above isn't showing the actual/final animations, it’s just Spine’s automated blending.  Right now, it’s just blending between static poses. We realize it's a bit buggy at the moment, but I think the end result will look really good, and this has been a major step in figuring out how to set up our H artwork.

Limbo’s Latest Enemy Artwork

Limbo pumped out a ton of artwork this month! We’re at the stage where we need to start finalizing poses for the Chain Splicer and first boss, so Limbo’s been pounding out sketches. Currently he’s working on final line art for some of the boss’s core moveset. We’ll be doing one of these sketch sheets for each character before we start the detailed art, just like we did with Onyx and the Splicer Thug, which will allow us (and you) to playtest and make adjustments beforehand.   

• First Boss Moveset Sketches 
• First Boss Tentacle Attacks Sketches 

First Boss Line Art WIP  

• Chain Splicer Moveset Sketches 1 
• Chain Splicer Moveset Sketches 2 

TK’s Asset Conversions

TK’s been digging his way through the mountain of assets we scored during Black Friday weekend, adding materials and converting them for use with Redshift. I’ve been trying to give him some insight into what to tackle first so we can integrate it into Ubercharge’s Pure Onyx maps. All of this stuff will work great for MATM as well. Here’s what he has done so far!

• Mech 1
• Mech 2
• Warehouse
• Ruined Vehicles
• Train