February Progress Update!

Hello everyone!

Despite an unfortunate hiccup last week progress on V0.06 has been going great!  Before I get into things I want to thank the Inner Circle crowd for all the responses last week regarding translating help.  I’ll be sure to contact you guys soon!  Also, check above for the first new music track that will definitely be used in V0.06!  It’s a new version of one of the demos posted in the soundtrack rewards last month(?), and while Audio Guy claims it’s not the final version yet it’s spot on to what I was hoping for.  In addition to this one, I’ve just added 5 new demo tracks created throughout this past month to the $15 soundtrack reward tier in the “OST Demos” section.

V0.06 Maps!

A quick heads up!  The map designs linked below are still in the concept stage, so all images shown are simply screens from the Maya viewport or basic renders in Daz Studio (meaning they aren't that pretty yet).  Also, some of the signage from the 3D assets is pretty goofy when translated to English, so anything out of place will be edited before final processing.

An important goal these past couple weeks was for me to dive into Maya with TK and start assembling concepts for V0.06 maps using the giant urban tileset he’s been working on.  In contrast to what we've done previously, I wanted to experiment with as many ideas as possible as opposed to focus on a single map to completion.  The plan is basically to make more than we will need, then once we have a pool of legit concepts we can start cherry picking from them as we need and polish them up to completion.  I've uploaded the most complete ideas we came up with here , which include a potential shop area (IC guys will notice this one has some new features), a sideview map that could be used as a transition or event location, and a concept that could be used as part of a hostile/exploration area.

The sideview map was an experiment in its own right since I wanted to see if we could make such a map using perspective instead of a flat (orthogonal) side view as we've done previously.  Since everything is done using 2D layers, the layers have to animate at the proper speeds in relation to the player to give the right illusion of depth/perspective.  After some testing I found out that we can do this, so I’m looking forward to progressing further with it.

This whole process has been a great crash course for me in working with Maya, and TK's been really patient with teaching me the ins and outs.  I showed these concepts off last week to the Inner Circle crowd, and we’ve been focusing these past few days on fleshing them out and adjusting the scale of assets in order for them to become functioning maps.

This Past Week Sucked

Now about that hiccup I mentioned at the beginning >_>.  This past week was pretty awful for me all around, as I spent the better part of five days unable to work due to a family emergency.  This was easily the longest stretch I've gone without getting anything significant done on the game, and though I'm not one for excuses I think it's worth explaining as reassurance that it was indeed an exceptional situation.  Last Tuesday night I had to take my dad to the emergency room because complications related to his existing conditions began causing aggressive internal bleeding out of nowhere.  He ended up losing a third of his blood and had to have four transfusions, and then had to contend with two days of seizures.  The good news is he was released on Saturday and is now doing much better.  That said, for the first few days I was pretty confident he wasn't going to make it, and I had to handle everything (including financial and legal stuff) that could go along with that.  Fortunately that was not the case, and it's been full steam ahead these past few days!  Thanks for understanding guys!

V0.06 Enemy Progress

In addition to immersing myself in Maya, I also made progress on the new Police enemy I showed off at the beginning of January.  All the battle animations for the first variation are finished as well as a custom shotgun model for a possible third variation, and I've uploaded the high resolution versions here for you to check out !  You may unfortunately need to download the GIFs to view them.  I tried using Imgur but it doesn't seem to behave well with large GIFs =/.  

At my request, AltairPL has added a little feature that gives the capability for future enemies to be a little more interesting.  Enemies can now have multiple variations of a pose and swap between them at random (you'll see there are two different idle animations for this guy).  It's a simple change, but should give me more flexibility when making animations.  On a related note, I'm happy to say I'll never have to (or have to make TK >_>) create animation frame files for Photoshop by hand, as I've adapted and improved a JavaScript ... script... I wrote awhile back to do it for me :D.  Getting animations from Daz and into Photoshop and ready for post editing is now completely automated.  

In addition to the above, AltairPL created an animation previewing tool for me to use when creating enemy (and other) animations.   Basically, I can now export animation frames from Daz directly into the game and watch the animation play in the engine.  I can easily test various engine-supported framerates to see if I need to make adjustments to the animation or speed, which always required making a spritesheet and setting up a test case previously. 

A Coding Update from AltairPL!

 Work has been progressing really well and the battle overhaul is very close to completion.  A few big and a plethora of smaller things were finished in January -- a few examples follow.  

Holds are now fully functional. Places that will need editing for upcoming double-teaming holds were only marked for now, since I'm not sure I'll be able to squeeze it in 0.06. Result popups are now action independent and can be used for various other in-battle calls ("Level up" popups on battle results screen are done this way for instance). I've also squashed a few small bugs that were in the earlier version, but were not rearing their heads in normal circumstances, so they've appeared only during some extreme testing conditions. There's only one major thing and few minor things related to battle mechanics left to do. Besides that I still need to take care of few more or less minor graphical glitches that pop up once in a while.  They're not game breaking or persistent, so they have lower priority. 

Even though I'm testing things as I go, I will still have to do many more random tests to make sure that everything works fine! 

Goal for this Month

Quite simply: to get as much done on V0.06 as possible!  It's at the point now where all the concepts are falling into place, so as long as no one starts bleeding out at random or WW3 doesn't happen (I wish these were sarcastic) we should be on quite a roll this upcoming month!  Granted, there's still a lot to do, but all of the optimizations we made earlier this cycle will be amazing for us once it gets down to knocking out the busy work. 

Thanks for your continued support guys!