Finished Cattail Attack and Starting Gestures (Patreon)

Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. The past 5 days (because of the holiday), I worked a ton on refactoring her code and finished a few things.

She can now chase you and hit you with a cattail if you piss her off too much with headpats, water, etc.. The behavior can be extended to use other long objects in the future instead of just cattails. Short demonstration with a new screen hurt effect:

If she has two cattails, she will just randomly attack you with one of them. Mixing and matching with other objects is allowed (donuts, ducky, etc). Water spilling back is not ready for demonstration.

I spent a bit more time on the pond water. I cleaned the surface texture by making the swamp muck sparser. I also wrote a post processing pipeline for VR with good performance. in mind Being underwater now refracts the surface as shown below:

I'd love to add fog while underwater but it can be very expensive for rendering. To finish the underwater effect, I will instead just distort the entire camera and add some screen fog. The visible duplicates bug is easy to fix and will be fixed by next blog entry.

One new fun feature that is very important and I began working on is gestures. This will allow the player to interact with Shinobu in a more natural way. The system will check how you move your Vive/Oculus controllers and decide if you are trying to do a certain gesture. No buttons. Purely hand motion. For keyboard players, the gestures may be binded to a key.

The first gesture will be "come over here" which will tell Shinobu to follow you for a little bit when available). I decided to prioritize this for v0.3 because I realized there was no good way to have Shinobu follow you, which seemed significant. A mockup with some real assets of how it will look like is as follows:

If Shinobu is not busy and sees your gesture, she will tag along with you for a little bit. Another reason I wanted to implement gestures now is to address the mechanics of her begging for objects. Currently she will just beg and ask for any object you have. In the future I would like her to not do this for every object (it would get annoying), and only beg/want if you fire the gesture of "present object" to her. Kind of like this picture:

Another thing, I am halfway through implementing realistic object holding for the player's hands. As in, the fingers of the player will properly wrap around picked up objects like Shinobu instead of constantly staying flat. Still have some work to do:

Last bug I fixed was making her neck not look painful when looking down/up at objects. Before:

After:

All of these additions are slowly making Shinobu feel a lot like a player which is my ultimate goal. I want her to feel like a dam smart AI loli. Some fun statistics:

Currently 70 unique animations.

10,000 lines of code (includes editor tooling)

534 total headpats done during testing since v0.1

HUGE thanks to:

Gédéon

TheMagicSpatula

Lazlo

Lev

For their generous donations. I've successfully hired a great Japanese-based music composer who is currently producing 2x 3-minute songs for the game. Stay tuned for more fun updates and maybe music samples down the line!