Continuing Sleeping Part 4 (Patreon)

The past few days I've received tons of new sound assets to include into the game. They include new sound effects for when gestures are activated, to ambience, to new music pieces! You can check out a sample of the WIP night theme attached below.

As you can see, the bedroom has been reworked to look better with new props, textures, and improved lighting. The mirror is back and uses my corrected parallax shader. It is not a true reflection but good enough to fool you. That's why I angled it a bit upwards.

This called for a major rework to the character's shader. The problem is that toon skin does not interact with light in a realistic way. Most of the time games have them be unlit shaders. This works but you don't get any light interaction. On the other hand you wouldn't want a super realistic shader or else it would look too "real" and weird. You don't want strong contrasting shadows with light on the face because it brings out too much detail from the mesh. It makes it look too "3D". So what I did was have a minimum skin brightness depending on the time of day so it looks like it has an "emissive" quality. I think this light emissiveness makes it look more 2D: 

The image above shows the environment shadows being black yet her skin retains some minimum brightness. This new shader was also built with the new Day/Night cycle system in mind so there will be some points throughout the day where she will fade into the pitch black darkness.

She catches light even better now including sunset and sunrise colors.

As for the sleeping behavior, I have finished the first few animations and have begun to implement them into the game. Currently I am reworking parts of her animation system to allow blending root animations. The following is a WIP of her jumping onto the bed to get in position to sleep:

The logic driving her navigation was also given an upgrade so that she can jump onto the bed from any edge of the bed. This means that she can now find the shortest path to the shortest edge of the bed.

This is very handy and it can be expanded to be used for other furniture in the future.

There are still tons of animations needed to be completed. The hard part is over. By next devpost she should be able to crawl to the pillow and rest her head where the sleeping behavior will fully activate. I have also announced the planned release date for v0.55, it will be released 8/4/19.

Stay tuned.