MNL Progress Report #39 (Patreon)

Hey there, nudies! We're still working on these cutscenes, though we hit a bit of a snag involving animation layers that complicated things quite a bit.

Let me set up an example - Say Amber has an animation of her laughing while standing upright. But what if you wanted to have her laughing while sitting down? Rather than create a brand new animation to have Amber laughing while sitting, you can layer animations - the laughing animation with a sitting animation loop - to create the same effect. At least that's my understanding of it. However, things get a bit more complicated when you have to introduce other factors, like Amber needs to laugh while sitting but also facing the same direction towards a character she's talking to. Once more variables and layers are introduced, they begin to interfere with the other, like having her look in one direction will accidentally erase her facial expression. It has turned out to be much more complicated than expected, though Invertex seems to have found a solution earlier today!

We implemented a feature to have Amber look towards objects she can directly interact with, so we're going to try taking elements of that code and use it to so that Amber can look towards things in cutscenes without it affecting the animation layers. That's my understanding of it, anyways! If that doesn't work, then we have some alternate methods we can try. Making games in 3D is hard, but it's not all doom and gloom. We just have to get over another roadblock, s'all.

In the meantime, Bear is nearing completion on our librarian (Tara) model, and it's coming out SUPER cute.

When playing around with shading, Bear accidentally made her a shade darker than originally planned... but I dunno! I kind of like it! What do you all think? Should we keep her a bit more tan?

AT has also made us some new expressions specifically for Allison, Amber's roommate! She's much less expressive than others by design, but still important for her to have SOME expressions.

And of course, we have another super cute Sweez doodle at the very beginning of this post! Sweez has been working on yet another character design, but they're currently under wraps for now. This next character is the owner of a thrifty clothing shop in Culo Culo Town's outdoor mall... What kind of character will they be? How will the interact with a nudist like Amber? You'll have to find out~

We also have a visualizer for Vanware's latest song we premiered a couple posts ago (made by Killerbro, who did the same visualizer for New Old Home), but unfortunately, Patreon doesn't let us upload video. You'll have to check it out on our Discord!

That's all for now! Thank you for your generous support, and see you next week!