MNL Progress Report #54 (Patreon)

Hey there nudies! Short blog post today! It's been a productive week, but unfortunately, lacking in visuals that aren't too spoilery. Sweez has actually gotten a lot of illustrations done, but we want to save them for the full game. I can at least give you this panel of Amber eating pizza in shock, though.

Something cool I wanted to show was this custom shader and outline tool Invertex developed! Check this out!

With this, we can basically determine the width and intensity of Amber's outlines, and even where or how far the outlines go. It's an incredibly useful tool!

As you can see, we're testing it on Amber's old model. Bear is juuust about done with the new model, now just putting on the finishing touches and rigging it up so it'll animate properly. We actually want to redo her rig at some point for better animation possibilities, but unfortunately, that would require redoing all of her existing animations and would set us back about a month. So instead, we're going to stick with the old rig for now and revisit that once the demo is out.

And on that front - We've got all our code mostly figured out for insert panels, illustrations, and 3D model animations for dialogue! That means we're now officially back on to (re)building our cutscenes!

This should go much, much smoother this time around than it did back on Unity. Back in Unity, Invertex had to go in and manually set up everything - the dialogue, the camera system, the timing of animations to the dialogue, etc. But here in Godot, Invertex made it so that many of the animations, illustrations and such are pulled from and triggered straight from my dialogue files. Basically, I write in the code for accompanying animations and camera shots above the dialogue in the script, and the engine makes it happen. If I want Amber to say "I'm shocked!" and also look shocked for that line, I just add in something like [anim=Amber_Shock"] above the line and bam! Amber's SHOCKED! I can even set how many lines of dialogue she'll be shocked for, if the animation is constantly looping throughout, and I can even trigger different camera angles straight from the script! It's very streamlined and simple, and should make cutscene building a breeze!

We'll be spending this week building cutscenes to see just how fast it goes. Here's hoping we can show off that work next week! That's gonna be all for now, though. Thank you all so much for your support, and see you soon with more!