MNL Progress Report #64 (Patreon)

Hey there, nudies! Sorry for the delay, but we needed just a bit more time to get stuff together. But first, check out the poster above! This was a collaborative effort with Sweez on the inks and Leslie on colors, resulting in this GORGEOUS piece of art! This'll be a key image going forward, and I hope to be able to use it as promotional material to advertise the game. But before we do, I wanted to show you all first. There's also an evening version, but we'll post that (and a logo-less version) in a post coming up right after this.

Now that the holidays are over, the team is feeling rejuvenated and ready to hit the ground running again. Not going to lie, it was a pretty stressful time leading up to the end of 2023. Beyond the holidays eating into everyone's schedule, we still had several issues to iron out with Amber's new model and rigging. We're using a new system that allows for a far greater amount of control over Amber's body and animations, but it's one none of us are terribly familiar with and requires a bit of learning. To give you an idea of how involved this has been, one of the current issues we're trying to fix is that Amber's tongue was accidentally rigged backwards, which we will not be posting due to how horrifying that looks. Should be fixed early next week, though!

We've also had to do a lot of learning and unlearning with the Godot engine, basically having to drop old habits we had during Unity. For an example, try imagining Amber's room. It's got her bed, her comic books, the clothes she stripped out of littering the ground. The room and all those little things can be uploaded wholesale to Unity and just sorta work. With Godot, however, we need to separate all those little things from the room. So Amber's underwear has to be her own file, tucked away in a props folder essentially. It makes sense, and it actually makes things a lot easy to use these props across multiple maps. Unfortunately though, we built all our previous maps with Unity in mind, so now we have to go back and separate all those props. It's a little bit of annoying extra work that ate up some time, but we've got it all sorted now and will be working with this in mind for future maps.

And speaking of maps! We've got her backyard AND the residential street imported and working. We've also been messing around with outlines and different shaders, to some... interesting results.

Click here in case the .gif doesn't work. 

So yeah. We really like the idea of the sketchy comic outline, but when applied to EVERYTHING, it kinda makes things look a bit too wiggly and busy. We're trying to find the perfect balance of stylization and practicality.

However, I'm VERY happy with Invertex's testing with shading and textures. I really love how the trees look and the soft shadows on the environment. We still have a bit more messing around to do, but man, it's always so exciting seeing this game slowly come together.

This week, we'll be fixing our rigging issues with Amber, making more animations, and I personally hope to have even more written! We've also been working on shop interiors, and hope to have something to show for that soon! It's a new year, and the team wants to make big strides in getting this game out! Within reason, of course. Thank you so much for supporting us! We hope to have much more to show real soon!

See you in a bit with more artwork!