December 2023 -- End of the Year! Still rough, but Melee combat is getting there! (Patreon)

Project Morningstar has invested a ton of time into having really interesting, fun, reactive Melee combat. It's a bespoke combat system, fully from scratch, even the API for handling animations is created from scratch to make it more accessible to modders, and let us blend animations together smoothly. 

You can see in the video above our player character fighting a dumb "zombie" AI, which just follows the player and has no self preservation reflexes. This is now an old video from 2 weeks ago.

AI can now raise their shield in response to the player being a threat, and lower it when they attack. They can also maintain a smart distance from the player, and choose to sprint or walk. They also try to flee if severely injured, and can fall down if killed, knocked out, or incapacitated.

Part of that has been a new Stat Modifier system, which can be defined in Symbols (xml format we use o define stuff,) and apply those to characters when an event triggers them.  An example above shows what we mean.

The old Stamina system and its HUD is also now implemented, so we can start balancing that initially against the AI's combat brain. As you and the opponent get more and more exhausted, you'll see them behave differently. This may come in the form of raising a shield slower, walking slower, and striking slower. Which obviously leaves a window open to retaliate without getting blocked! 

The more Endurance your character focuses on developing through their backstory, traits, and training, the longer they will last before Stamina is an issue. Also, getting a good night's sleep and being well fed, not sick, all those keep Fatigue from dropping y our max stamina cap.

This last week we also got our old Character Generation system up and running, finally. 

We can now drop in characters made with this system directly into the game through a dev mode interface too, which means we won't need to fight naked default characters anymore! Yay!

It also brings us one step closer to having a version we can actually show off!

It's very cool to finally have a working character generation system where we can see the Motivations trigger from Stats, and all their Traits & Skills. 

Downside: we made a little bit of a mess of my UI work during implementation, and there are a lot of broken visuals sctattered around I'll have to fix in this new year. 

The Appearance Tab is the most broken, and needs a LOT of TLC to get back to looking nice, which is a bummer. Those screenshots above are from my old front end. What we got back was... not that, so a lot of work will need to be done to fix it. 

As I said, it could use work. Not ready to show off quite yet.

But -- it is working, which is what is important. You can save these characters out and drop them into the combat prototype with all their Stats and Gear, which is where we are currently dialing in the feel of combat.

This is a quick example of characters falling down.

As you may notice, they are only falling down using sprites that are to the South.

That's because falling down uses only our existing sprites currently.

We unfortunately need to draw new sprites for the top 3 character sprites, if we want them to lay down on a bed.

You can imagine, this is quite an annoying workload multiplier for us artists. 

For every set of eyes, noses, mouths, face shape, hair, beard, eyebrows, glasses -- we have to make a laying down sprite. Same with all parts of our Armor. Helmets, glasses, belts, pants -- it's all gotta get 4 new sprites, for a total of 9 sprites per thing. 

We did try to get around that, and simply keep reusing the 5 default rotation sprites, but it doesn't look good when a character is running any from you screen north and just falls down, still seeing the top of their head when it should face away from the camera. Same with beds.

Not great, right?

So that's why we're biting the bullet and taking the list to:

1. South

2. SouthWest

3. West

4. NorthWest

5. North

6. NorthEast(Mirrorable)

7. East(Mirrorable)

8. SouthWest(Mirrorable)

9. NorthWest-Face-Down

10. NorthWest-Face-Up

11. North-Face-Down

12. North-Face-Up

13. NorthEast-Face-Down(Mirrorable)

14. NorthEast-Face-Up(Mirrorable)

Even typing that is a bit of a pain.

There are some saving graces: We don't need to draw all 14 of these Sprites, since 5 are mirror-able! And for things that are only ever seen on the back or the face, such as eyes, we only need the South, East/West, and the Face Up Norths. We can skip those for face-down because we never see it.

There are some caveats here: Some armor is a-symmetrical. And for art that isn't a 3D render with 2D hand painted details -- this makes a 14 Sprite set a massive pain, which we'll have to keep to a minimum. 

Despite that frustration, Curtis is getting us the new Editor, fully realized after the last massive round of 2D to 3D conversion. The Building Encapsulation System now works, and we can detect when a building has been "consumed" by another building the player has designated.  

As a bonus to this, we can now tell what a "room" is vs a room open to space, and detect what would fix it. That will allow characters living in your town to automatically find and repair walls! 

The new highlighter shader shows you wall that are to be modified, and how a building will merge. 

This is obviously still Dev Mode. Coming up in March-April, we hope to finally see pawns running around these "blueprints" placing resources and doing work building the walls. 

We also have a new goofy boy to add to the creature list! 

There is a chance this is our breaking point using traditionally hand drawn sprites for creatures.

Currently, all our critters use the same system as our Characters. 

If we want them to walk or attack, we just animate their positions and rotations. Some Particle magic will help show when an attack hits or misses, and when they leave foot prints (hoofprints?)

But dubiously this works less well the more complex these get. So we're constantly debating adding limbs as 3d elements and rendering them as sprite sheets, or simply abandoning 2D at large and going 3D.

That last one is tempting, I won't lie.

It would mean we would have to hire a dedicated 3D artist and rigger, and a dedicated Creature Animation expert. That's 2 more crew members, which will stress out our indie budget in an uncomfortable way. That's in addition to later in the project when we need to hire additional designers for writing & scripting quests, and producing a content layer.

At that stage we may have to consider a crowd funding effort.

So we should continue as-is for now, doing the best we can with simple animations using sprites, and layer in 2024, as the game's most essential core systems have emerged, we can look at the potential of crowd funding to take us to that next tier of budget and quality.

It would be very cool to enjoy these characters & creatures having fully realized limbs.

And it would probably be easier on Modders too, as the game has matured to the point where the sprite art may be harder for the average artist to keep up, which is what I wanted to avoid. 

We'll see!

New year, new timeline!

These are the big ticket items from 2024 all layed out by month. Some tasks taking weeks others months. And it gets fuzzier the further out you go.

But -- there is a clearly defined Pre-Alpha in this year. I won't say when, as there is a lot of unknowns here. But we'll keep at it!