Inner Circle Update for October 16 2018! (Patreon)

Sorry for the long wait between posts. We’ve been especially busy trying to get stuff nailed down for a Pure Onyx release. On that note, there’s some good news and bad news. The good news is that we’re aiming to have full color / shaded Onyx sprites ready for this first release. The bad news is we won’t have them ready before the end of the month.  We can however have a playable build ready for you IC guys next week or so, it’ll just be using sketches. 

Goals for November Release 

We’ve put together a small list of goals for the November release:

• COMPLETE: Functional Start Menu and keybindings
• High quality line art, color, and hard shading for Onyx’s basic moveset
• COMPLETE: Functional moveset for the first Splicer enemy (sketches)
• Potentially finish line art and block coloring for the first Splicer enemy.
• Killing bugs
• Basic H system?
• HUD design improvements?

Sprites!

Most of our work these past couple weeks has been on sprites.  We spent the better part of a week figuring out style and level of detail, as well as redesigning the foundation of the skeleton system to get around some early mistakes. Getting sprites to mesh with the backgrounds was the primary hurdle, but I think we’ve mostly cleared that with our recent tests. We’re planning on working in a hard-shaded style as our target level of detail for now, though we may go a step further and add soft shading if we can A) not suck at it and B) there’s sufficient time.   We won’t have the benefit of 3D references for a lot of enemies like I did on the initial Onyx sprite test, so we need to be sure we can produce consistent results without them for whatever we aim for.  

Aside from accessories left to be added, here’s Onyx’s first “complete” sprite; her idle pose, as well as a couple environment tests:

• A herd of Onyx in their natural habitat
• With some grazing Splicers

Aside from hard shading, there are some obvious changes since our last iteration.  This is due to some difficulties we ran into -- the biggest of which was readability. We increased hand and foot size, changed glove color, and added rim lighting and color grading. I also simplified the hair somewhat to better match the anime style.  Figuring out how to draw the rim lighting for her hair took a few tries because it kept looking like an outline from a distance, but I think we got there. 

Currently the workflow looks like the following (here it is in graphic form):

• Sketch poses
• Test in-game
• High quality line art
• Solid colors
• Hard Shading / Speculars
• Rim Lighting / Shadow

We’ve actually enlisted TK’s help for coloring for the near future since there’s just so much work to be done. The major goal for the November release is to have Onyx’s basic moveset ready with color/hard shading. We should be alright, but revisions are inevitably where a lot of the time will go. 

Here’s some of our other high-quality sprites in various stages of completion – sorry for bald Onyx ^-^

• Onyx Knee Strike 
• Onyx Knockdown 
• Splicer Pre-Engagement 

Definitely let us know what you think about the style so far and what we can do to improve!

Mr. Kittyhawk’s Unity Progress

I asked Mr. Kittyhawk to assemble some bullets showcasing his progress from the past couple of weeks. Here’s what he’s accomplished!

• Groundwork for stamina system.  I have the groundwork complete for a stamina resource for the player to use for things such as special moves, blocking, and possibly even the H system. I say groundwork because it's not fully tied into the combat system yet.  Not all attacks cost stamina, and the AI doesn't consider stamina in its behavior pattern.
• Some refactoring of the PlayerCombat and EnemyAI scripts. The first sprint for this project was all about hacking together a working prototype as fast as possible. That prototype is pretty good! But if we want to design interesting combat encounters, have any kind of boss fight, or give Onyx interesting combos, then these two systems need to be organized and robust.
• Added a startup manager script to take care of setting up the game's starting state. This is my goto location for interacting with the game when I'm testing things. It lets me modify the start sequence and jump directly to what I need to debug. It also loads your saved settings.
• Laid out basic Main Menu and keybinding screens with working logic. This is not pretty yet; it's functional but it’s bound to change as we need it to handle more things. The goal for the first playable build is to have keyboard, dualshock4*, and xbox360/xbox1 controllers working smoothly, with support for more unusual input devices to come later.

*The popular community made DS4 Windows drivers cause Unity to recognize a dualshock controller as an Xbox gamepad, and I can't tell them apart in code. This means that you'll be gifted with the untold joy of having your controller mapped by default with the wrong controls. You can fix it by rebinding the PS4 controller map, or removing the DS4 Windows drivers. (The latter is HARD, a simple uninstall isn't going to be enough)

New Details

I started out after the last update by making a small design document so that Mr. Kittyhawk can better understand the scope of what we’ll need from a programming standpoint throughout the entirety of the project. There’s quite a bit of detail to be added there still, but I figured I’d let you guys in on some of the setting and gameplay details.

Here are some ideas I have for potential stages. We will select the best 5 (or so) ideas to use for the initial retail release of the game. 

• Streets (Splicers)
• Red Light District (Syndicate)
• Rooftops (Police)
• Junkyard (Machines)
• Sewer (Biomonsters)
• Prison (???)
• Biomonster Nest (Biomonsters)
• Splicer HQ (???)

The enemy types shown aren’t exclusive to the levels – they’re just ideas for a theme where we could creatively introduce new enemies (or in some cases have maps that lend to enemies that require environments, such as water dwelling enemies or something). Feel free to add suggestions, as well as give me some ideas for environments that could work within these levels!

One other thing I wanted to talk about is weapons. Weapons will be expendable like in other beat-em-up games.  This means when a weapon’s ammo is spent or it breaks, you drop it and move on. Weapons can be found either in breakable containers or dropped by enemies that begin with them. Some enemies will actually be able to pick up weapons lying around, and other enemies will have specialized weapons that only they can use. 

Here are some of the weapon ideas I’m considering:

• Katana
• Handgun
• Uzi
• Machine Gun / Heavy Machine Gun
• Throwing Knife
• Molotov / Grenade

The various guns would have different piercing/knockback properties, as well as special moves. 

I'm sure you all want to know more about the H system, but we haven’t finalized the first prototype yet, so I’m not quite ready to talk about details.   I can say though that while it will operate similarly to RoR games, the goal is for it to impact gameplay so it’s not just an afterthought, yet not punish the player for watching scenes progress.   


That's about it for now.  I owe you guys some MATM updates as well, which I need to post @_@.