November 2018 Progress Update! (Patreon)

I’m going to keep it relatively short and sweet this month.  Progress is going very well on Pure Onyx!  We required some extra support for the artwork, so we’ve pulled TK over to help with coloring, and we’ve added a new animator as well – Limbo’s friend, Kitsune. She will be helping us with Spine animations, meaning we now have a great little character artwork development pipeline between the four of us.  

November Pure Onyx Test Release

Sorry if you were thinking it’d be today, but we still have some work left on the first Pure Onyx test release. We expect the release to be around the middle of the month. 

The release will be a brief playable section as seen in the videos, and will be a good opportunity for you to provide feedback on controls / movement / etc. Our biggest goal is to get the color/hard shaded artwork finished for Onyx’s basic moveset. We had an Inner Circle release that I think went well, as they helped us debug a lot of startup issues. 

Here’s a small list of goals for the November release (updated since the Inner Circle update in October):

• COMPLETE: Functional Main Menu, controller support, and keybindings screen
• High quality line art, color, and hard shading for Onyx’s basic moveset
• WORKING but not complete: Fully animated walk cycle for at least Onyx using Spine
• COMPLETE: Functional moveset for the first Splicer enemy (sketches)
• COMPLETE: Potentially finish line art and flat coloring for the first Splicer enemy.
• COMPLETE: Loading screen and level preloader
• Killing bugs
• Any additional features Mr. Kittyhawk can knock out

We are still working on the H system, so don’t expect any H content in this first release ☹.

Character Sprite Workflow

Most of our work this month 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. The above image was composited outside of Unity, but it actually looks significantly better in-game based on the tests we’ve done.  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 that 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, we’ve got about half of Onyx’s basic moveset complete. Here are 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

Character Sprites!

Below is our most up to date progress on the character sprites (in varying stages of completion)!  The characters will utilize a combination of frame-by-frame and mesh-based animation, meaning most if not all of these will eventually be broken down like the above image to be animated in Spine. For some attacks / animations it may make more sense to draw intermediary frames, but until then the game will be completely functional without these. 

** Updated or new since last Inner Circle post

• Onyx Walk**
• Onyx K.O.**
• Onyx Jump Kick**
• Onyx Jump**
• Onyx Idle
• Onyx Knockdown
• Onyx Knee Strike
• Onyx Kick
• Splicer - Full Moveset

Stage, Enemy, and Gameplay 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 (Errythang)
• 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 (Shinobi Girl, Parasite in City), the goal is for it to impact gameplay so it’s not just an afterthought, yet not punish the player for watching scenes progress. 

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Well, I tried to keep it short at least :D – let me know if you have any questions! Thanks again guys for all your support!