Inner Circle Update for December 20 2018! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

So, I’m afraid to say we’re a bit behind on the H content for Pure Onyx, but there will be a special eye candy piece for everyone on X-mas :D. 

Regarding the H content however, it’s not all bad. It’s just taken longer than expected to learn how to properly rig and bind characters in Spine for full animation sets, and even tougher, for proper animation mixing (Spine’s automated animation blending). We’ve made a lot of headway nonetheless, including on the Unity side of the H system.  

I'll talk about it more below, but I want to point out the video above is not an example of the final animations.  This is actually showing off the automated animation mixing, and in this case it's mixing 4 static poses. This gets layered on top of our actual animations for a dynamic that can't be achieved with any number of sprite sheets.

First Stage Artwork Update!

Uber has blown it out of the water again with the environment artwork. I showed a little preview of the final section of the first map that he was working on last week, and it turned out great. It’s tricky as hell to get the 3D models to conform to this wonky perspective, but the results remind me of some of the SNK fighting game backgrounds we took inspiration from :D. He also redid the road, and now that we have Limbo to help out with the language, we were able to create some custom signage that fits the look. We still have the background and foreground to do, but those will go quickly in comparison to the crazy perspective stuff. Check below for a full-size map render (24000 px!).  It's 17 MB so it may load slow o.o

Full Map Render  

Anyone catch the reference to the first release of MATM in here :D?

Spine Animation Progress!

One of the goals this week was to get the full moveset for the Splicer Thug into Spine so that we could answer the remaining questions we have about the animation tech stuff and workflow. This is a pretty imperative for making good H scenes, so we needed to knock it out first. We’ve made a lot of progress here but it’s been pretty tricky. 

Kitsune and I started by adding shadows for and finished breaking down the Splicer Thug artwork.  It took some work, but we’ve now got animation mixing functioning, and have a solid idea for how to make it look good. We even have it working with the shadows :D (this was something I was worried about). Keep in mind these aren’t the actual animations, it’s just Spine’s automated blending.  Right now, it’s just blending between static poses. We realize it's a bit buggy at the moment, but I think the end result will look really good, and this has been a major step in figuring out how to set up our H artwork.

As proof that we’re not screwing around here, here’s the three-page reference walk-through I wrote up during this process for us just to remember and keep things consistent :D. It’s a relief to have it figured out!

Unity H System Progress

Kittyhawk here, I've been away for a couple weeks but work on the H system is well underway. The Unity component of the H system controls the playback of multipart H scenes, and when called it positions actors in 3d space, transitions them into the first cycle in the H sequence and controls progression and playback speed through the H set. We’ve yet to tackle the integration of it into the combat system, but one step at a time!

As Ero said, he and Limbo haven’t gotten around to making some test H artwork yet, but we’re at the point where we should have the flexibility to not worry about tech limitations when coming up with poses or scene ideas involving multiple characters!

Limbo’s Latest Artwork

Limbo’s pumped out a ton of artwork this week! We’re at the stage where we need to start finalizing poses for the Chain Splicer and first boss, so Limbo is pounding out sketches for these guys.  We’re starting to set up the sketch sheets currently. We’ll be doing one of these for each character before we start the detailed art, just like we did with Onyx and the Splicer Thug, which will allow us (and you) to playtest and make adjustments beforehand.   

• First Boss Moveset Sketches 
• First Boss Tentacle Attacks Sketches 

• Chain Splicer Moveset Sketches 1 
• Chain Splicer Moveset Sketches 2 

Asset Apocalypse 2018

Last but not least, TK’s been grinding away at more asset prep! Trains and mechs are the theme this week. These mechs will go great in MATM, but we plan on breaking them down and using their parts throughout the scrapyard that comes before the first boss fight in Pure Onyx :D.  These assets come in various states of trashiness and usually without textures or materials, so quite a bit goes into cleaning them up!

• Mech 1
• Mech 2
• Train