March 2019 Progress Update! (Patreon)
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Hey guys!
I’m really disappointed we’re not as far as I was hoping we’d be, and I apologize for the release not being ready yet. We’ve made a lot of unexpected progress in other areas while we work on getting the animations to the quality I expect, so there’s a lot to show off at least. We’ve also already got solid results on what I think will be the most advanced real time liquid system in a 2D H game, and we’re making good strides toward relatively seamless animation transitions.
Since Kitsune and I are the only animators, we’ve taken some steps to speed things up in the future by getting TK the pro edition of Spine so that he can rig new animations in Kitsune’s off hours. His 3D rigging skills pretty much directly translate to 2D, so it’s already been a big help.
BTW, I'm including all the full / high resolution versions of the artwork I post in updates in an attached zip from now on, so you don't need to poke all the links. Unfortunately Patreon doesn't allow for high resolution images, so they have to be linked from offsite :(.
Here’s the full rundown of topics for this update (I've marked new stuff since the last IC update):
- Grapple Animation Preview (UPDATED)
- H Artwork Previews (NEW)
- Frame by Frame H Scene Mock-up
- Physics-based Liquid (NEW)
- Vioreaper Completed Design!
- “Charger” Completed Design!
- Syndicate Enforcer Design Preview
- Vorepup Design Preview
- Tunnel Map Preview (UPDATED)
Grapple Animation Preview
I showed an earlier version of this off to the Inner Circle crowd last week, but its complete now. I’m really satisfied with the quality here, especially for a first attempt. Since the last time you saw this, we’ve added a faux 3D effect to all the body parts to emulate rotation, and improved the skeleton to add more realism to the swingy bits.
Two major hurdles we overcame this month to get to this point: a fully featured face rig including faux 3D rotation, and a new design for skeletons for H scenes.
A major difficulty for this kind of game is that Spine (and any 2D animation software) is inherently bad at handling complex interactions between characters. One character can’t have body parts in front of and behind another at the same time without some trickery. In our case, we’re actually swapping out the character skeletons for H scenes and replacing them with a single (big) skeleton containing all the necessary characters. But we also want to make these animations as flexible as possible so that we can reuse them with the future possibility of new characters/outfits/skins/whatever. Anyways, it's taken some time to get sorted, but we're there. Here's a screen of the animation playing in-engine :D.
We’re working on the other animations currently, but aren’t ready to show them off quite yet.
H Artwork Previews
Above are a few completed stills from the upcoming H artwork scenes :D. Here are the high resolution versions:
Frame by Frame H Scene Mock-up
I’ve attached a simplified frame-by-frame mock-up of the H animations for this upcoming release. Limbo and I made this to help figure out the details / determine what extra drawings we might need. This doesn’t include any complex details or loops, but sketching the transitions out in this style has helped a lot, and we’re testing the limitations of Spine as we go.
This animation is intended to be a two-parter, but we may lop off the second part for this release just to get it in your hands faster.
You can download the full version at the bottom of the post!
Physics Based Liquid
This may be my favorite part of the update this month, and I hope you guys think it was worth taking a few days to work on it! Our liquid FX system will consist of two parts: particles/dynamic simulation in-engine, and drawn liquid that gets rigged to the character in Spine and animated. This is what we have (so far) for the particle simulation. We tested a few things, including baking liquid simulation from Blender and using the technique that most AAA games use for blood splashes etc. We ended up however going with Unity's brand new particle FX package.
Check out a high resolution video of it here! The artwork used is a WIP image by the way -- this would be completely animated.
I think this has some huge potential. Best of all, now that we have presets figured out, it's incredibly easy to manipulate for new animations. What do you think?
P.S. We're looking at making it an option for the puddles to be persistent (they would start dissolving once performance is impacted).
Vioreaper – Completed Artwork!
We finished the artwork for the Vioreaper’s idle pose! Check out the full images below:
Charger – Completed Artwork!
And one more knocked out! It really sucked, but we actually had to redo the work on the Charger from scratch after we made a major goof with the image resolution. TK and I powered through the next two days on only naps in order to redo it and catch up @_@. I feel really good about the results though, and Limbo did a fantastic job with the design :D.
Syndicate Enforcer Concepts
Limbo has been forging ahead with enemy concept art while we work on Onyx's artwork for the release. He started on designs for the Syndicate Enforcer, which has given me the opportunity to start practicing male faces in this style.
Vorepup(?) Concepts
Another monster returning from MATM will be the Vorepup :D. These designs were done with it mind, but his armored appearance makes me think this guy could be more like, I dunno, a Voredaddy? Heh, point is this may be a larger version that the Vorepups orbit (or maybe he's even spawning them with his projectile attack). Ideas are welcome! Here are some additional pose sketches and a color test.
Tunnel Map Preview (UPDATED)
The Vioreaper’s nest / tunnel map is coming along great :D. Here are some full resolution screenshots, as well as a preview of the full map. This one features a lot of custom hard surface modeling by Uber, so be sure to zoom in :D. We still have to add the nest goop, which Ubercharge has actually made a lot of progress on, but I’ll show it off next time.
- Tunnel Map 1
- Tunnel Map 2
- Tunnel Map 3
- Full Map Included in the Attachment