Inner Circle Update for March 10 2019! (Patreon)

Hey guys,

I’ve finished up the artwork for the second part of the Splicer Thug H scene, and TK has rigged the Vioreaper’s main pose in Spine. Limbo and Kitsune had to be away for most of this week due to a family emergency, so I’ve been trying to fill up the hopper with tasks so that the pipeline would be full now that they’re back. 

The goal is to make the next PO release within the next few weeks even if we don’t have the animations totally polished. While this will be the first test of the H animation system, it will also be the first release demonstrating Mr. Kittyhawk’s big Unity overhaul, which he’s going to show you the specifics of below!

H Artwork Preview

Here’s a preview of the finished artwork for the second part of the Splicer Thug scene :D. I’m experimenting with multiple sets of face artwork here -- something we should be doing to get the most out of our Spine rig. 

• H Artwork v1 
• H Artwork v2 
• H Artwork v3 

Biomonster Goop  

Uber has been making an ongoing effort to produce some good organic materials for the biomonster nest levels. In actuality, we’ve been trying to do this effectively since early MATM days. We’re getting some good results by sculpting rough shapes in Z Brush and letting the materials do the heavy lifting. The only downside currently is the render times suck with all the subsurface interactions going on, so we still need to experiment with optimizations.  Here are the high res renders!

• Biomonster Goop  
• Alien Meat Man AKA "Gary" 

More Environment Stuff

Uber has also been working on the hard surface stuff for Stage 1-2. Here’s the model for the train station pillars that will be holding up the freeway in the background (materials aren’t done yet :D).  As with the Tunnel level stuff, he’s modeling everything in a modular fashion so that we can sneak it in other places and not waste all this effort.

• Hard Surface Details 
• Surface Breakdown / Geometry  
• Material Previews 

Bug Fixes!

Before Mr. Kittyhawk goes into the details of his overhaul, I figured I’d point out that it has wiped out most of the existing, deep seeded bugs with Pure Onyx :D. 

• Scenes no longer freak out when loading. Music doesn’t start and stop and post processing doesn’t go in and out.
• We now have true dynamic physics (as seen with the liquid test last week).
• Characters no longer hang up or fly into infinity when they collide with borders.
• We now have a reworked animation queuing system so that characters can’t be in multiple states at once, meaning no more “two Onyxes” bugs. 

Mr. Kittyhawk’s Unity Overhaul Update

Hi everyone, glad to see you're still here. I've been hard at work this month cleaning up our code architecture. Refactoring and architecture improvements are very unsexy business, but it's necessary to insure future builds are stable and have only minor bugs in them. Since this work doesn't have a whole lot that I can easily show you visually in game, I'm going to share a peek behind the curtain on how the components make a game fit together.  Perhaps more importantly, it should give you some sense of the work that’s gone into this overhaul.

I've documented about half of our code into a class diagram. This is a roadmap I use to remind myself what tools I have available to me while I'm building the game, and also where those features live in relation to what I'm currently working on. This diagram doesn't show everything, but it should give you more than enough detail to understand our architecture.

Sections of the combat system and unit definitions that I'm currently working on don't have finished documentation yet.  We also won't be spoiling how the H system works before our release in the next few weeks. To get started we'll examine a small subsection of the graph and explain how to read the individual pieces, and then I'll leave you with a larger view of how the game works under the hood, and what our systems are capable of doing. Hope you enjoy!  

• Diagram Tutorial 
• Overview 
• Unity Components