Inner Circle Update for April 16 2017! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

TK and AltairPL have family stuff going on this weekend, so I'll be updating you on all my fun things.  Luckily I actually have some fun stuff to share this week!  

Battle Music Revamp

Audio guy and I have been working on an updated version of the battle music!  I've posted one of our early work-in-progress demos above.  The mix is kind of sloppy since we've been passing it around like a (insert hooker joke), but the energy is definitely there.  Once we get a bunch of solid parts down we'll mess with the composition more so that it flows appropriately with the game.  

Story Progress

I've been on a story hiatus the past few days as I've taken a break to work on something else (see below), but early this week I started boiling the whole thing down into what will likely be a 10-12 page summary that reads sort of like a Wikipedia movie plot write-up.  I was basically working at such a low level for so long that I didn't want to lose the forest for the trees, and with a few diverging but major ideas rattling around I decided I should take a step back to see how the various possibilities look at the high level.  Another benefit of doing this is that I'll actually be able to get critical analysis from other people without handing them a 100+ page document.  It's been in transition so much that the rest of the team doesn't even know most of the story :D.  I'm also writing the summary in such a way that, while explicit, it fails to mention the H content, meaning I can get critical advice from experienced writers who may not be all that into H-games.  

Character Shadows!

This is a really unexpected topic, but this is something I've been fiddling with for a looooong time.  We've made a whole lot of improvements to the artwork style of the game since the early releases, and something that's sort of failed to catch up is the most important thing in the game -- the character artwork!  With the switch to the new engine down the road, it's likely I'll be doing an artwork overhaul sometime in the future, and since consistency is incredibly important, it's good for us to be evaluating techniques now rather than later.  

One of the most significant areas that I've never been able to get a handle on until now is how to properly handle character shadows so that they don't only look consistent within the styling of the game, but actually add to it.  The goal in my mind was to create an effect that leans toward an animated/hand painted look so as to mitigate the unnatural 3D feel that comes across in some of the artwork.  In addition, it needs to do what shadows should do, and that is add depth; something the character artwork is lacking in my opinion.  Lastly, it needs to work with directional lighting.  *All* of the character artwork has been lit from the front up to this point, and in some environmental situations it just doesn't look that great.  The reason for this is that directional lighting (up until now) does some gnarly stuff to the character shaders, basically making unlit areas look super flat.  I've finally come up with a low overhead process that, I think, fits the bill (and just as importantly, works universally).

I've made an album that you can find here that shows off some of the test results, as well as gives a brief description of the process.   

Once you're through with that, I've also uploaded a set of GIFs and images  showing some of the many early attempts and progression toward the current technique.  Keep in mind that Google Drive doesn't play animated GIFs, so you'll need to download them to check them out.  

Let me know what you think!