Progress Report - October 31, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I hope you've had a fantastic Halloween. To celebrate, have a ~spooky~ bit of update news: I'm still focusing on UE5 stuff!

I said last week that I was hoping to wrap up my UE5 experiments and move back to working on Overbreed, but that didn't happen. There's always something more to explore.

Since last week's post on the 24th, I have (among other things) figured out:

Building and playing fully cinematic cutscenes, as opposed to in-game animations. The system is built in such a way that making cutscenes and making character animations is identical - the only difference is a cutscene has a camera placed in it, and character animations are attached to characters through game logic.

Building a robust and highly-adaptable interaction system, making it so that pretty much anything can be done easily through the four-option interaction system. Amusingly the only thing I have left to do here is the ability to hide and reveal options through interactions, but that's for another day.

Lip-syncing in UE5 and adding them as additive animations, so characters can lip-sync to anything they say during any playing animation. This would allow for, among other things, having dirty-talk segments played dynamically throughout a scene.

"In-character" cutscenes, where the player character is smoothly moved into a cutscene sequence, and then smoothly moved back out with control returned to the player. This is seen above in this arbitrary high-five example, but more practical examples of this would be, for example, opening a window. Player walks up to the window, clicks Open, it plays a short cutscene of the character's hands reaching to grab the window lever, the window is pulled open, and control is returned to the player with the window now open. This is a much simpler solution than trying to manually corral the player character to the correct position and orientation for the cutscene animation to be played live, and I think the explicit cut to cinematic camera angles makes it more immediately obvious that you as the player aren't in control and can't do things while they play.

Updated the outfit system a bit, to allow for color and texture overrides. This allows me to make multiple outfits that are simple recolors and retextures of one another, without having to go through the effort of making full duplicates of the underlying assets. Much cleaner on system resources, and much easier on me as a designer to manage and maintain.

Generalized the outfit system a bit, to allow outfits to be attached to any character, not just the player character. This was done because the Max you see in the above cutscene isn't actually the same Max that the player controls - the player's Max is just turned invisible during the cutscene, which spawns in an entirely new Max for the duration of the cutscene. The new Max needed to have the same outfit as the player's Max in order to sell the illusion, so I had to generalize the outfit system.

At this point, I am just going to officially commit myself full-time to my UE5 experiments. Not going to beat myself up over not working on Overbreed right now - I think this is a far better use of my time, to say nothing of the fact I find it more stimulating than animating more of the same.

That isn't to say I'm not interested in working on Overbreed, because I absolutely am. I'm just interested in learning new UE5 stuff more.

Right now, I think my next plans for my UE5 experiments are to figure out building custom levels (complete with lighting and such), transitioning between levels, managing global state (such as keeping track of decisions made, inventory items, equipped outfit, all that fun stuff), saving and loading (kinda import in a game innit?), and then finally building a full conversation system.

At some point I should also finally give Chloe her hair and outfit. Might as well make sure the new generalized outfit system described above works correctly for her, too. Don't see why it shouldn't. Famous last words.

Once I have all the systems built, I intend to build a tiny prototype that brings everything together in an actual meaningful mechanism. I am thinking it will be a simple motel room with Chloe smoking while laying on the bed. You can interact with a dresser to open and closer a drawer, and inside the drawer will be 3 different outfit bundles you can use to change clothes. There will be a few knicknacks in the room you can look at it, maybe a window to open and close as described above, and a door you can exit into the hallway through. The hallway will be mysteriously segmented off with no connecting lobby because that's quickly getting outside the scope of what I want to do.

After that prototype is done, I think that will conclude my UE5 experiments. At that point, I will return to working on Overbreed, and we will revisit the UE5 stuff once the Frozen project is waiting for audio, and again once it's pushed out the door and called done, meaning the on-stream project can officially focus on making a UE5 game.

Looking ahead a bit, I am thinking that we will start the UE5 streams by making two prototypes, because I have two very different modes of play in mind.

One of them is a classic action-adventure style, like what my prototype here has been showing off, a very Life is Strange or Telltale's Walking Dead style of play, with freedom to move around and interact with the scene, lots of optional stuff you can do, as well as a general main thread that can be affected by choices made both within and without that main thread.

The other is a more straightforward visual-novel style play, all fixed camera angles with no player freedom, engaging with the world only through explicit text choices. Think my Futashep VN. This was the original design intent for the on-stream game concept, before the idea of using UE5 for it was brought up.

Both prototypes will be pretty short I hope, and then once both are made, I want to show them both off to you guys and gals here, my general audience over on Twitter, and the specific audience who follow my livestreams regularly and who will have to suffer through the creation of whatever we decide to make. I want to get opinions on which style of play people think we should pursue.

On a technical level, both are more or less the same amount of work. As I mention earlier, building cutscene animations and building third-person character animations is the same exact process. One does not take more effort than the other. The only real difference is that the action-adventure style of gameplay requires more creativity on our part as designers, because we have to think of all the things in the world that could be interacted with and what those interactions could be and how they could interact with the main story thread. And I think that'd be fun to figure out, personally.

So yeah. That's where we are, and that's where we're going. As always, I'll keep you all informed.

Again, I hope you've had a great Halloween! I'll see you all next week!