Weekly Gaze - III - Cake (Patreon)

Welcome to this week's Weekly Gaze (the late SirMalo edition of Gaze)! I'm going to keep it a short one today, like I did the last week... not sure I kept it short. What is considered short? A page? Anyways... I'm currently working on improving the showroom bits and pieces, like making proper color selectors and patterns grouped under categories so it's a bit simpler to browse and use the customizer, while Hareress is working on new Showroom stages and full acts, but I'm vain and shameless and I'm only going to talk about new features and not content as such ^^

So, let's make a cake, with my arrogance (primary trait of a dragon). I think that's the best way to explain this Gaze. We are making a cake! And cake is always built from bottom up. Right. Step one: Cake. Step two: Decoration!

Chocolate topping (liquid, milk chocolate)

Every pattern in the game has been organized to three categories; Natural, Stylized, and Absurd. Eventually you will be allowed to chose which primary type of patterns are spawned in-game, basically choose between Natural or Stylized. The Absurd is basically a misc category which will have both joke skins and skins that are generally not found in the wild, e.g. tattooed skins, or other special skins.

Currently the point of organization is just to make it easier to browse patterns in customizer, there's no in-game effect as of yet ^^

Two clawfuls of hard candies (any color and flavor)

The second priority for me this week has been making the pattern color palettes. Now, the old system only had custom buttons (yes, each color was a button, not a color) and it was unwieldy to expand, and I don't know if anyone realized you could actually click on the hex color and write values into it... the questions / suggestions in survey kinda hinted people didn't realize it ^^'

So, out of that was born a clickable color table! This is also very future proof, I can eventually add different kinds of palettes for different things, e.g. eye palettes, or maybe shine color of kizan's scales. Did I mention Kizan? They're dragonling kind of race ^^

I also kept my favorite colors, the original colors, so if anyone doesn't want to go wild with colors and wants to easily pick natural set, it's there for them :3

Five clawfuls of hard candies (salty liquorice!)

Third thing I've finished this week (because, yes, the palettes and pattern organization are done ^^') is new and improved Showroom camera. It still requires some testing, but it works pretty nicely in Showroom. Basically it's a simple raycast setup where camera checks if something obscures it, and if so, it just pops before the obscuring object.

Of course to do that, I had to learn the hard way that rays are not cast between two points, but from one point to specific direction. I'm stupid, don't worry! It won't affect you in anyway, I just spent more time on it than I should have x)

The camera doesn't actually ignore everything by default, because in games what you see is separate from what is actually physically there, so I still have to mark some objects as having physical collision forms, so that the camera will evade them. That won't take too long though ^^

TEN CLAWFULS OF NONPAREIL

But my primary work has been on faelain head! By canon, the kitty race is a lynx, so there will be some puffy side fur and ear flares. Eventually I want to add different kinds of kitty races, a lot more regal and shorter fur, like saardan faelains, but those will came long after we've gotten basic set of races in ^^

While heads are one thing, I'm also working to improve the bodies a bit. Not a massive amount, but there are some old kinks left in that I want to iron out. Also as the kitty heads require a bit more neck/throat, I need to redo some parts of the body to support it properly. In addition to that, I'm expanding the Titty Space™ to allow more space for bigger breasts and also male needs to get proper male breasts, finally, instead of shrunk our female breasts ^^'

The basic work progress for heads is as follows:

Base head -> body rework -> head sculpt -> head texturing -> reskinning everything -> redoing morphs (expressions, body, genitals, breast sizes) -> linking everything animation system -> fixing animations

Currently we're at "head sculpt", and almost done with it. None of these take especially long to do, everything just takes time and we're not exactly swimming in extra time, but don't worry, they'll get here faster than your worst guess is x3

With love,
Ruffleneck

p.s. the colors ended up really bad in the gif, holy hell... xD