Large post: Final progress update before v0.3's Patreon Release! Ocean planet sneak peek. (Patreon)

Heyo everyone! Here's the final progress report for v0.3! This week is mostly final touch ups, and fixing some stuff. I'm going to overview my current thoughts on development, along with a few things to come.

 Overall I feel I didn't make enough ground in the new "features" department. While the base/essential content is completed, I want there to be more buffer room for additional things. I was feeling this a while back when I was discussing potentially "getting more people on board". As a result I have been in discussion with a couple people. I'll be sure to announce whenever things are more concrete, but this should hopefully open some things up. 

Even with this being the case, development workload won't quite be where I want it, but we are getting close. I will likely be doing more thinking, and reviewing for polishing up the workflow and development itself in the future. The main reason I feel that it is flawed is because there are a lot of features I would love to add, and expand on, which I seem to be having trouble getting to amongst the base workload. These features include: a few weapon types that you can choose from, shop system, expanding on the gender-bend aspect of the game, properly implementing the affinity system, and potentially adding some more "side content" type things. Of course these are second to the base content in terms of priority, as to avoid active scope creep.

ANYWAYS... there is a long road ahead, to sort these things out.

Just before I start the progress update I am going to quickly say that I will not be here for next weekend, this means aside from v0.3's launch on the 1st, I will not be doing a progress update next week.

Alright, let's get in to it!

First off I actually did some experimentation for water shaders in the upcoming Ocean planet.

(I just used one of the Catiya buildings for reference while I was adjusting the values. I wanted you to be able to see the buildings through the water as you fly by, but fade off in the darkness of the water. These cities are mostly underwater with minimal amounts emerging from the water.)

Next I made the climax animations for Pix's first Hscene. Along with this I added some minor effects, and put in the SFX

Next was setting up the proper progression for Pix's first and second Hscene. In both scenes she ends up with something in her eye, so I set it that when it happens, her eye will close for the rest of the scene.

I also made some small adjustments to the animation.

Next, I made some adjustments to the party select to work for more characters. I also set up Pix's info and respective images. (It does not work with gamepad currently).

After that I did some adjustments to the "fade out" shader (The one that makes it so an object fades out as it gets close to the camera). Basically just to allow them to have normalmaps to allow them to contain a bit more detail.

After that I did some adjustments to the boss. In the boss progress update I talked about how I wasn't too happy with it's state. I essentially changed up a few timers to speed up the pace of the fight. I added a bit more movement to some animations to make it seem less "static", and also made it so the tentacle pedals are always open during it's Idle state.

As you can see, the pedals on the side are now open. Technically they are tough to hit, but it at least gives you the option of something to shoot at in between states.

Overall I feel like the fight feels a lot more smooth now.

There were several bugs throughout the level that I fixed alongside these.

After that I wrote Pix's dialogue and set up her conversations, Hscene, and clothing options. While I was working on animations, and associated code, I decided to tinker with some other options:

The other options consist of testing how easy/hard it would be to implement other clothing options. Here is an example of putting Pix's clothes onto Lana

With some adjustments Pix's clothes fit quite well onto Lana, however it does not work quite so well the other way around. Pix's boobs and rig are just... not built for Lana's clothes.

Giving alternate clothes is not "too" difficult provided they translate well enough. I doubt this would be any kind of a key feature though. Even though it's not too difficult, it is still fairly time consuming, as I need to morph the base, and rig each clothing piece separately, along with adding them to any control parameters. It is a fun addition, and I may add stuff like this at my leisure, but don't expect it to make too much of an appearance overall.

As you could see, I changed the dialogue buttons as well. I still don't consider these to be ideal, and will likely change at some point, but I feel they are muchhh better than what was there before.

Finally, I made some last minute additions to SFX (Some boss sounds, sounds for the new lasers, etc). These will likely be placeholders for the time being. I also reworked some timing on the enemies.

There were some other things in the works this week, but I will end the report there, as it is starting to get quite lengthy.

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Considering there will be no progress update next Friday, I thought I'd do a very brief rundown here in it's place. I'll give a first look on some of the water level.

We are going to try our hand at a form of "Day/Night" cycle within this map. The map will likely start during the day, and end at night. (Don't take that sea monster for granted... I doubt we will have something like that in the level)

Are peeks at some models BigFeff has put together.

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Anyways! I'll wrap it up here, as there are still a couple things I want to do before I send a build off to the team for testing. I'll catch you all on the 1st with the release of v0.3! Hope you all have a great week!

-Regulus