Siren's first animation, some new additions, and Hscene 2 sneak peek. (Patreon)

Heyo everyone! As mentioned this week has been dedicated to Siren's animations. On top of the animations I also got a few smaller QoL and mechanical options in. I did a couple other things to get other aspects rolling which I'll cover in the progress report. Without further ado, let's get into it!

To start off, I broke up the image (as usual)

Then meshed it up.

Rigged.

It's not too common that I use IK in these animations, as the movement is often a little bit too perspective based for a 2D rig. (I use a lot of morph, and scale adjustments). In this case I used it in a couple spots.

Considering Siren's hands are anchored on the wall, I set up an IK on her hands. In this demonstration(via the inspector), the bones frame updates are slow for performance sake. This is just for the inspector. In-game it will animate much more smoothly.

Anyways! Let's get to the results.

Idle

The base loop was shown at the head of this post, but there's a bit more.

Here's a hard version.(Looking now, her right arm's IK is over-extending... I'll fix that up)

An alternate (This one's dark just because it was taken from the inspector, not in-game)

With the base animations in there, there are still the climax animations which I will finish up today. Yesterday I decided to take a bit of time to implement concepts/ideas for some things I think were overdue.

They are still in-progress, and the visuals are still placeholders for the time being, but I have put in the scripts for alternate weapon types.

Starting with a gatling gun. This weapon is an alternative option for the Charge shot. Holding down fire will wind up, and unload rapid fire until released. (Right cluster uses normal primary fire, Left cluster uses gattling.)

The idea behind this is to open up a more accessible option for single target focus fire. While timing the primary fire's 3 shot burst for high damage is more of a legacy attack from games like Star Fox, it may be awkward for newer players to adapt to it, as it is a bit of an archaic system.

The gatling gun will allow the player to not have to worry too much about execution for optimal damage, and just unload on the enemy with full-auto by holding fire. Overall gatling will do high, single target damage, but will be slightly less damage output when compared to well timed primary fire.

If you use the gatling gun, it would essentially leave you with 2 single target attacks, and no strong way of AoE. To make up for this, there is another option for primary fire(can replace the 3-shot burst). As mentioned, the visual is just a placeholder.

The wave is a primary fire that has a slower fire rate, and overall low "DPS". This weapon makes up for it by having a few unique traits. It has a much larger hitbox than the lasers, but it will also pierce through enemies, and even obstacles. This can help you with clusters of enemies, and enemies who are in hard to reach areas.

Along with these things, I have added a visual message for points received by killing enemies. I feel it's good information to the player, and gives things a bit more of an "arcadey" feel

Finally, I decided to take a bit of time to break up Aether's conversation art so that I can mesh and rig it when I get some more time. I'm not sure if I will have it put in for v0.4, but if I can, I would like to. Either way, while I was doing this, I was playing around with ideas on how to go about some of the in-game customization.(This is an extremely rough concept I pieced together with random available assets from AmHidden(literally frankensteined), and it would likely be properly drawn in when implemented).

That should pretty much do it for this week's update. The next week will be focusing on Siren's 2nd Hscene. Her 2nd Hscene will be something that I haven't tried to tackle before, but it should be interesting. Here is a sneak peek!

If I get time in between her animation, I would like to add a small/quick shop system for the new weapon types to sit in, but we will see how the week goes!

Anyways! Thanks everyone for the continued support. It's really started to feel like things are going to be put into high gear for this build, so here's to hoping this momentum continues (please no random detrimental bugs that suck my soul lolol). Catch you next week!

-Regulus