Nika Conversation animations, QoL changes, balance changes, and fixes (Patreon)

Heyo everyone! Here with a pretty productive week. Nika's conversation animations are a bit eccentric, and were fun to do. I had some extra time to tap into a few quick things I wanted to get in as well. I will start with the QoL/balance updates. Let's get into it!

Alright! 

There are now indicators for your allies showing when they are technically available for use. This should help for clarity on characters like Pix and Nika. This is an extremely basic implementation, and may be adjusted in the future.

Next was implementing a indication overlay for when the purple claws latch on to you.

Once again, this is a pretty basic implementation, and will likely be visually updated in the future, but I did want more clarity for newer players on this end. Also to help the player notice in case one sneaks onto the ship without noticing.

A couple more small changes were to ship boundaries. The amount of camera leniency has been increase horizontally on "most" levels. It is still restrictive on the Titas, as there are segments that are built around the restrictions.

With this increase in camera distance, the player can now aim at more drastic angles. (Basically you can aim wider from whatever your current position is)

Another change and addition was in the "Hscene Room"

You will now start with more of an overview window, and of course an addition that has been requested.

When you click on their button it will also play their voice line asking for assistance along with some SFX.

Another thing you might notice is that "Nova's Hscene" will now play the cutscene/slides intro along with it.

I can't remember if I mentioned it last week, but I also reduced the plant boss' tentacles health from 1500 to 1000. Tentacles will now die faster. Overall this is to quicken the pacing of the boss, and make multiple cycles feel less bad. I also made some changes to the player laser. The player's laser would often collide with obstacles instead of hitting enemies if they occur on the same frame (most prevalent on the Plant boss on Molbon). I made some hitbox changes a while back to avoid this, but it's proving to be insufficient. I have now made it so when a laser collides with an obstacle, instead of colliding with it, it will simply flag itself as such. After running through all other collision instances, if it has not hit anything else (ie, an enemy), it will THEN collide with the obstacle on the next frame.

Something else I *started* doing was implementing the new input system. While it's still very much in progress, it has started. Many controls will now use it, though it will not be noticable at all (except maybe some gamepad controls). Once this has been fully implemented, keybinds will be on the table, and gamepad controls will be much more consistent/practical.

Finally, SOME headway was made on the recurring save issues people are having between builds. It seems this only happens on specific systems. It seems it's due to the serialization/deserialization of the binary formatter with new data. (It's odd that some systems handle this totally fine, while others do not.) From what I have read online, I am a big dumb head for using this system for saving anyways. I may look into implementing a new save system if I don't come up with a solution soon. If I implement a new save system I will do what I can to ease the transition, allowing people who have functioning saves carry their data over seamlessly.

ANYWAYS! Let's get into the conversation animations! I almost forgot that's the main highlight of this post.

Of course what you saw at the head of the post was Nika's Idle animation. (No particular emotion)

We have our Happy Intro, and Happy loop:

Here's her Smug:

Shock:

Angry:

Sad (Basically just a variant of Angry):

Of course there are clothing toggles as well.

I believe that is everything I have to report on for this week. These next couple weeks are going to be a bit intimidating, but we're gonna give it everything we got.

Neos boss will begin.

I gotta rig this sucka up, animate the facial animations, and add the proper effects. Here goes nothin'!

Thanks everyone! This was a long one, but I'll catch you all next week with a lil' bit o' pepper on the boss.

-Regulus