Vertical Slice 2 (Sept 25 2023) (Patreon)

Vilserioooo

This month we’ve kept chipping away at the vertical slice. Most of the functions are somewhat working and we actually have a couple of visual things working enough to showcase... visually.!!

We’re doing a few things in parallel right now: namely, lighting, camera-work and character interaction. For MS2b and beyond, I wanted everything to feel as fluid as possible during gameplay so we decided against an UI overlay of character sprites of all kinds for conversation mode (think something like Persona 5 where characters emote via a face sprite next to the textbox or any RPGs where the field character’s only do basic emoting and most of the conversation is done via a 2D UI sprite). I wanted the field characters to be the actual actors. This is actually much more burdensome than it sounds since it means that character sprites need to be integrated into a 3D scene with 3D lights and all emoting animations needs to packed into the field character.

Lighting and taming Cinemachine (Video above)

Lighting is everything. It doesn't matter if its drawn, shot or rendered, light, and how it interacts with a subject, is what makes anything visual worth looking at. I have some experience with this in real-life shooting video but man... video game lighting is hard. Should this aesthetic-enhancement be included in a vertical slice period?? Perhaps not, but I was too curious to see how good we can make a scene look if we gave it everything we got. It took a few sleepless nights but I think we've managed to churn out something that looks somewhat presentable... Here are some lighting shots from all stages of us messing about this month.

Above: Where we left off last month

Below: Today

Below: Balancing realtime lights with baked lights. Figuring out where to cast shadows and where not to. Will people even care? I have no idea anymore... but I kinda do? The whole team does too? Shadows are one of those things you don't really notice  ... until you do, since Ritona can look floaty without it. Once you see it, it’s impossible to unsee.

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Seamless Character Interaction

Behoooold:

The camera slides into conversation mode seamlessly and everything is fluid...! We have also decided not to use traditional visual novel textboxes and decided to go with speech bubbles to accentuate the characters animations. I alway wasn’t a fan of text covering up basically 35% of the screen... it always felt like a waste.

Above: Position of the bubble and text size needs some work on close-up shots

I’m also keenly aware that everything is too god damn dark right now. This is kinda where we’re I’m having a lot of trouble balancing out the various types of lights... but it get’s a bit technical and thus boring so I’ll spare you the details.

I’d like to reiterate that nothing here is final. A lot of the map is just hacked together so we can get the slice done and will not appear this way in the final game. Please consider these vertical slice articles something like a dev diary where you get to see behind the scenes of the build of the game. Please don’t share any of the details above to the public. Thanks!

So. What do you all think?  Please leave us a message with your thoughts. We hope you like it and are excited about how MS2b is coming along as much as we are. There’s a crap ton of hurdles we still have to overcome as newbie game-devs but I can confidently say that I think we’re onto something really cool. This style of graphic where realism and anime merge is not an aesthetic you see very often. We want to give you something unique and something that can become a signature of the fault series moving forward. It’s taking a bit, but make sure to stick around. We can use all the support we can get, financially or emotional.

Thanks again!

-Munisix