Last poll winner & Dev big post #2 (Patreon)

Nicole won the last character poll! Now we got another furry character to play with. Some fellas want her to be neko, so I'll try to recreate this specific look in the character editor of the upcoming unity version. This will be an example that it is pretty easy to create a character on your own from existing parts.

Unity rigging is a joke

All last week I was comparing what animation solution suits me best. At first, I thought that the unity solution is better. I need deep control of the rig and it should be moddable. Well, after lots of pain, crashes, unity bugs and swearing I came up with a simple review of what is unity 2d animation package is in comparison with spine.

The spine is like a pretty and nice-to-play game where you have fun while making animation rigs.

Unity 2d animation package is a mod for Minecraft, where you can also make 2d rigs.

Unity solution is ugly, buggy as hell, crashes a lot, you hate it and it begs you to kill it inside the code comments. But.. it somehow works after all.

For the past year of working with the spine, I crawled under its ribs and disassembled it to its atoms. I know it too well to suddenly switch to the completely different unity rigging. So I decided to stick to the spine, and I'm gonna squeeze out everything from it. The main con about spine is that it has no free access to the spine editor itself. Which sucks for modding. Only one rigger may access meshes, bones and all the spline magic under the hood. This inspired me to the next generation of our character rigs. 

Rig 4.0

The First generation of my character rigs was made on unity. It was for the game which was the conceptual ancestor of Golden Coast Saga. I got an overall understanding of what these character rigs are about. 

Then was the second-gen rig that was made for Haru's Secret Life. Another game of mine and Cillian's. Completed production-ready use of the ideas that I took from the first one. 

After this, there was the well-known character rig of the third generation. I introduced it this summer and used it in the Kiss My Camera web version. Its main purpose was to surprise everyone. I used so many advanced techniques and dark magic that it's become hard to scale and maintain. Also, it cannot support modding by design. 

After these tries, I came up with a brand new solution. The main purpose of the fourth-gen rig is stability and scalability. Data-driven approach. Everyone can add their character just by following simple tutorials on how to organize images and where to place them. I'm building a reliable tank that should not be stuck in tons of assets shit. And as with any tank, it has just the utility look and no fancy interior. It will have many tools for quality animations like the floating elbow technique or masked pupils for eyes and even physics. But there for example will be no more pseudo 3d magic which is always a custom solution and very hard to adjust for every character. And the character will be cut below the ankles. 

By the way, I'm planning to do two rigs! One is for visual novel game mechanics - for character close-ups, wardrobe, character editor, etc. And the second one is a mini rig! Almost chibi full body character rig for the main top-down gameplay. It will be less detailed as it will be visible almost every time from some distance.

Also sticking to the spine means that scene rigging will also stay on the spine, so there will be at least one new lewd scene in the upcoming minor 0.1.9 version!

Okay, spine rig. How are you gonna use it in unity?

As I said, the spine wasn't designed for modding purposes. So let's make some nasty things. Let's make an unethical hybrid of spine-runtimes and unity editor. I'll use the spine just as a render engine and rig system, but I will animate this rig via unity. I need everything modular and animations should be as files, rather than baked inside the spine rig as it was before. If you're a mature modder and ready for some advanced unity adventure, there will be tutorials on how to make your own animations for any rig or scene.

I've already done a lot of research and prototyping, so here are some nice achievements of mine. Now I don't need previous questionable techniques like hardcore head transplantation in real time with many bugs. Here we have a neat draw order separator, and it works as it should.

Another achievement is eye masking through the shaders. And the one that I am really proud of - is shader recoloring of the body via gradient maps from scratch. Shader creation with a node shader graph is for pussies, real gangsta make things with bare HLSL code. With this shader, you can properly color the skin in any color you want. This is a real time saver. I dreamt about something like this since the web version of the game. Also, it supports transparency, so you can make ghost characters or slime. Other things to implement are marks and shapes on the skin. This will allow you to make tattoos, different fur coloring, and whatever details you have in mind. 

Modding

So much talking about mods, why do they matter? 

I'm a big fan of mods for games and know all the beauty and ugly of their existence. They can vastly increase the game's lifetime. Deeply enrich its gameplay. Multiply play hours. Also mods often try to improve existing gameplay, but they also can break into pieces the initial game design and it will be no fun anymore. My work is also will be making a sandbox-like game design, so the new custom mechanics can be easily glued to the main game and it will be still fun.

This is an interesting tech task that I wanted to do like for 4 last years. Build architecture that supports deep modding including logic mods via prebuilt c# libraries or scripting API via Lua or python.

Also, mods are a great marketing tool. Remember Friday Night Funkin'? Many artists draw their own characters and characters that are wanted by the community just to play with them and get some content for their audience. FNF gives the ability to create youtube-ready content for SFW artists, it was a win-win exchange. But what about NSFW artists? There are so many 2d artists. But are they have the same game to self-fulfill? Are there many easily moddable nsfw 2d games, that encourage you to reskin various already animated lewd scenes with your own characters in any art style you want? Not really. We definitely should fill this gap.

The first actual usage of the content mods is to make every already existing character as free mods. No more copyright problems, all responsibility blurs :D

Expect my constant mod support and encouragement with tutorials, ideas, in-game benefits, contests, and much more. Fortunately, we already have a growing community and awesome community managers to help you with everything to start creating.

It may be a global community challenge to build most of the characters from our characters list. You can even make a character from real photos, why not. I expect to see crazy shit from you. Don't upset me, just do it :D

Logic mods! But let's talk about it later when I finish all research..

What's next?

Now I need to test the last stuff: physics, runtime skin injecting, mod asset bundles, addressables and custom libraries injection.

Also, I have now someone who helps me make logic code for Golden Coast. It means I can spend all my time on Kiss My Camera. I can do my actual job now. Testing technologies, approaches, building pipelines, making prototypes, and other R&D stuff.

Stay tuned for the prototype sneak peeks of the brand new top-down mechanic

Next time there will be big post about logic mods and multiplayer support 🍿