Update announce & game news (Patreon)

Hello

It's been a month since I drowned myself in working on a new character animation rig. Let's see what I have for you by the end of the year

Upcoming 0.1.9 Christmas Update

While I was full-time busy with the unity stuff, our artists made 7 new characters and 2 clothing sets for you! We also drew a new lewd scene, but since I moved to unity, animating it in the spine is making no sense now. You'll see this new scene in the upcoming unity version. More about it is below.

This is a minor content update, so there is no new tech stuff besides fixing a couple of bugs.

Also, this is the last web version update! I finished with the new animation system in unity, so I can completely migrate to the new engine now. That's it, the web era is over. The 0.1.9 version will be available online for a couple of major releases of the unity version, but then I'll shut down the server and it will be available only as a downloadable version for those who want the nostalgia of ol' days Kiss My Camera flash-like mini-game.

Quick in and out 20 minute adventure

I finished with my final animation solution. In the previous post, I compared the pros and cons of unity 2d animations and spine. I came to the conclusion that the spine is better. But in reality, both are not suiting my needs, so I started work on my own solution based on spine and unity together.

In total, I tried 4 different approaches with 3-5 attempts per each approach to make things work. It was a month of trigonometry, shader languages, matrix multiplications, and all the math stuff that I thought I would never use

Finally, I came up with a GPU-based rig that supports the easy replacement of assets on the go. No sprite atlas solution with the main goal being as moddable as possible and artist-friendly at the same time. 

Every part is modular so modders can collaborate with each other. Imagine a modder who wants a 4 arm character. Not a big deal, just copy past a pair of arms in the rig setup. Then another modder decided that there are not enough animations with 4 arms characters. He downloads the mod with our 4 arm character, unpacks it, makes some new animations in unity, setup dependency that his mod requires the original mod with 4 arm character, packs it in his own mod, then uploads it, and now everyone can use the original mod with an additional mod for animations! Pretty inspiring, right? This can be applied to any character element. New hands, skin colors, animations, mouthes, clothes, personality, and much much more. It's quite hard to describe all the possibilities in words, let me show you over time. 

The gif above shows the recolor feature which is another fun-to-play thing coming with the unity version. The recolor controls will be inside the game and will give you the possibility to recolor any part of the character, even the smallest details. Moreover, it will speed up the process of creating new scenes, because now I can just procedurally recolor characters rather than create new recolored assets which require lots of time.

What's next?

Now I have to spend a week just to place every new asset of the Christmas update inside the version which will not be supported anymore. That's quite disappointing, cause I need to do it in an old-fashioned way, I have to recolor all the sprites and export them by hand.

After the update, I'll take a break for a week. Have to relax my melted brain and think about the network architecture. The first alpha version 0.2 of the brand new Kiss My Camera on unity will be next month.

Stay tuned for the last 0.1.9 web release this week! 🍾🎄