Anduo Report - April 8th, 2021 (Patreon)

Hey y'all!

Bear here, I'm gonna do another weekly update!

Pretty much since the 0.33 patch release 4 days ago, we've taken a bit of time off of content implementation for the next release to get some rest and to come back with fresh eyes!

In the wake of this, we've done a little bit of preparation work for a game after we've finished TC. It's important to start work on this early, so that we have a clear concept/vision once TC is finished.

Aine has been working on testing out different art styles! We've been very happy with the TC Artstyle and still think it's amazing. However, after so many years, we want something different, something new. To get a fresh new look, we decided to start by assembling a massive amount of reference art. Here's a little glimpse into that:

Taking inspiration from the refs and honestly many more twitter pages, Aine started work on iterating some super rough concepts:

Face Style Concepts

Moving in the anime direction

Trying face proportions and body proportions, as well as anatomy details density

Shading concept with soft shading and low opacity highlights

Right now we're looking to move into a more eastern style direction, but who knows where the journey takes us. Take all this with a massive grain of salt, everything is still up in the air at this point.

While Aine was working on the art side, I've decided to sit down and do some research into the tech stack for the next game.

Since I would like to have a real-time combat system in the next game, I've started looking into what tools would be useful to us. One big point of pain for us in Third Crisis is the combat, especially the AI. I'm hoping I've found a tool to make this easier for us in the future: Behavior Trees!

Behavior Trees are essentially a sequence of actions that an AI takes. They've been invented by the Halo 2 Devs (I loved that game back then :D). The whole concept is similar to Playmaker, which is what we use in Third Crisis. The difference is, that Playmaker is meant as a way to implement general game logic, while Behavior Trees are designed for AI in games specifically. Having worked with playmaker in the past is helping out a lot here though, because custom actions are very similar code compared to how they're coded in Playmaker.

I've also started implementing a very rough system for a dark souls like combat system. So stuff like attacking stops your movement, during attacks, your character moves, attacks take time, enemies have wind ups. That kind of stuff. It's pretty basic stuff, but it needs to be implemented at some point nonetheless.

Apart from that, I've done a bit of practice with Spine animation:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/710469633274150942/829796681536897114/Screen_Recording_2021-04-08_at_21.15.01.mov
Spine is a professional grade 2d animation program. So far, I've been using a tool built into unity, but it is missing a bunch of features that Spine has. Also, Spine has a community of professional animators, of which we hope to hire someone when the time is right! 

Our most recent hire JuggerDown has now officially joined the internal Anduo TC Dev team! We're happy to welcome them into the team and love the output that we've already seen! They've drawn the new bear suit and much more is in the works:

Their job is focusing on new dialogue sprites for now, but there will also be animations!

Rated has been working on the next CG for the streetwhore content!

Work has been very straight forward and smooth on this one. Next up, she'll focus on content with the bar-bad-end Jenna!

PmPerfect has finished his work on the Airhsip version of the Phone UI and we've even already got it imported into unity!

Next, he's working on adding a background image for the phone:

Then, the current plan is to focus on the Peitho phone ui! 

That's all for this week. Honestly, my day today was 100% spent on tax/business/corporate stuff... It's quite taxing.. (hah, getit) But for real, making this whole game studio work cleanly on the corporate side is so, so, so much work. We have amazing people helping us through it luckily. I hope I can get back into the groove of animating and writing for the side content over the next day or two though! :)

Lastly, thank you all so, so much for the support! We literally wouldn't be able to do any of this without your amazing support. We hope you enjoyed the last update and especially the new carceburg!

Much love from the team <3