Update #13 (Slight Alpha delay, Lots of bug fixes, and Trailer 2!) (Patreon)

Unfortunatly We've been working through a few gameplay bugs in Level 80 and will need to push back the alpha a few days to complete final bug testing and fixing. I as the Dev apologize for the delay. As we're getting into later releases containing a fair parcentage of content of what will be in the Full Release, the time demand of interconnected bugs has slipped its way past us this week. We do not intend or project any future delays on Alpha 3, and we personally cannot wait to release the finished Alpha to you all :)

Set Release Date: June 20th at 8:00pm PST, 11:00pm EST, 3:00 am UTC (June 21st)

Highlights:

• Level ! Completed Bug check and ready to Ship! (Alpha 3)

• Grab Mechanic Polished (Level 80) (...)

• Camera Animation! (Togglable camera animation designed to simulate the movement of an early 2000s camcorder)

• Tons of pre-packageing bug fixes

Coming Soon:

• Trailer 2 (We're super excited to announce Subliminal's official Trailer 2! Coming to all social media in approximately 30 days!)🎉🎉🎉

• Alpha 3 Release! 🎉

• Widescreen Support (Set for integration in patch 3.1)

• Level 566 Leak! (Scheduled 13th)

• Complete Menu and Options Screens Reconstruct! (Planned for Alpha 3)

The Details (for nerds):

Persistant bugs are some of the worst things any developer deals with regularly, aside from corruption. But, nonetheless, it always ends up resulting in better code and a few lessons :)

This weeks development was filled with lots of bug fixes and a new camera animation polish and implementation!

Camera Animation: Realistic camera movement has been a huge TODO for quite a while and something I (the dev) have been very excited for. First thing, as always, is reference finding! After a fair amount of dives into old early 2000s camcorder footage we've compiled a good amount of variation and length of footage. Now we turn to replicate what we've found. We started with a simple camera shake and tweaked a few values to match a layer of a specific scale of movement from our references. Then, we repeated this, adding layer of movement at a time doing our best to isolate a specific scale of movement and combining the results to get a basic idle movement. We then repeated this process for a running movement and had our two base movements. But, as we've found in our references, a big part of convincing camera movement are turning and rotating movements as the person holding the camcorder sweeps the camera to a new angle. To replicate this we first started with a spring arm camera attachment to generally smooth the rotational input of a mouse. Then, to give a bit of a jerk feeling to sudden rotations we began animating the length or as it translates to, smoothness of our spring arm, to increase at the start of a sudden movement and as the rotation input comes to a stop decrease to snap the camera to the new rotation. It might be hard to visualize without a proper reference, but in alot of cases, when we record a video handheld we ease into our rotations and are faster relativly to stop rotating. An interesting side effect of this is that we usually overshoot where we're planing on pointing and end up backtracking a slight bit to get back on target. This would be our final big addition to our movement system: A slight overshoot and pull back animation of the cameras rotation based on how fast of a movement the player rotates and in which direction. Altogether the effect is quite convincing and something I'm looking forward to sharing with everyone on Alpha 3 Release! :)