Update #27 (Dynamic & Procedural Cutscenes and Chases) (Patreon)

Quick note: This is a Public Post, meaning everyone (subscribed or not), will be able to see this and hopefully get a taste of our ✨amazing✨ development content!

Hey Everyone!

We've got some pretty exciting new developments to go over today involving procedural changes to a few cutscenes and chases!

Development Snippet: Dynamic & Procedural Chases and Cutscenes have been in the works for a while now and, as we expand our development team, we now have some exciting announcements! Firstly for cutscenes: The majority of cutscenes will now have a variety of scenarios possible, making it quite rare you will ever see the same exact cutscene twice. And now secondly and most exciting, for chases: Every chase will now have a variety of physics-based events that will procedurally trigger throughout each chase as well as procedurally placed obstacle paths, in contrast, to set obstacle paths (Ex: Level "Run" Chase). Continued in "The Details"...

Now let's get to our main update this week!

Highlights:

⋅ Dynamic & Procedural Cutscene & Chase Work! (More in "The Details"!)

⋅ Animation Improvements and Fill-Ins (Lot's more animation news coming next week!)

⋅ Steady Team Expansion!! (Official Update on this is coming next week!)

⋅ Lots of Optimization work!! (Including a possible new dev!)

Coming Soon:

⋅ Level "Ventilation" Leak! (Set for Sunday! 11/19)

⋅ Wrapping Up Expansion Planning! (Official Update on this is coming next week!)

⋅ Exploration Polls! (Set for Wednesday & Friday! 11/15 & 11/17)

⋅ More Mechanics Polls! (Set for Thursday & Saturday! 11/16 & 11/18)

⋅ More Procedural Cutscene and Chase work!

⋅ General Optimization (Level Streaming focused)

The Details (For Nerds):

Now, let's dig into some procedurals!

Procedural chases and cutscenes have been on the back burner for a while, but with the expansion we've had lately, It's finally come back up to a main focus!

Let's dig into some cutscene dynamics first: For dynamics here we have a couple pretty straightforward ways to create variation. Our first is having a set of different camera movement sequences that we can pick from when it comes time to trigger one for our cutscene. Our second is having a few variations of our main event (Ex: a Physics-based shelf falling over or an entity animation). With these in our hands, we can quite easily setup a system to choose between 5+ distinctive different cutscenes, and in the process bring a much more natural and dynamic feel to cutscenes that the player will most likely experience more than once.

Now since we're still mid-development in our chase procedurals, let's take a more birds-eye view here this week that we'll be able to build off in next week's update!

Here, in contrast to cutscenes, we have a quite complex system for choosing exactly what we want to change each time we load a new scene. In total, we have 2 parts to our system: Obstacle/path setup and Physics-Based event setup. Each time we load our Chase scene, we first want to start with our path setup, laying out a full path that we know is completable and not blocked off in some way. Then we can go in with our Physics-based events and place them in available spaces on our path with their respective triggers. Finally, we can do a final check through our path making sure that none of our newly placed events will cause any trouble with our path, and we can sign off on our new procedurally generated chase course. 🎉

**In Addition: For those here who would still be interested in joining the Team, below is an updated list of all specific categories that are still up for grabs! :)

- 3D Character Animation

- Sound Design (OST specific)

- VFX (2D and basic 3D video animation and compositing)

- UE5 Blueprint & C++ Development