Alrighty (I’ve been abusing Mini dev logs for a while so… time for another journal!) 

So this post was a little delayed. Discordians know already, but my laptop decided that it hates me and the GPU died, so I had to send it out for repair. 

Meanwhile, I kinda messed up my Windows partition on my desktop after removing one of the drives to use for backing files up. Managed to fix that issue, but lost a couple of days of dev time 😛

ANYWAY! Some things did get done! Some of it harder to show (and some things I’m not wanting to show off just yet)

Character Sprite and Animation Workflow adjustments

Firstly, we’ve been working on ways to both expedite and simplify our animation workflow. As most of you have seen thus far, there are many characters in the game, and many of them will need a lot of animation.

We’ve been looking at some of the current character models, and have been working to stylize them in a way where they are simplified while retaining the important aspects of their design, and ultimately went towards a super deformed (SD) direction with many of the character’s in-game sprites.

Through this process, we’ve focused on narrowing down what details are the most important, and which details would be ultimately lost in animation (and the character’s sizes).

Some of the ones displayed here are first passes, but I think they’re really coming together so far. We’ll be creating and reworking some animations to test this, and tweaks may follow depending on the outcome.

Combat Design

For those who’ve been following the project for some time, you may have seen mentions of Breeze having a few forms before. Two of Breeze’s “Weather” forms include a Wind Form and a Cloud form. We intend on these forms to provide Breeze with additional combat moves and other features.

We’ve been working on developing Breeze’s Wind form some in the last month or two. Originally I developed some designs in a really drafty format and Haps, well, he kinda interpreted them as yo-yos… I ended up liking them more than my idea!

Without spoiling too much, the uncanny idea of wind yo-yos fit Breeze a lot.

Programming

Interesting progress on the programming front. I’m recently completed integrating a new “kinematic” controller into the game. In layman’s terms, this allows me to bypass using the default Unity physics, or rather, allows me more finite control of how I want the game physics to work. 

Breeze and other actors have a series of states that they can be in. Each of these states cause Breeze/other actors to perform very specific things. Current Breeze himself has 20+ states, and this is very likely to grow. 

One of the struggles was controlling the physics between the states, since it’s technically a layer outside of the state’s code that mostly works independently. I would need to basically introduce additional flags to “tame” the physics, but this was proving to be troublesome.

Another problem with my current physics implementation was how slopes were being handled…. 

They weren’t (at least, the way I wanted them too).

Now I’m able to have slopes (and can control slope limits and such). In the previous implementation, I would need to apply different physics materials to control the friction of a surface, as well as change the collider an actor has so that they don’t start sliding or aren’t able to move on the slope at all!

Anyway, with this all said, I’m finally wrapping up some major gameplay components, and move more into things I really want: AI and level development! 

We’ve begun some development on pathfinding, which will allow AI to navigate better in levels, but I’ll show more of that in the future. 

Cindy did the awesome background above, and is developing on additional concepts to help with helping towards getting a visual style going, and making sure character/sprites match up well.