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Inner Circle Update for February 17, 2019!
🕑 Added 2019-02-17 12:00:57 +0000 UTC
Hey guys,
We had some setbacks this week, but we also overcame some technical challenges and have the H artwork process streamlined / automated for next time. That being said, we’ve got some good stuff to show off.
Animation Progress
I’ll get the boring stuff out of the way first @_@.
A major difficulty for this kind of game is that Spine (and any 2D animation software) is inherently bad at handling complex interactions between characters. One character can’t have body parts in front of and behind another at the same time without some trickery. In our case, we’re actually swapping out the character skeletons for H scenes and replacing them with a single (big) skeleton containing all the necessary characters. But we also want to make these animations as flexible as possible so that we can reuse them with the future possibility of new characters/outfits/skins/whatever.
Long story short, now that we have some actual H scene Spine components, it took a few days of trial and error to figure out naming conventions and how to properly organize things in the most futureproof fashion. We’re now in assembly line mode and hope things will go smoothly from here on out :D (though, I’m sure we’ll inevitably need to clear some road bumps when we get it in-engine). I’ll post again once we have some polished stuff to show you!
Advanced Rigging Stuff
We actually got TK the Spine pro edition and caught up this week so that he can help with advanced rigging techniques. His 3D rigging skills translate pretty directly to Spine. One thing I’ve been pushing for is that he and Kitsune master the faux 3D effect that you see in really good 2D animations—and they’re definitely getting the hang of it :D. Check out this new face rig video!
Vioreaper – Completed Artwork!
We finished the artwork for the Vioreaper’s idle pose! Check out the full images below:
Charger – Completed Artwork!
And one more knocked out! It really sucked, but we actually had to redo the work on the Charger from scratch after we made a major goof with the image resolution. TK and I powered through the next two days on only naps in order to redo it and catch up @_@. I feel really good about the results though, and Limbo did a fantastic job with the design :D.
Ubercharge’s Map Progress
The Vioreaper’s nest / tunnel map is coming along great :D. Here are some preview low resolution screenshots of the tunnel, as well as the full map. The background is only 25% of the final resolution, so details on the metal will come through a lot better on the final version. We still have to add the nest goop, which Ubercharge has actually made a lot of progress on, but I’ll show it off next time.
Comments
MangoFishSocks
The animation thing sounds like a real pain even with your workaround. But it's good that you did, of course. It's a bit of stumbling along the way but you guys are definitely getting there. The 3D on the facial rigging looks very, very good. I have no idea how you do that but it's working splendidly. The vioreaper's 'meat' looks a bit small for Onyx but I suppose it fits the size of the rest of the body. The most interesting part of the charger to me is actually the lower jaw. It's very unconventional and gives the guy a real alien (adjective) look. Looking forward to the H animations.
Ashiel
On the subject of animations, you might check out Guild Meister and other games by the same developer. The long and short of it is those games have a lot of animations, but part of that's because most of the animations use a combination of several protagonist poses that are pretty consistent across the board (which also made it easier for them to do different combinations of foes).
