Breathing Life

Hello, friends!

You might say that I should not be looking for new features to put into this game, and you would be right. I need to finish the dang thing. But also, I need to make sure I am creating something I am proud to put out in the world. Something engaging, appealing. Beautiful.

To that end, I did find one more thing that I can do that makes a big difference. It's actually fairly common in visual novel type games, so you could almost say that it's table stakes.

What am I talking about? Animated narrative figures.

I don't know a whole lot about animation, but I do have my own copy of Spine to play with. So I decided to experiment with mesh animations. It turns out that once you get past a few fundamentals, there is a lot you can do.

After some early successes, I decided to go through and touch every one of these (about 300 by the time we're finished) to do a breathing animation, a blinking animation, and a gesture of some kind to show that they are speaking. It will take a while, but I think the end result is much better than a static figure.

By the time we have a public/marketing demo ready, I should have animations for all the figures in the prologue and Act I. So these will certainly be in the demo build.

At the moment, I am close to finishing design notes for the fourth-to-last story module. And I've finished about 80% of the upgrades that I had planned for the manor interface. It looks so, so much better than it used to. I look forward to showing that off when it's finished.

That's all for now. Hope you're having a great summer!

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Beasties