Mid-September HelixFTW Report: Liala, Modding (Patreon)

So first and foremost, allow me to introduce the next upcoming HelixFTW character. Designed by Serkular and modeled, textured, and rigged by me, is Liala the snake lady. We're still kind of figuring out what we want to do with her; we've been focused on getting modding support up and running before delving seriously into animating her and getting her set up, but if we can get even half the things we've internally discussed up and running, I think you are all very much going to like her.

I have had to learn a LOT to make her work, both in terms of getting her to work in Blender but also how to also make those techniques transfer over to Unity. I don’t tend to use auto-rigging tools, so I’ve gone through and gotten myself to learn how to make things like her neck and long tail work manually. I'm also incredibly happy with the texture work I've done with her. There were numerous points in time where I didn't think I'd be able to get her to work, at all- but here she is, and I couldn't be more proud.

Mind you, even at this point I'm still ironing things out and making sure she's where I'd like her to be, but she'll get there in due time.

So that's Liala talked about, onto the next part:

We're still working away at getting modding support for the game up and running. At this point, most of the backend is pretty much done; the hard part now is getting all of the documentation written up on both the Blender and Unity sides. There is a lot to go over, especially when the game has mostly been reliant on 'tribal knowledge' up until now. We've both gotten pretty good at setting new characters up, but actually making a guide for how its done is proving to be a time consuming task.

Ideally, when this is all said and done, anyone with access to Blender and Unity should be able to sit down and make their own characters for HelixFTW with support for them to show up in-game, which is an exciting prospect. If you're unhappy with the current selection of characters available for the game, you'll be able to make them yourself.

HelixFTW was not built with modding originally in mind. It'll be possible to create your own character, but it will still be a lengthy, time-consuming process.

And finally:

We're probably not going to have the modding support release fully ready by the end of the month, since actually getting the guides tested and read is going to take more time. However, there will be an updated release for the game (0.6.4) at the end of the month that will contain options for game resolution, windowed mode, locked framerates, and a variety of under-the-hood changes related to modding.

Perhaps not the most exciting release, but it does mean that you'll have way more control over the game's performance.

We're planning to have Liala's first release at the end of October.