Progress Report #81 - Working on animations (Patreon)

Hey lads!

I know it has been 2 weeks again, but we've stumbled into many problems, one after another, and my health (and life) was shit lately. I also wanted this post to be a wall of text, since I have a lot of info to pass to you, but I'll save it for the next progress report, thus this one will be a bit shorter.

From the great news, I can say that I managed to upgrade my animation tool and it supports editing even the most outdated animations (instead of making them from scratch), so it's a real life saver. But it comes with a great downside. I estimated that I have to fix around 30-50% of existing animations, but due to all the art changes and new animation tool, I will have to edit ALL of them. There's around 700 animation files in my project, some are unused, some are duplicated, but it's still 700 fucking files to go through, and Unity doesn't really allow me to preview them easily. Thus currently from morning till night I'm fighting with animations, and I will do it for the upcoming weeks. Fun. So please bear with me. Over the last few years I said many times that art can't be improved, because it will break the game, and it's a miracle that I was able to adjust old animations at all. Although some of them need to be made from scratch. RIP.

Regarding animations, you can preview 3 in action here:https://vimeo.com/760732139

Visible dick is intentional (It's my experimental feature on the new dick X-Ray, toggleable), so it will look better once finished.

Attached art files are 2 locations from the Park's public toilet and 4 male body types - Skinny, Normal, Fat, Muscled (WIP). And no, females won't have any body types to choose from. Random NPCs will use body types randomly. Aaand I'm removing random body sizes (height/width) from all NPCs, so they will have the same height (making animating characters easier, too),and thanks to that I can remove my syncing tool, so less animation desyncs and better game performance overall. I will try to reduce amount of black screen fade outs and reduce pointless text (e.g. Jane left the shower) and amount of clicking.

Also, if you want to check some of the OST, you can do it here:https://soundcloud.com/iamzeryth/sets/unaware-of-the-world-soundtrack-preview-1

So all in all, I bet you are wondering if the game will come out still in October. That's a great question and I have no idea. It will most likely be bugged due to many broken animations no matter when I release it (there's no way that I can thoroughly test them all just by myself). If I believe that game is playable enough to release it, I'll do it on October 30th. If not, I'm delaying it to sometime in November. I believe that we all agree that it's better to wait a few weeks more than to release an unplayable crap. Anyway, if you want rather bug-free game, you should wait until December probably, but the more people report bugs, the faster I'll be able to fix them. Game will be labeled as closed beta and thus unavailable to the public until major bugs are fixed, so you will have to wait for free version probably until the end of December/January. Sorry about the inconvenience.

Yeah, this project will inevitably share the Cyberpunk 2077 fate on release, sigh.

Cheers!