January Devlog - New Animation Systems (Patreon)

Hello and welcome back to another devlog!

I've been busy again this month with art, development for Catgirl Care, and my VTuber, Sweet Tea. Not everything is easy to show off this time around but there's a lot of cool and complicated systems that I'm excited to share with you all.

First off...

Catgirl Care Updates

For the first part of the month I was still working on Catgirl Care's character creator. I cleaned up the code with added documentation and spent a bunch of time creating safety checks for downloaded or invalid save data. I also reworked the gradient textures to be much more performant as a single texture instead an array of 1 pixel tall textures.

While polishing the character creator is fun, I was really hoping to get some development done on the core sim gameplay of Catgirl Care. Fortunately for me, Godot 4.6 has finally released and along with it, proper Inverse Kinematics!

Inverse Kinematics allow for chains of bones to calculate the best rotation needed to reach a target position. In my case, I've been wanting to use IK to allow Catgirl Care's walking animations to work with unpredictable terrain. I'm also exploring using this system for petting and allowing catgirls to interact with objects dynamically.

Since Godot's IK system was just added a couple days ago, I am currently in the process of testing to see what the best practices are but my outlook is optimistic. Hopefully I can have a catgirl running around in a test environment soon!

Sweet Tea's Animation System

My new character (she has a bio page!) and livestream assistant, Sweet Tea now has a full VTuber model! I expected this to not take as long as it has but development did not go as expected.

The above example shows my test for Sweet Tea using Godot's default 2D animation system. In it, every layer of her model appears to tear, overlap, and streak as I twist the neck bone. This is the same system I used for Lust Potions so I hoped that it would also work for a VTuber but I think Sweet Tea is too complex for my patience with these tools.

Instead, I've decided to build my own 2D deformation system.

The way Godot's default system works is that you create a 2D mesh (like a 3D model) and then you manually assign bone influence (weights) using a frankly awful interface. It works well enough for simple rigs or carefully prepared animations (like in Lust Potions) but it's very limited. If you're familiar with Live2D, that works similarly but has much better tooling (and an unfortunate payment model that I'd rather avoid).

My system does not use traditional polygons. Instead, I'm warping the image itself according to bone transforms sent to a shader. The amount of warp is controlled by grayscale texture masks, allowing for gradients and easy separation of elements (like Sweet Tea's twintails). This still has limitations but the result is a smoother deform with simpler setup and iteration.

This has honestly been one of the hardest coding projects I've taken on and I'm really proud of the final results. I still need to finish rigging Sweet Tea but I'm confident my system will provide better results (and possibly better performance) than Godot's built-in system or more advanced systems like Live2d. That said, I am also keeping an eye on Inochi2D's upcoming Godot support.

While it may seem odd to spend so much time working on Sweet Tea as a side project, I'm planning to use a lot of the concepts I've developed in future projects. The 2D bone deform system is perfect for 2D character animations (maybe Coral in Rockin' Resort?) but my research on text-to-speech systems could also lead to character voices (probably as a mod?) and her text analysis systems are perfect for interactive fiction like I plan to work on for Katie, Sophie, and Lisa's eventual game.

What's Next?

My main focus is now on getting catgirls moving in Catgirl Care. If I can get a petting demo ready, I'll be very happy. I'll also be finalizing Sweet Tea's animation system soon but she's more of a background project.

I'm also planning to update the Patreon commission bank soon to use my regular commission prices. That may happen this upcoming month or after - depends on when I find the time.

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Anyhow, thanks as always for supporting my art and game development! I'm excited for what's coming up with Catgirl Care and my other projects. Even with itch.io cutting my income pretty harshly this past year, your support has kept me afloat so I can focus on this passion of mine. Thanks again and again!