Working on C.S. (Patreon)

Hello! In an earlier post I think I might have said I was really excited to experiment with a feature once V80 was done. Well I have dived into it. This week I started by created a coding architecture for this feature which allows me to add lots of nuance to it, which is basically required if it's actually going to work at all. This has been working well I think--especially once I created the debugging system, which... has been put to use. Yes, this is another wacky, zany, out-there feature with an acronym starting with the letter C. But it's not the CC--it's the CS System. (Is that too easy to guess? Maybe.)

Almost immediately I hit the feeling of "This is going to be harder than I thought", even though I had known it was going to be harder than I thought. It's also requiring an extra amount of math skills, which I am not too great at. I still don't know if it's actually going to work out or be scrapped, but it requires about another week to really tell. If it doesn't start looking a lot better by then, I'm going to scrap the idea, and you might never know what this was about. The reason I'm so ready to scrap it is because it doesn't really affect gameplay, so it's not really a super essential addition. (Unless, of course, if it works well--then it'll be essential.)

Besides this, I got a great idea for an ultra-aggressive creature, and I won't explain it further than that.

Ending Breakthrough

I also woke up this morning with an idea for the ending of the game. It came to me as I was waking up and felt like a dream; it was somewhere between an idea suddenly popping into my head out of nowhere and me watching it take place like a movie--a very short, choppy movie that finished in like 5 seconds, showing a key moment of the ending during gameplay.

This idea took place within the larger premise which I had been tentatively moving towards, which means I'm almost certainly going to go with that now. So I basically know what the ending of the game is going to look like now, in a broad sense. This dream was pretty exciting for me, because it mainly answered the question of what the players will do to ultimately bring about the end credits. That has been one of the main unanswered questions that has never really gone anywhere and has always been totally blank. So I'm really happy about that. There's still a lot to think about though.

I think the dream came to me because I had recently watched another couple videos analyzing one my favorite classic horror movies I've never actually watched (yet which I continue to watch long videos about; its plot just fascinates me.) And now if I said what movie it is, it would reveal too much!

Left-over V80 Stuff

Here's a document I forgot to share, which is from when I was trying to figure out where to put the utility slot on the HUD, which was a difficult problem. I was not going to add the utility slot until I figured out a place for it on the HUD. The final place I chose for it is still unfortunately easy to miss (which is why there is a special animation for equipping items into it to draw your eye up to the slot.) But the utility slot being on the top left feels like the most logical place to me, and I was really happy when I got that idea.

This climbing animation for the Feiopar was the hardest, most painful animation to make, and its back left knee rig specifically has some ugly twitching problems that I couldn't fix. But it's gladly not really easy to notice from the side angle!

The Feiopar is an example of how just a little procedural animation can go such a long way. Because its tail waving around really "sells" a lot of its movement as real while in-game, and otherwise it would probably look quite robotic.