PROGRESS REPORT #140

Hello everyone, welcome to the 140th progress report!

I suppose I should start this progress report by talking about what took up a good half of the past dev cycle: making the game's first animation.

I would have at least shared a still of the animation, just so you guys have an idea of what I'm talking about, but I don't think I can post anything NSFW in a public post on here. So I guess you'll have to use your imagination... ^^'

The animation

There were a few key challenges there, the first one getting a good-looking loop, of course. Thankfully this wasn't my first time using the various animation tools thanks to a few tests I've done before, so the making of the animation itself wasn't really an issue. Making a good one is the real trouble, lol. The main issue with that, and I'll get back to that later, is that making a loop look good can get quite finicky. Meaning that it's a lot of changing values just a little bit, a small portion of a movement at a time, looking at the result to make sure it didn't mess up other portions of the movement, then doing it all again until you're satisfied. That's what I did before in my previous animation tests, and I always ended up overdoing it, kind of messing up a perfectly good base loop. This time I decided to take the lesson to heart, and I kept things simple. I got a base loop going, adjusted it so it looked just fine, and didn't touch it at all afterwards. The result still looks a little stiff in some places, but I think I managed to make up for that in other places in the animation.

Adding variation

I think what makes an animation come alive the most are small variations in the main loop. I think in real life even the most repetitive movements are never perfectly repetitive, and adding even small variations can make an animation pop through the screen. Adding small movements like head and feet movements can convey a lot of emotions as well, so I made sure to throw that in the mix. I'm happy with the result, and I do think those added a lot to the overall quality of the animation.

Physics

I didn't dwelve into the realm of jiggle physics this time, to get that out of the way. The animation didn't particularly call for it, and I felt it was too advanced for a first animation anyway. The only physics sim I did was for Alice's hair. That's not the first time I simulate her hair so there was no particular challenge here, I just now know that I need to start the actual animation loop later so the hair physics have a chance to settle into a natural-looking result.

Lighting

That was the last big thing to get right. When making animation I'm basically forced to use EEVEE, unless I'm ready for a week of render time :'D. There were a few new occurances here for me as well, like forcing myself to use world lighting and light probes (with a certain success I might add), but I didn't give myself enough time for the lighting I don't think, and the result ended up looking a little flat. It's not dramatic and you probably won't think twice about it if you usually enjoy my art, I just think I could have done a better job. This was day 4 of working on that animation at this point however, and I felt spending more time on this would have been overdoing it.

Back to renders

Once I was done with the animation, I came back to the world of non-moving renders. I finished the renders for the new MDS event I mentionned last progress report, and then I worked on a new Larry event I won't go into detail about. Both of those events have also been fully implemented in code, and that Larry event required two new portraits.

Conclusion

I expect things to continue moving forward smoothly in the foreseeable future. Next I'll probably be working on Emily's events, which will probably be rather interesting. I remember having a lot of fun writing those :)

Anyway, that's it for me. The next spoiler post will feature the animation I talked about earlier, so if you're a supporter who isn't on Discord and you haven't seen the result yet, stick around for a little longer!

See you next time, cheers :)