Billie Bust Up-date: New Face System! 💌

We are in the process of animating all of the characters (excluding cutscenes and boss fights) so that required a new tracking system. Yes we're talking about paperwork! Lots of paperwork. We use a lot of google sheets. I'd like to release the full GDD when the game is out if possible

Our game has lip-syncing, so it was important that the characters had full lip sync options for smiling, neutral and sad faces. Along with multiple eye expressions

Each face sheet also needed to follow a similar template, so that we didn't need unique set ups for each character.  Each texture is named appropriately to communicate to our animator where each image needs to go inside the sprite sheet

And the final result is something like this

We still have a few spare slots for custom mouth shapes if we so need!

And a quick test of the new eyes and mouths on Billie in Maya!

Now for the fun part! lets see them in action

A little nod to Psychonauts, Billie will attempt to balance on her shield. Billie may not be good to begin with, but the more they use this idle the better they will get until they perfect it! Ta-da!

Billie can learn this idle by watching Aristotle perform it

Run on the spot! Inspired by Jak and Daxter, Billie will jog on the spot a little bit after running before returning to a normal id

Here are some storyboards for Billies dialogue

Can you hug the axolotl? yes, yes you can 

Stealthy!

Percy

We have other characters apart from Billie, lets take a look at our next animation targets, Percy!

Percy's magic decoy is Scrimshaw. Distract Percy and eat his sandwich by creating an illusion of Percy's number 1 crush.

Speaking of Scrimshaw...

Not only does he have his lovely new song for his shop, we also have more concepts for the shop itself!

A smugglers cave fit for a prince

The smugglers cave has some Viking elements to reflect Scrimshaw 

Moon!

Moon is a grumpy fruit vendor, chances are he won't make fast friends with you.

Other Animations

The Guard Dogs are animated! Let's check them out

Find all the animations in this video!

Block Outs!

Here we have two lovely block outs by Sam. Barnaby's exterior tower and the lost city of magic

Check out the full video for Barnaby's tower 

Check out the full video for The Lost City of Magic 

3D Assets

Ovie and myself are working hard on those 3D assets! Here's one of the tombstones for Barnaby's level I've been working on

A spooky Barnaby tree!

Redline of my sculpt by Jovi!

Some concepts and assets for the cat pirate level! This is from treasure trove trek.

Concept vs final asset!

Merchandise

More pin prototypes in production, this time its the backer pin for Fantoccio. Once again, should take about 14 work days to get a physical prototype

Aristotle's plushie prototype is here! We recently unboxed him on video 

Shown below is a concept for a holographic sticker for Aristotle! I've ordered a few different types of this sticker to experiment with. I can't wait to show you the results in the next update!

Billie keychain! Ash made this by accident, it was meant to be a pin, it transformed into a keychain at some point

Goodbye!

That's it for this update. have some misc stuff!

-Katie<3