The worldbuilding of Kaspar Frankish

I'm excited to finally share some of the game! I'll have to record some video for the Itch page soon. Currently this is a sandbox where you can play around with the movement and throwing mechanics which are the foundation of the game, with some rudimentary NPCs and a forest environment.

Next build I plan to expand the selection of items you can use, as well as flesh out combat AI and emotes to make the opponents much more expressive and threatening. Audio also needs to be expanded.

Extremely WIP animation to test out character physics. It's not got a whole bunch of life to it and isn't super anatomically accurate yet, but I wanted to share something this week. Very happy with how things are shaping so far.

Quick status update: Not dead and working on This Guy! This is a super-WIP texture that's not finished yet (proper renders to share by next week is the goal), but I'm very happy with how the new Stekh model is going. Still needs the whiskers, fur, and lots of cleanup around the legs, forearms, ears, etc. They are already animation-ready and this time I've been keeping the design modular so I can quickly generate distinct people from this as a base in future projects.

I'm working to design clothes from two historical periods too, lots of stuff to share when it's ready! My current goal is to use them in some slice of life style animations around one of the cities they inhabit, in three different time periods.

First (successful) attempt at using an SLA machine to bring some of my creations 'to life', as it were. Ran out of material while the skull was printing, but overall am extremely impressed with the result!

There will be a bunch more (digital) stekh content upcoming too, though it's still too early to comment on that much as well. Things are looking up in terms of 'amount of personal creative projects needing to release soon', now that things are less demanding at work and I have more energy to put into everything personally important.

A really rough écorché showcase.

To be retopologized as a character base in upcoming animations.

Stekh got a lot of visual redesign this year, the 'heart' of them ( ethology, evolutionary niche, cultures, individuals, etc that've been worked on for years) remain mostly the same.

I feel this design 'fits' them a lot better, that's also much improved over the original as I learned more about anatomy and biomechanics.

Museums are very helpful!

I'm most excited about the development of the hindlimbs. Keeping in line with the niche of a projectile-throwing predator, Stekh now have a novel way to do this via whipcracking!

TLDR: The force of the main body moving can be transferred to the hindlimbs, which conserves energy towards the end as an acceleration of the hand, reaching incredible throwing speeds.

Small world building update: This is roughly how Stekh are shaped now! I've had a few gripes about my previous designs as I come to learn a lot more about bio-mechanics and anatomical structures in general. They still have their same ethology, environmental role, and general body-plan; but this form really accentuates the throwing-niche specialization and allows them to move a lot more efficiently in their environment.

It looks like a tail from this angle, but those are actually the two hind-limbs. In this case they are a lot more articulated and fish-like, never having evolved to carry weight and more adapted for maintaining stability. Early ancestors also used their tails as a defensive tool similar to monitor lizards, though in Stekh this whiplike motion was adapted for killer underhand-throws.

Behold the Jet Fighters! They fly! They strafe! They dodge! They fill the role of 'elite' enemy, bringing super-aggressive damage potential in a small/nimble profile. Luckily they are rather fragile so any good AOE weapon can prevent them from being an overwhelming challenge.

Ignore the weird bullets and disappearing fighter, they still need death animations as of posting.

Been working on a lot of silent refactoring this month. We how have a train editor that lets you pick your cars, and the projectile system was reworked multiple times into something very high quality.

Some new content was added in the form of two new enemies. The composite enemy shown has multiple different 'modules' it can spawn with. Current loadouts for this enemy include nuclear bombs which KO your entire train if they land, but can do the same to enemies if shot down early, shield generators that absorb X hits regardless of damage before burning out, drone spawners, and a missile launcher to keep you on your toes.

(PS Pay the rapid-fire cannon no mind. I'm still working on rebuilding the old guns to use the new weapon system and just needed a test weapon to show how you can juggle nukes)

Not dead!

I spent most of the month working on something called gradient descent optimization. It took way too much effort, but I'm extremely proud of how it turned out and now I can use this tool a lot easier in the future, which is cool!

What does it do?

This test enemy has three thrusters placed sorta randomly, yet it knows how to fly! This is pretty impossible to figure out a clean math equation to do, especially with arbitrary positions and thrusters.

But even when a thruster is destroyed, our gradient descent code immediately knows how to re-configure the thrusters into something that lets it stay airborne. We can place any amount of thrusters in any configuration and our ship knows exactly what to do.

I can try to explain how this problem was solved in more detail if it's of anybody's interest, but essentially we boiled each thruster down to float variables in an array, and each frame the game does multiple iterations of wiggling the variables and comparing if these new variables would make the ship move closer to a desired direction/rotation (this is called minimizing the error).

Also shown here is a WIP shield unique to this enemy, which will try to get in the way of the last cannon to shoot at them.

Progress update: Train commands!

We worked on adding trains to our train game this week! Currently they aren't animated properly or with correct sound effects or anything and they'll get more polished eventually.

New command system:

Taproute still keeps the 'rts-lite' theme of giving orders to most of your turrets, with only one type of turret being under manual control. We will still probably have hotkeys, but we also added this nifty radial menu to control your lads!

The menu slows time and allows you to tell a specific turret to fire on something, it'll aim when selected and fire when you let go of right click. The aimer will also follow your cursor if you move far enough away as to tell the game you wanna reposition the aimer.

Behind the scenes: Train generator system:

You can customize your own train this time! The game requires your train to be under a set length, but you can choose to add basically any cars to the train in any order as long as it fits! There's a nifty bit of game balance where larger train cars are generally more powerful, but the space they take up means you have fewer cars overall to work with!

New weapons:

We added the original cannon to the game! I explained how it bounces off of armour before, but can instakill many unarmoured opponents.

We also added the versatile holman projector as a primary weapon! It's 'pressure' mechanic allows it to act closer to a light cannon which evolves into a lighter but faster machine-gun as you keep firing. Do you space out your shots to take advantage of the accuracy and explosiveness of high pressure shots, or do you just want to spray a torrent of metal chunks at your enemies? Now you can do both!

More bullet testing, this time a smart-bouncing type.

BEHOLD!

Very WIP but we can now blow up enemies1!

Each enemy's individual parts can be destroyed and cause all kinds of chaos. In this case you can destroy movement-enabling thrusters, the weapon bay (which also destroys the protective armour segments which attach to it, nice), or cause explosions by hitting a fuel tank.

...Not that you need a fuel tank to cause explosions with this one. The cannon in Taproute is much meatier than Scalepiercer, capable of disintegrating most weaker enemies. It's also capable of bouncing off of armour! Part of me wants to add friendly fire for if you deflect the projectile into your own train but some of us on the development team think that would be too evil.

I think it'd be fun.

1: Though we didn't have the actual explosion effects in the game at the recording of this video

Minor dev log stuff:

Enemies are now made of hitbox-volume nodes which track health, deletion, and bullet collision. We also have a modular destruction-spawner node for spawning things on death.

Combined these allow for a huge amount of interesting behaviours, like spawning explosions, debris or entire other enemies on death! Health volumes have attributes (health, shape, material), bullets can interact with that last attribute to define behaviours (I.E: The cannon explodes on Standard but deflects against Hardened materials).