#breezeintheclouds

Very rough animation warm-up... or should I say cool-down? Featuring Frost from Breeze in the Clouds. Enjoy!

Burnard (his coworkers call him Burney), is the Supervisor of Heat Waves.

(Burney was originally designed by me, but once @eclipticafusion joined the team, I had no choice but to have him redo the design!)

This hog comes off as fairly imposing to those who don’t know him, but he’s actually a bit of an odd ball. He’s very wise, and very knowledgeable of the workings of Tropolis.

Burney is very understanding and is surprisingly cheerful most of time, though, there are moments when it can be really hard to tell when he’s getting angry or if he's just excited about something; he's got a bad habit of getting louder and louder mid-conversation. This attributes to the gossip of him being a rather dangerous fellow when he’s "heated up".

Burney is capable of building complex engines and machines, such as how he built his domain in the form of a train.

He’s managed to automate a lot of the functions in his domain, with his workers mostly performing upkeep. This gives him a lot of free time to lounge about.

(Sprite Concepts by Piti Yindee)

He's is an avid book reader, his favorite genres being history, philosophy, psychology, and self-help books. He’s recently moved on to soap operas and dramas (leading to him sometimes crying to himself… his tears evaporating shortly after).

He also spends a LOT of time sunbathing.

While he prefers to avoid conflict, he'll typically takes a defensive stance, able to redirect or absorb most attacks. Don't let him cross over into a move offensive stance, as it could spell trouble for everyone.

(Guest art by @thebluebear27!)

Pile and Coal

Hey! Just a quick heads-up for those that didn't already see on Discord:

I'm in the process of moving, and will start moving things into my new place starting Monday! If you're lucky, I might be able to sneak in a little post at the end of next week.  It's basically in the same city, so nothing too crazy!

I did manage to sneak in a little dev this week. I fully integrated Kai's Fleece Dialogue tool that I mentioned in the last dev post! I did some slight mods to it to update the UI, but other than that, I'm now getting rid of a lot of junk I was using before!

I'm also able to include GameEvents into the system in a much cleaner way AND use them inside of Unity's Timeline system, basically allowing me to animate cutscenes and have them pause when dialogue pops up.

Piti Yindee also worked on updating Pile's model sheet for his sprites:

Pile's design has pretty much evolved from a combination of me, Piti, Haps, and Clipey's efforts, so there's a little bit of everyone's design in him now!

Animation Practice

Some of you probably saw an older version of this, but felt a bit anxious art-wise because I haven't been able to really sit down to animate/draw over the last few weeks, so thought I'd update this animation of Drop some:

Enamel Pin Update

I've packaged and/or sent out pretty much all the pin orders (I think I might have 1 or 2 international pins left to ship) as of today. Quite the learning experience shipping all of those pins out!

That's pretty much it for this update!

Oh, check out this art piece of Frost by BobbyLontra! Turned out really cool ~ https://twitter.com/BobbyLontra/status/1134136935038029825

Mini Devlog #7

This was a bit of an unplanned code clean-up week! As I was setting up/connecting remaining gameplay features to buttons, I found that some related (and unrelated) code made things little tricky, so I decided to refactor some systems.

I also managed to get some neat things implemented in the process.

Accomplishments this week:

Essentially, refactoring involves rewriting code without changing is underlying functionality, and most of the refactoring I did involve renaming some classes and functions, as well as moving some functionality into places that made more sense (and also giving those functions some better names).

One class that I refactored and renamed was an “ActorPhysics” class. This was a class I wrote to handle some shared physics behaviors and collision checking to be used in the various states that characters have. I also cleaned up several others. Here are some of the standard scripts/classes that most characters will have:

I managed to implement some new collision checks and debugging gizmos that make it easier for me to tell when a character is colliding with something and where. For this, I simply have the ActorPhysics class generate different points around the actor’s collider.

I’ve made it easier to change/create overhead popup text above characters.

I added the ability for Breeze to be able to grab enemies (this was a bit irritating to write, but made me rethink some functions in other states)

Made it easier to access the animator/sprite of a character. As often as these two are updated, etc, I wanted to make sure that I could easily access the two in code without having to jump through hoops.

Worked in ensuring that characters abide by the game's grid, to make it easier to design levels around them, and being able to work with more reliable values for physics forces.

Continuing to streamline animations and animation transitions. This is being done by planning out the standard set of animations most (or all) characters will use in the future, this way, as we implement/add new characters, adding in their animations is a simple matter of dropping them into one of the various animation states in the graph below (note, some of these states might be removed/renamed):

Added in a tool for debugging. So far, I mostly have it displaying some "profiler" information, but hopefully soon, I can add in some debug console stuff too!

Next Focus:

Well, I didn’t really get to work on tasks that I outlined the last update, so I’ll shoot for them again this week:

Ability to remap controls.

Start getting things ready for some testable builds again (maybe even some for patrons 😊 )

Sounds and Particles/VFX. Now that a lot of combat and movement features are much more developed, I'm really eager to add on some bells and whistles (and verify the pipeline for getting these things imported and working for different scenarios)

AI: Looking to get some enemies doing some cool things again. I've actually got a more solid AI framework going (compared to the mess I had a year ago), but we need to actually start looking at individual behaviors for different enemies more thoroughly.

Updating the Patreon page and Website/Blog design. I haven't exactly touched either in a while, but want to make things a little more attractive here and there.

Sodo

We've Launched a Discord Server: https://discord.gg/KByy7wg 

We're on Patreon now: https://www.patreon.com/srbilyon

I’ve also set up a Donation Link for not Patreon users: https://bit.ly/2MfmgGf