leafygreen

 Not dead yet, still working on new animations and some 3d models after a break week. Godot 3.5 broke some navigation code and shaders so I spent some time fixing that too. Not to much to show unfortunately, hopefully I'll have something more polished soon.

I've been reworking a whole bunch of the animations, and this is going to be an ongoing thing. Many of the animations before either transitioned poorly or didn't transition at all to idle state. The reworked animations now transition properly. Particle effects for both characters is up next. There's also some more minor stuff that just makes things feel a little more polished. Flinches all have different stun times now (and different hitstop amounts), character does an automatic recovery after landing on the ground in flinch state. Fixed up the collision boxes so they can be customized again (after going to convex shapes). Started some work on an appropriate camera. Sera makes this tough because she has a habit of zipping around, and a lock on camera that just blindly follows her around is a terrible option. I tried a midpoint camera but her dashes still cause a problem. A fixed camera that follows the player is an option but it needs some serious tweaking. The arena itself...

I finally got the chance to really dig into Godot/Blender shaders, and redid the sword slash and water. The water's still missing depth fade, reflection and some scattered foam, but I think its a good start. Initially in Blender I used a moving voronoi texture, but I realized that baking a series of spritesheets for water was insane and not a good idea. So I figured out a solution that gives an approximate version of what I want using godot visual shader and textures. My system is fairly old and the gpu is a lower end oem one, but I didn't notice any frame drops that weren't already there, so I don't think it impacts performance too much. I still have to bake lightmaps for everything so the real time lighting is probably causing most frame drops. For the sword slash that was a valid choice (because its a relatively small texture and does not loop) and thats what I did, made the shader in Blender, then baked out a series of spritesheets for it, so there's no actual c...

 Fixed screenshake, fixed hitstop so it only affects the player and enemy nodes, added support for a landing during flinch in air animation. Refactored several poorly written classes, and fixed a bunch of other bugs. I took out the custom cancel because it was totally broken and made things too easy. I'm thinking about bring it back in a more balanced way, maybe allowing it to cancel/reset combos after the attack's required time is up.  Enemy now causes hitstun (longer than the players) and screenshake when hitting the player. Sera has three different attacks now and is on her way to being a thorn in the player's side, but I still need to add more, especially some anti air ones. Thanks to the people on the yurijam discord, I chose to give Sera more scars rather than just one. Also, additional messy sketches with some more facial expressions. Character info: Name: Seraphina - Nobody actually calls her this, Sera for short. She takes her wife's last name, which I haven...

 Still making slow but steady progress on the boss, things slowed halfway through due to a navigation bug but that's fixed now. Current work is on a projectile system, which is working in its most basic form. One new thing I've found is collision detection for areas do not work well if you're using anything other than a ConvexPolygonShape for some reason. The area detection will be extremely slow with any other type of collision shape, including stuff like cylinder shape. I'll have to rework my attack system to work with a convex polygon shape since its still kinda dicey right now. With any other shape it takes about a full second before it detects any bodies/areas inside it. I think this is a bug, based on some current open issues in Godot. I'm also thinking of ideas for twists on the combat system. I'm thinking some of the current attacks might change later on depending on the twist I want to add. It's likely that the combat system won't be fully finis...

 I'm working on the prototype arena, which works as I hoped, and I'm working on the boss enemy. Not too much to say since I'm just in the weeds of tweaking everything. Lots of navigation tweaks and attack system tweaks on her. The basics of how she's moving is in, although there needs to be tweaks on the timing (not aggressive enough). Lots of animations to do as well. I'm working on tweaking vfx too, since a lot of it was lazily thrown together and a lot is also missing. It'll probably go through a lot of iterations. It took me a while before I was happy with 3d modeling and texturing so I figure it'll be the same for everything else I'm learning.

The prototype model for the boss character is mostly done, her name is Seraphina (on left). Rhys, the protagonist, is on the right. I had some trouble matching the 3d model to the 2d art style, since I don't really copy the 2d art to make a model, it seems to mess it up more than it helps me. Its also not a priority right now. Some notes on the rigging. I wanted to reuse armatures, I also reused Rhys' meshes so I duplicated the blend file. This was one of the most annoying things I have ever run into. The animations got duplicated, the meshes didn't match the armature. There were somehow animations on the meshes as well and this created problems. Its best to delete every single animation and armature and start from a fresh mesh when modeling then append the armature object itself once the mesh is complete. Then before adding the mesh to the armature, modify the pose so it fits the character and apply as rest pose. Then the last step is to attach mesh to armature.  Later on,...