August Devlog - Rockin' Graphics

Hello and welcome to another game development ramble!

This month has been focused more on developing some of the more complicated rendering effects that I intend to use in both Rockin' Resort and Catgirl Care. This has been a lot of learning for me regarding Godot's shader system and 3D modeling, but I'll hopefully be able to use the techniques and assets here in future games.

Anyhow, let's get into it!

Water & Sky Shaders

Rockin' Resort takes place by the ocean, so I need a solution for large bodies of water as well as a way to render a bright, sunny sky. There are a lot of ways to create these effects in Godot - in fact, I initially explored shaders that others had created but I wasn't happy with the results.

In the end, I spent a week or so learning Godot's shader language while working on the water shader show above. I wanted to make sure I had a lot of control over the shader, so the final shader has several parameters (colors, the amount of light absorbed, etc). It took several attempts to get a result I'm happy with, but I think this will work fairly well for my water needs.

With some experience with the shader language, the sky shader was a much smoother process. While the water shader had me watching countless tutorials, I only followed a few for the sky shader. My approach to the sky shader is a very simplified approximation to the one used in the game Firewatch. I didn't use as much atmospheric math, but my 2D art doesn't do that either.

Interestingly, I managed to create the clouds without any sort of tutorial. I sorta guessed on the math and it just worked!

Base Character Mesh

In the last devlog, I showed off initial progress on the base character mesh for Rockin' Resort. There's a decent chance this mesh will also be used for Catgirl Care, so I've been working hard on improving it. It's not done yet, but I expect to be making the character models for the main Rockin' Resort girls soon.

My primary concerns for this base mesh have been resolving outstanding issues from Date a Mink 3D's character model, cleaner shading, and improved expressions. Date a Mink 3D had an issue where, in order to get Eris's eyebrows rendering over her hair, I had to render her eyebrows on top of everything. Fortunately, while working on my water shader, I found a solution for that, which should allow future games to avoid this issue altogether.

Regarding cleaner shading, I have some progress on that but I've hit a roadblock. Anime-style eyes in 3D are usually concave instead of convex and this creates unusual shadows in Godot. For Date a Mink 3D, I simply disabled shadows on Eris's eyes. This meant the "sleeping" shots in the final game require the lights to stay on, which was a little odd. I want to do night scenes in the future, so I need a new approach.

A common method for creating smooth anime-style shading is to modify the normals of the mesh via a proxy. This actually works quite well and even imports properly into Godot! Unfortunately, adding in expressions causes the normals to warp, breaking the effect completely outside of Blender.

An example of the expressions breaking shading when exported to Godot.

I'm still looking into solutions for this problem to see if I can retain the smooth lighting, but I've also improved the concave eye mesh that caused the issue in the first place so it may not be needed. Either way, it's not something that should block development.

I mentioned briefly that I've been improving expressions. You can see a bit of that above - the left and right eyes and eyebrows are now animated separately instead of being joined blend shapes. This, along with a few new shapes, should allow for a larger variety of expressions in the future.

What's Next?

While I'm currently still working on the visual style I intend to use in both Rockin' Resort and Catgirl Care, I've also been writing out some ideas for a potential Rockin' Resort teaser to showcase the new features and visuals (once they're done). I'll talk more about my plans for that once the visuals are closer to being done.

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Anyhow, thanks for supporting my work, everyone! This month was a new peak for support earnings and, while I try to avoid focusing on finances (if I really need more money, I can get a part time gig), I wanted to extend an extra thanks for that. It's through your support that I've been able to spend so much time developing the skills for gamedev while continuing to improve my art.

Thanks for reading!