Status Update, May 2024

Overview

• Shinmera: completed "Getting Through to You"

• Shinmera: started work on a release method for Trial games via CI

• Shinmera: more revisions to trial-blender-addons

• Shinmera: fixes and optimisations in Trial

• Shinmera: develop some shader post effects

• Shinmera: allow shape feathering in Alloy

• Shinmera: release PromptFont v1.4

• Domolutz: more sick animations

Some Details

One week was taken up by SBCL'25 and ELS'24 this year, which was a lot of fun, though ELS also tired me out a bunch, what with having to stress about the live stream again. If you wanted to talk to me but missed me there, my apologies! I'm really bad at approaching folks.

Anyway, this month I did a bunch of stuff to further improve dynamic reloading. It now works well to the point where the entire level and player and so on can be reloaded when their respective files are updated, and you can quickly switch scenes as well, all without needing to restart or losing any other game state.

Still haven't heard from the Blender glTF folks, so we're still manually punching in timings for the animations, which is becoming a real pain for testing stuff. I also realised that our current test setup just plain sucks to get any feedback at all on how the combat feels, so I have to revise that and figure out some other combat and collision related things I'd been ignoring until now.

But, Dominic has been busy hammering out more animations, and honestly I'm still astounded every time I see any new work from him. I know we still have a long road ahead of us to revise and tweak and tune, which is why getting the export sorted out is so crucial, but just getting these juicy animations at all is already a lot of fun.

I also added some of my own juice with some shader effects, and putting that together with his animations, we now have a preview of the death sequence:

Aside from that I did a bunch of things here and there like improving PromptFont, and starting on a way to build and release Trial games from CI, but honestly I've just been kinda spinning my wheels. I still have trouble getting my motivation together to really work on what's important. It's been getting better in recent days, but I still feel like there's a huge wall in front of any task, even if I technically know how to implement it.

So. For next month, what I really want to focus on is two things: first, I want to implement a better arena and enemy behaviour so we can start testing combat properly. This'll involve fixing some collision issues, which I'm really not looking forward to. Second, I want to get a dialogue and interaction system going so that I can place some stuff into the world, and have some flavour dialogue or cutscene trigger. I have ideas on how to do that, but given that we have to do all the editing in Blender, and all the actual game data is in Lisp, I'll have to figure out how to get some of that stuff over to the other side and I'm undecided on how exactly to go about it.

— Love, Shinmera ❤️