(BEAR) Anduo Report - March 31st, 2021

Hey y'all, Bear here for a change!

First of all, we're very close to getting the monthly patch out, but Vils has been struck by a power outage for several hours now. The side content is good to go, but the main story content is still missing it's final touches. We're sorry for the delay :c Once Vils has her power back (it's still out as of me writing this), we'll be right back on track with the release!

However. Since I'm throwing the party this time, I'll at least show you with all the cool things we're working on!

First of all, we've got in contact with a new artist that is looking to join the team for CG and Character art creation! This will bring the total of artists working on the CG part of the bits to 3 now, which will increase our art output even more! 

Here's an outfit that this new artist worked on which will make it into the upcoming patch! As a bear, I approve. c:

The next one is also already in the works!

We're choosing colors right now, but we might just settle on the player controlled recoloring.

There's a lot that goes into hiring a new artist, especially in them getting used to the art style, but we're happy with the progress that has been done on this front!

We're also working on an animation for the bar content and here's a little example of the work that goes into it:

1 - Initial draw. The dick didn't look quite right to us, so we decided to iterate on it!
2 - Doxy's tutorials are always amazingly helpful, so we decided to look at it and immediately some thing stood out
3 - The second iteration was already better! The foreskin was a nice addition, but the center of the shape still didn't feel quite right
4 - Overlaying the example dick front he tutorial showed that the green line was very different, so that was the next target
5 - The third iteration nailed it in our opinion!

Here's a wip picture of the whole cg (Pre Dick iteration, I don't have a newer one at hand):

As you can see, sometimes little details like the shape of a dick can take some iteration to get right. We're trying our best to make sure the final art that gets into the game is the best it can be!

For Environment art, we're also making leaps and bounds! We're suuuuuper excited to finally release because we are really proud of the visual overhaul Carceburg has received in link with the main story progression.
Here's a little teaser:

In the redesign, we wanted to make the path in the town feel "dirty" and went with a bunch of sprites that are overlaid on top of the path. However, because the background sprites in carceburg now use a shader that makes them 60% grayscale, we had an issue:

Having 2 grayscale shaders on top of each other made the 2nd one see through. This issue ended up requiring 2 fixes. For one, the shader set the alpha value to 0, which weirdly worked fine on a single layer of grayscale, but broke when 2 were overlapping.

This was easy to fix by simply ignoring the alpha value and using
c.rgb = lerp(c.rgb, dot(c.rgb, half4(0.3, 0.59, 0.11)), _EffectAmount);
instead.

The second issue was that our environment Artist PmPerfect had - with the best intentions - drawn the sprites in the same color as the grass that had the grayscale effect already applied. This meant that the effect was essentially applied twice. Once in the base color of the png and once by the game. Once we figured this out, it was a very simple fix of the png having the correct base color and the roads were finally looking great!

There were many more technical issues with the implementation of new carceburg, which is why it took 3 months to pull of, but we're finally done and super happy with the results! Seriously can't wait for y'all to see it, haha!

We're also working on the "bad" end of the Bar nighttime bartending route and I've had the idea of completely changing the visuals of the bar for it! Here's the almost-final photoshop render of the new Bar:

This is not in engine yet (Desva is working hard on putting it from asset sheet to actually being in engine), but I'm super excited to fill the new environment with life!

Next to that, pmperfect is also working on a fancy ui for the phone, *finally* replacing the programmer art that has been there for way way too long. Here's some refs of that:

We had the idea of changing the phone depending on what path in the game your following! Can you guess which is which? c:<

It will go hand in hand with a complete Jenna redesign, even including a new pose! 

Rated is doing an outstanding job (and having a ton of fun) iterating on the "bad" end Jenna! We've increased her breasts and hips, given her an optional dick, as well as piercings! I also had the idea of having the condom belt. The cool thing about that is, that each condom is a separate layer, meaning I can add them one-by-one during gameplay!

I know we've been starting 3 "bad" end paths (Peitho, Streetwhore, Bar) so far and not a single one is completed, but this is the last one we're starting for now! It's just so much fun to work on them, haha.

At the same time, Rated is working on a new Streetwhore animation! This will play after the new Liedryn content that is coming with 0.33! Hopefully it'll even make it into 0.34! (no promises thooooo :c)

I've recently been trying to speed up my animation process. While I'm super happy with the quality of the Liedryn animation that will be in 0.33, implementing it took over 2 weeks, which is literally more than half of the time I have each month to produce content. So I set myself the goal of doing a full animation - start to finish with sound and everything - in ONE DAY (ARGH)

And it kinda worked out! (?) Make up your own mind! Let me know what y'all think!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/710469633274150942/826123550196105316/2021-03-29_17-57-22.mp4

Also, here's a teaser of the Liedryn animation! https://puu.sh/HslAO/3969df45a7.mp4

I'm skipping over a bunch of stuff we did this week including Guard Vision Cone performance optimizations, Https certificate stuff for our website, working with a new sound designer, drawcall (batches) optimization for Carceburg and much much more I'm probably forgetting, lol. But this post is already massive!

Please just know that your support means the world to us. You are all amazing and we thank you so so much for letting us develop the game we want to develop for you all to enjoy! We're going to get the 0.33 release out as fast as humanly possible, promise!

<3 Bear