August Update / Devlog

To be completely honest, these past two months have been extremely rough going for me. I can't get into all that happened during July - a lot of interpersonal drama. Since then, though, the payment processors against NSFW games on itch and Steam has been a big scare, causing me to stress about whether or not what I make will even continue being viable.

On top of that, around the same time itch de-listed thousands of games, (all of mine included) we were informed by our landlord that we have a month to move out. We've had a month to month lease agreement, but they told us that a "situation has arose in the family" (If I had to guess, the "situation" is that their family told them they should re-list for higher rent) So, I've been spending a lot of time looking for a new place to live, as well as packing and cleaning, in-between working on the game and doing commissions.

Despite all that though, I've finally pushed through finishing the Mimic fight in Skantish. A Mimic as a boss battle is a somewhat abstract concept that took a lot of brainstorming, not to mention how difficult animating it was compared to the previous humanoid monsters in the game... So, let me walk you through my process for that.

The idea of having a mimic as the area boss came from two things. One, I had to find a way of giving the Xanadu Ring to the player while keeping it feeling natural. Two, the Sunken Chasm is made up of the ruins of an ancient magical Vexoi capitol. So, it felt right to have a more magical type of monster, something that's somewhat otherworldly and wouldn't fit in anywhere else in the game. Mimics, of course, are classic D&D stuff, which felt right alongside the general fantasy vibe of the area.

The problem of course was figuring out how exactly you'd fight a Mimic... Or rather, how it would defend itself and fight against Naomi. It's just a box with teeth, after all. At first, I was going to go a somewhat boring route by having it be more of a tentacle boss fight. This would see it attacking mainly with huge tentacles, and almost solely using those. Wouldn't have made any use of the fact that you're fighting a Mimic...

So I sat and thought about it and that D&D influence, before realizing something. It's a mimic, and mimics, of course, eat adventurers. That means it's probably full of old gear, weapons, items, etc... I decided on having this be the main gimmick of the fight, having the Mimic spit out weapons, potions, and even zombie kobolds. (Sort of implying its previous victims...) The weapons, of course, make use of the previous tentacle idea by having magic mimic tentacles rise from the water to pick up the weapons and use them against Naomi.

That was great and all - having a solid idea for what you want to do before doing it is... Uhm, well it's ideal. (I can't say I always do that) Then the problem became how exactly I would implement such a fight. Tentacles in particular have always kind of been my bane when it comes to implementing them in games. I LOVE them in NSFW, but in terms of making them animate for a game, that's always been hard.

Similar to the Sentinel (which I talked about here) I decided to use Spine again for the Mimic's animations. While this did save a lot of time, and lead to a very fluid looking mob, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a pain in the ass to set up. For one, I only have the 'essentials' package for Spine, which doesn't allow for mesh warping sprites. This means that the tentacle, as well as anything else long and twisty (fabric, ropes, etc.) would have to be segmented. Getting these segments to line up properly took a lot of planning, and while it still doesn't look great during certain animations, I'm overall happy with how it ended up looking. (Especially in the big tentacle's idle animations, and the tongue also looks alright in-game.)

I also ran into a lot of problems animating the chest itself, having to constantly restart and tweak the exact rig set-up for it to animate properly and not fuck everything up. (Strange rotation issues, paired with scaling issues) I do like how "3D" the Mimic ended up looking though, with the mouth and chest top/bottom scaling in a semi-"realistic" way rather than being completely flat. Also, this fight makes use of swapping out 'attachments' in the form of which weapon the tentacle has equipped. (Either a sword or an axe) Both even have separate hitboxes! I might expand a little upon this fight by adding additional weapon sprites and potions, but for now I feel it's more or less solid. (It could probably use some timing and damage number tweaks, though.)

Between all the work I've been doing with the game, art, as well as general life stuff, I haven't had much time to practice music unfortunately. At this point, I think I'm just going to continue scrounging together royalty free music to use throughout the game... Once Skantish is finished and released, then I'll start working on my own OST to release as a future update, I think. That way, I don't have to portion out time that could be used for development on learning to make music, delaying the overall game. In MB6 I added another song by chongusbongus, who's music is used as the Direhook Keep's theme.

Also, I'm kind of considering making some merch in the form of stickers... Will probably just sell the designs on Redbubble or something similar, and custom-print a batch for conventions and what have you. These stickers would probably just be little chibi drawings of Jonas, Ren, Ashe, Naomi... Stuff like that. I got the idea for it stuck in my head when I went to AWU at the beginning of the month, so I kind of want to have a couple stickers on hand for next year's con. I just wonder if people would be interested in that.

Anyway, sorry I didn't get as much done this month as I would've liked. Thankfully, this has probably been my biggest hurdle with designing the game in the past couple months, so the rest of what needs to be done for the Sunken Chasm should be smooth sailing leading up to doing the sex animations - at which point the area will be finished. All that's left is the area's shop, a few NPCs, and some story cutscenes. (As well as touching up the game's intro dialogue with Erik a little bit.)

Thank you for all of your support!