Dev Log — June 2023

Hi everyone!

May has been a busy month and I've been doing a ton of planning and designs in preparation for the dynamic avatars, which I will be sharing with you today.

Animated Avatars — Live2D

Many of you are probably already familiar with Live2D from VTubers, which I also use for my own streams and the animated avatar on the game's front page.

While looking into the requirements for dynamic avatars, I've learned that Live2D Cubism comes with everything we need for developing dynamic avatars, including a comprehensive editor, a good data structure, and out-of-the-box rendering support for HTML5.

Live2D allows us to create a mesh (think a 3D model, but with 2D parts that make up the entire figure instead of 3D geometry) that can be manipulated to create animations and we can toggle meshes and change textures to alter the look of the character at a whim. We will also be able to record animations and poses so avatars can react to a number of things happening to them!

The biggest challenge then becomes to make a scalable design that allows us to support a myriad of traits and clothes with the fewest possible assets needed, and create a system that builds on top of Live2D to change the avatar to reflect your character.

You can read more about Live2D here 

Physiques

The most fundamental part of a player avatar, which also poses the largest scalability issues is physiques. Is your character masculine, feminine, androgynous, muscular, and/or curvaceous? —are all concepts that have a significant effect on how your character appears, and all other things, in particular clothes, will have to build upon this shape.

The game already has a number of physiques that we would want to continue to support, and I also have a number of wishes for new things I want it to do: Right now, there's a trait for feminine, but no trait for masculine; I want a muscular appearance that is also feminine; I want an androgynous appearance; I want slender to have a second step, similar to voluptuous and muscular, which have curvaceous and lean, respectively.

These posed an incredible challenge, however, and for comparison, here are some of the designs we started out with:

• Have a 3D grid with an axis for fat to slender, muscular to voluptuous, and feminine to masculine, for a total of 3 gender representations times the number of steps from fat to slender (very fat, fat, neutral, slim, slender) over the number of steps from muscular to voluptuous (muscular, lean, neutral, curvaceous, voluptuous), for a whopping 3x5x5 or 75 unique sprites!
• If you consider lean+slender, lean+slim, muscular+slender, and muscular+slim the same physique, you can literally cut corners of the chart and get the number down to 39, which is still an insane number of unique sprites before we even start to consider traits!
• If we throw away the idea of a 2D grid and instead use a triangle of the physiques already in the game, similar to the final chart, we can reduce the number to 30.

At this time, we still thought of the center as the default appearance, similar to how it currently works in the game, with a different default appearance for each gender representation. But what does a voluptuous masculine character even mean, when being voluptuous is inherent to the feminine shape? Once we realized this, we attempted to do away with the idea of an axis for gender representation and instead map default gender representations around the triangle, which turned out wasn't only possible, it was ideal!

By placing androgynous at the center, and having masculine characters start out with a physique between muscular and slender, and feminine characters start out with a physique between slender and voluptuous, we were able to cut the number of unique sprites to a third, for a manageable 10! —All while supporting every physique trait in the game already and my wishes from earlier, with curvaceous lean being a muscular appearance that is also feminine!

The power of planning and design is cutting your workload, and the workload for every future addition to a system, down to almost a tenth of what it could have been! With just 10 sprites, having a third axis for things like ethnicities, height differences, and more unique appearances such as being short-stacked may even be possible to add down the road.

Player Market

Backers who follow along in the backer channel on Discord may already know that I've made progress on adding account-wide storage, player trading, and vendors to the game, and another thing I will be adding with the next update is a player market.

The player market will allow players to list items stored in their stash for purchase by other players. All you will need to do is select a price for your item in crowns, the new centralized currency in the game with the next update, and it will be listed on the market. You can then open up the market by clicking on a listed item, which will be opened in a separate tab similar to profiles, or you can access it directly from the front page.

The market will allow you to search for items by name, appearance, magical properties, and anything else that makes an item unique, so you can find the exact item you desire, and any item that stacks, such as talismans, can be bought in bulk from many players at the same time.

You can search for and buy items while you go about playing the game, and you don't even have to enter the game to do so. When you buy an item from the market, it will withdraw the crown amount from your stash, and when you sell something, it will deposit the crown amount in your stash, making it easy and convenient to use the market.

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I was hoping to get the player market and the many other new features out this week, but other obligations continued to slow me down and some of the features also generally took longer than expected, but I will attempt to have the update out sometime next week!

Thank you all for the support and welcome to the many new backers who have joined us since the previous major update! It's thanks to you all that I am able to put this much thought and time into the game!

Cheers,

Tinon