Nika2 Revisions, Credits Sequence, QoL Improvements/Additions.

Heyo everyone! This week was pretty great for progress. I got pretty locked in for both behind the scenes, and stuff I'll share. This week I basically started knocking off the "medium priority" list, which includes some very welcome additions. Let's start from the header image!

This will be the game's credits sequence. There will likely be no real reward for doing well or not. It's mostly just a fun, interactive way to engage in Nova's Impreg, and have an interactive credits sequence. This sequence will likely be skippable too by pausing and exiting.

The next bigger thing was reworking Nika's 2nd Hscene. We decided to completely remodel Aether, and change the setting of the Hscene. We also added new eyes for Nika.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Next is going down the list. There were quite a few things checked off this time.

1: To start was a bit of a balance issue. The way "Thrust" worked was that it would always regenerate, no matter what (unless paused). This meant that abilities that "drained" thrust would combat that. The issue with this is that when you combined drain reduction, and regen increase (ie Lana Passive + Generator), you get 2 variables that can overlap eachother... this effectively meant that something like using Tanya's barrier with the right combo could technically make you regen faster than spending..... eternal invulnerability. I made a fundamental change to Thrust so that regen completely ceases when it is being used, and balanced all draining values around that. This should mean that the 2 abilities should still have the impact as intended, but will not scale to inverted levels.

2: I increased the size of Health Pickups. Not just in model size, but also in hitbox size. The reality is, there is no reason why someone should "miss" a health pick up unless they actively choose so (Like in Catiya1 if you go right). This should help with that.

3: I went through all of Nova's animated art/atlases, and removed any art that had prominent lips. This is purely for consistency sake. Most of her Hscenes and main art do not have reddish lips/lipstick.

4: Next was implementing a "Hide UI" Button in all Hscenes.

5: Next up was creating a system that would save the player's menu location. This way if the player views an Hscene via the "Hscene Room", then upon exiting, the player will be returned to the Hscene Room. Of course the opposite would also apply; if the Hscene is accessed via the Hub, then you will be returned to the Hub. This should mostly just cut menuing back a bit.

6: Fixed a stupid bug where Siren's heal audio would break after a couple loops

7: I created an "Alert" specifically for when Rooster's passive is cutting into the player's health. It may display differently in the final game, but the important part is that the scripts are implemented.

8: I made some adjustments to Zol'gan2's early-level. I removed a couple clusters of enemies, and spread the buildings out a little bit to make it feel a bit less claustrophobic.

9: I extended the hit box of Raph in Neos2. Now you do not need to shoot up at his brain, but can really shoot at any spot and hurt him. This is to mitigate always needing to stay at the top of the screen just to shoot him.

10: Made it so buttons no longer make a "mouse over" sound if they are inactive, or locked buttons.

11: Added Events for Pom's Hscene, and when the player first gets access to the Brothel. These are 2 things are easily missed despite being unlocked. These Events basically just put these scenes more in the field of view for the player (The event is only 1-time, much like the other character events in the hub). In the case of the Brothel, this event will unlock if Aether has 50 Assertion, or Resolve. The brothel event was actually a bit time consuming to do because the dialogue system wasn't really implemented in a way to make dynamic adjustments to the scene like this, so I kind of had to make some adjustments.

12: I lowered the global illumination in Zol'gan a little bit, as it was wayy to bright to support a light colored model like Nova.

13: Made a script for Nika's Yarn ability. This script is by no means perfect, but it will do "theoretical" position checks while moving to see if it would fall out of reach for collection. If it thinks it's gone too far, it will immediately stop. The tl;dr of this is that it's much less likely that Nika's yarn can fall out of bounds, and should almost always be collectible by the player. It's by no means perfect because the bounds of the player is set by the camera. The camera moves, and swivels in real-time, meaning the yarn can't realllly know the bounds of the screen by the time the player gets to it, but it can make safety guesses.

14: Made some adjustments to Pix's Eyes in her 1st Hscene. I made her irises a bit smaller, and re-positioned them.

15: In Titas 2, I added to the script that swaps between "Real World" and "Subspace". When switching to subspace, several of the subspace objects will do "distance" checks with the player. If the player is too close to the object when it is spawning in, then it will cancel. This is so when the player swaps to subspace, they don't just appear in, or right in front of an object and take collision damage.

16: I've made some text wrapping fixes in dialogue. The hub dialogue could often get too long for the new dialogue boxes, so I adjusted the positioning, and created a "Best size" wrapping just in case things got unexpectedly long.

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With that, this week is wrapped up. There were a few other things I touched up on that are more behind-the-scenes, but I'll stop the post here.

Next week is probably going to be more of the same: Implementing re-renders, and continuing down the list. A quick little idea of other things on the list are stuff like:

-Pressing "esc" or "B" going back to previous menus rather than having to click the "Back" button. (This one might be a bit weird for some menus, but I'll see what I can work with.)
-Slightly extending Neos2's length
-Implementing a way to mitigate the ability to "Miss" ally help calls, as it is fairly easy to boost past them by accident.
-Making Neos1's Wire route a bit less... "easy" to access.
-Polishing some attacks on Molbon1 boss
-Perhaps adjusting/removing some transmission dialogues to make them seem less "crammed" in moments across levels
-Adding "Tips" when pausing during Impreg Trials.
-Adding Breath/Sweat to Hscenes

There are a few other things on the "medium prio" list, but that's a list of a few.

I'm not suuurre if I'll be able to, but I would really like to be able to finish off the medium prio list this week. I think it would put us in a really good spot for progress.

ANYWAYS! Ahaha.. thanks so much again everyone! Your continued support in these final stages means so much! I'll catch you all next week with another report!

-Regulus