Song preview, Meshing finished, and some simple menu layouts.

Heyo everyone! Another progress update in bound! It's nice to get back on to familiar territory with the animation process, and the feel of the level is really starting to come together with the music in there now. Without further ado, lets get in to this last week's progress!

Starting off, as you can see in the preview above, Wishful has finished the first song of the game. This will play during the level of Catiya (planet name may be subject to change). I wish I could post videos directly to these posts without using a 3rd party embedding (so I could showcase the music alongside the game).

First thing I did this week was add dialogue sequencing and the outro for the boss fight.

It's a bit jagged, and will use some touching up, but this is the groundwork for it.

Next up is some small additions from our 3D modeller, BigFeff.

This is a pretty basic scene, and it has a good amount of work to be done.

The plan for this scene is Level select. I am hoping to add a "Hologram" type shader to the planets, and have them display, spinning like this while you select what planet/level to play. As mentioned before, this scene is very barebones, and I will likely be putting it together after I am done with the Hscene animations.

Speaking of Hscenes, there has been slight changes to the Nova Hscene, and it has been meshed.

The tail has been reworked, and now has multiple states. (I don't have the control parameters set up yet, so I can't give the best demonstration yet).

The colors are a bit wonky in the AnyPortrait inspector due to it being done in the URP. Here is more what the colors will look like in the scene. (The layers are all folding on top of each other because the states aren't set yet)

For those unfamiliar with what I mean by "meshing". Basically the process of these animations is that AmHidden will send a full static image to me with a couple "variations". I then break up the image in to a bunch of small segments. (often about 50-150 pieces depending on how complicated it is.) I then manually "add vertices to each section like this.

It takes a little while, but it's all a part of the process.

Another thing I've done is fix up some of the shader layering in the game. There's a small chance you noticed it in earlier gifs I have posted. This might be a bit of a boring spec, but I'll tack it on here.

OLD:

Notice the green reticle fades as it displays over the water. Enemy explosions also sometimes got very suppressed when they died over the water through the camera view. Shaders render in a bit of a different queue. In this case, the water's shader would render last making it appear over everything... oops! I'm pretty new to shaders so this is fairly new stuff to me.

NEW:

Basically I just learned to set queues up properly for shaders. I also changed the reticles to be rendered on a stack camera to ensure they will always appear over everything.

Alright, that pretty much sums up this week! In the next week, I will likely be focusing completely on Nova's Hscene. I am hoping to have the animation done for next post.

Sorry if the post seemed a bit busy. I feel like I could make them more brief if people feel like they are too long, but I like to show things when I can rather than just saying "hey.. i did this".

Thanks everyone for sticking around for Star Lust! I'll catch you all next week with some motion in Nova's Hscene!

-Regulus