Month: November 2021

That’s it! I am officially complete with all the animations for the illustrations I have available so far. As I’ve mentioned before, I still have more illustrations in queue, and at the moment it will still be quite a while before I get a hold of them. In the mean time, we are sifting focus back to game development! (If you’re wondering, the image above is a small(large?) preview of the 12 year old version of the daughter)

My immediate goals for the rest of the year is to solidify the in game weekly cycle, add/fix/improve all available systems, and finalize the over all design of the entire game. With this in mind, I started reviewing the basic systems of the game and extrapolating stats growth over the entirety of the game. I ran into a problem with the current stat growth in the job system.

The stats were growing too high by the end of the game. Each stat increase is a percentage added to the battle stats. If I left it as it was, the values would exceed my preset limits resulting in things like Hp being 25,000 by the end of the game. This isn’t a problem in and of itself but I want to keep values within the 4 digit range to better keep track of where the player should be at any point in the game. This limitation is very important since smaller numbers are better to manage as I test battles and events throughout the game.

So I came up with a new system that slows the growth of these stats by 4x. This will ultimately split the stat development between jobs and equipment with a small third from random events throughout the game. My goal for these stats is a soft cap of 300% and hard cap of 500% (this value will most likely never be reached in game) Check the images below to see the changes.

 There are still more systems I need to review so I’ll be looking out for any serious changes I need to make. As they say, a solid foundation makes for a sturdy house.

In the next month I will be making some serious announcements and releasing a new video showcasing a lot of the changes between the old build and the new. I’m thinking of doing it on the 14th of December. I’m not sure yet, we’ll just have to see how the month plays out.

As for now, I’ll continue adding, reviewing and redesigning systems in the weekly cycle. Until next update, stay frosty friends.

I was pretty set on not updating this week since I spent most of it relaxing and gaming. But I felt an urge to get some work done toward the end of the week and managed to reach my goal of finishing all the animations of the current roster of NPCs. I even went back and adjusted a few older animations.

Now all I have left to do is a few animations for the daughter’s older ages. Out of the 16 I have, 13 are complete which leaves 3 to go. I should have them completed by next week, and since this is a holiday week in my country, I will have time off work to tackle other task in the game. Or, I’ll use the time to relax and game again.

Time will tell.

As mentioned in the previous updates, this will be a very short post. As of right now I have 10 1/2 out of the 16 animations complete.(65% roughly) I am almost done with all the major NPCs. I’ve also been going back and making adjustment to previous animations. Maybe by next update I’ll be completed with everything I have so far.

I’m trying to power through as much as I can but all that mesh editing is super draining. Check the image above to get an idea of the amount of clicking I have to do with each character, and that’s only halve the number for that animation.

So much to do, so little time. Nevertheless, we go on.

Time for an update on the animation process. But first, I want to show you the final title screen with the entire background animated.

If you compare it to the old video you can see it looks much more vivid and active. When I decided this composition I wanted to include a beautiful night sky more than anything. This choice was a bit of a homage to Princess Maker 2. There is also a consistent theme of stars throughout the game if you haven’t noticed.

With the title animation complete I have moved on to the characters. As I mentioned before I have quite a number of characters that need to be animated. As of right now I have 16 in total. (not even close to the final number) I have 5 completed so far, which brings me at 30% completion. The animating process isn’t so bad, the real time sink is the mesh editing process.

The dots are vertex that help shape the edges of each polygon that makes up the mesh. What you see here is the out line of the “Body” image’s mesh. Moving any of the vertex (dots) will also move that portion of the image. This creates the illusion of motion that you see in certain games and anime idols on youtube.

The mesh is what controls the morphing of the image. You have to make a good, detailed mesh to make a believable animation. And since these images have so many parts, the mesh creation takes anywhere from an hour to multiple hours. I’ve been recording all the character animations up to this point and plan to continue, so eventually you will get to see the whole process.

Here is a video of one of the characters I’ve animated this week. Since I already revealed her in a previous post I’ll show her again here.

As for the rest of the characters, I’m not ready to show them yet. There are many other things I want to reveal before I start showing off characters and plot points. So I want to get through all the animation stuff ASAP!

Since I’ll just be animating for the foreseeable future I’m not sure what I’m going to post next week. Maybe I’ll show off some monster designs. We will see.