MNL Progress Report #150 - Oh My God, Does That Say One Hundred and Fifty?


Hey again, nudies! I realized we're at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY of these progress reports! I think I'm gonna have to stop numbering them at this point because good lord, that's so many. At some point, you run into a Final Fantasy situation where the numbers are so high that it gets intimidating! But seriously, think you all so much for your generous support over these years. And don't worry, we've got LOTS of progress to show!
One of Bear's big projects this week was perfecting what we call "The Dream Tree". It's a notable tree with some notes attached to its limbs, and is very important to the plot of MNL. We knew we had to make it look good.
It originally just looked like this, which you may remember from progress reports in the past.
Not... particularly dream-like, huh? But now after several months since its original iteration...
THAT'S a tree! Through the magic of shaders and textures, we've got something REALLY nice. And what would a tree be without some wind rustling through its leaves, huh?
Check out the videos below! This one was set up be Anneliese and it's so good that we can even account for HURRICANE WINDS. Not that that'll happen, of course, but it IS funny.
Unfortunately, after a WHOLE lot of fretting and furrowed brows, we've decided to ditch our previous dialogue engine, Dialogic. It just wasn't working out for what we needed now with our cutscene controls and it was going to take too long to custom code a bunch of stuff just to get Dialogic to work. When the game had more of a "visual novel" direction, it was fine, but now... eh. A shame... but we've already got dialogue working again through the default tools, and it's actually much easier.
You can see it in one of the videos below. Ignore the dialogue itself, but this was a test Killerbro made for both dialogue and camera movement to make sure both worked alongside each other. Aaaand they do! We're prettying the dialogue box back up to make sure it meets our visual standards, but we've got a LOT of things working now. Body and face animations, camera movement, dialogue choices, and even directing character movement in cutscenes!
Along with prettying up the box itself, we do still need to figure out a way to smooth transitions between animations. Otherwise, characters hard reset back to their default idle, or they'll just snap in place for the next animation. Not ideal, but fixable. We'll try to have that figured out by next report.
Speaking of which, I have both a convention AND a root canal coming up this week, so unfortunately, I won't be able to have a report ready for next weekend! In lieu of that, I'll have another character bio post queued up and ready for Saturday. This one will focus on the librarian and the sex shop owner! Ooooh~!
But that'll be it for today! Thank you so much for your support, and see you next week!