Character Styles (poll) - and update

Things sort of slowed down a bit. I've taken on a large software development project to pay the bill for a few months, so naturally most of my time has been aimed at that, so gamedev has taken a dive for a while. I have been thinking about it though and some stuff has progressed.

For starters, the game has had a graphical overhaul, so all the foliage, scatter terrain and landscapes have a new style:

It's more toon shader, but it also means it's got proper grass coverage with less of a GPU hit than the previous version. The downside is that the characters no longer fit. This is totally fine, to be honest the character models were created a couple of years ago for an animation project, and they were in a constant state of being updated every time I found a use-case their rig or model couldn't handle. These guys were built for proper animation work, so don't really go very well into a game. I kind of always knew they'd need to be changed to something more suitable for the game eventually, but used them as stand-ins to get things moving quicker.

Well, looks like now is the time to start thinking about those character updates.

So, I have used ai generation to take some character prompts and shit out various character styles. Remember, this poll isn't for the characters themselves, but for the art style of the characters.

POLL

I'll be honest, I was throwing all kinds of prompts to get different styles, and in the process, there's a few characters in there that will end up in the game in the final style. There's a few characters that aren't in the poll because they're a similar style to ones that are in the poll.

As for progress on the game:

• Added idle animations if you stand still too long
• Fixed player floating in a falling animation when spawning in
• Fixed an incorrect option when talking to the innkeeper in Pineridge
• Set up swimming. Kind of. Needs further work.
• Updated all foliage and landscapes to new style
• Updated all randomised terrain to new style, fixed collisions
• Fixed some missing inventory slots
• Fixed some enemies crashing Forest_C on spawn
• fixe Idle bug while in conversation
• minimap now hides during conversation
• New model for open Forest level entrances
• Fixed enemies not entering Investigate Mode
• Fixed badgers moving really slowly
• Fixed wolves always running
• Fixed bug where enemies could hear your footsteps from miles away and would track you forever
• Fixed enemies going directly to the player instead of investigating rock impacts
• Fixed collision for downed and masturbating enemies - they blocked corridors, can now move through them
• Updated goo node texture on plant traps

Currently I'm adding in combat. Player attacking works, as does enemy block detection, I'm now working on adding combat to the enemy ai so they can decide to fight or fuck depending on factors like mood, horniness and aggression, and also so they can decide to block if they see the player go for a hit. Naturally, this has introduced so many bugs, but it's making progress.

As a further note, I've been considering the character thing, and I think I might pivot away from customisable characters and just do 2 or 3 male and female preset characters with a little customisation available. The main reasoning is that it is a nice idea to have a full character creator, but it would take a lot of time to get right, especially when you start messing with heights and trying to get parts of enemies into player characters in the right position. The other reason is every female character currently uses the same body, the heads and tails just get swapped for the species. Same with the males, except add in genitals. It means everyone looks the same. Preset characters would mean getting defined and identifiable players and enemies.

The decision is still up in the air, but I'm angling towards that at the moment.