Thanks! Haha I get that a lot with SIGNALSIS, happy to provide more of what people want!
A member registered Jul 01, 2018 · View creator page →
Creator of
tank controls but you can shoot to anywhere based the camera
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Action game where you dodge for a bit then time stops allowing you to play cards to attack!
Card Game
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It is what it says it is
Role Playing
A tunneling machine finds itself injected into a body resembling a human.
Survival
Dying here would severe the constant anticipation. But what I found in this place was much worse than life or death.
Survival
Recent community posts
Not too much the report I've fallen behind on some stuff and still have the last bit of level 1 done, but with the last 5 days or so off I decided to slap all of the tasks on the whiteboard and look at it from a lateral progress angle than a vertical one. I tend to bounce between the two but it's hard to get out of the habit of being very vertical and making everything super linearly.
I also tested the game with some folks and level 1 probably needs work balance/onboarding wise but I think worst case I just have a default easy mode where you merely take a penalty to score if the game ends up being too hard. It took 3 weeks to get a solid foundation and level 1 done but I think I'm just going to have do a little bit of corner cutting to get 2 levels done in a week. It's really a matter of how polished/varied the game will be that's the big question mark. I think I just want to live up to the music though as Cowberry's been doing a really solid job with it.
So I've modeled a basic enemy with vertex colors painted on as opposed to UVs. That one shader i talked about with making the sprites pop out from the background wasn't wasted. The ones on the left of each pair has a custom shader i made to make the lighting affect the colors much less. Making them pop out more from the background.
This isn't an artstyle choice so much as a readability thing. I might be overthinking it though. As long as the humanoids are the only thing moving and the environment is relatively simple. It shouldn't be too hard to point out what's relevant. Having said that it's also why I've been trying to keep the environment fairly Doom wad-ish. I plan to make anything that's modeled to be interactable to some degree, and the rest will likely be baked into whatever I manage in the quake editor.
Before rigging and animating I tend to just throw the models into the ingame scene because I never know what something looks like until it's ingame. The enemies are a bit generic but I'm liking how they're brining back the Virtua Cop influence, the lack of any complicated detail I think will help with standing out. This model is actually based on the protagonist but just puff the chest up to look more stocky and bam there ya go. I'm probably going to reuse the hell out of this model though.
Next up is rigging and animating these fools
So in a chaos of directions I... decided to use realtime 3D for the characters for a list of reasons, but that meant concepting, modelling/rigging/animating stuff so I hit the ground running. 
For some reason i had it in mind for her to be like Iris from MMX4 but then I realized thick long hair is a huge no no in 3d modeling so I went for an anime pony tail thing. Then I had it in mind to go not just low poly but early PS1 segmented limbs and potentially vertex colors. This is something FF7 was known for doing for enemies, which involves assigning colors to vertexes as opposed to UV textures which became more dominant as 3D became more understood. I see it as an excuse to avoid having to do extra skin weighting and get some nostalgia points. I'll likely use faceless enemies with no textures to cut down on any UVing.
Tiringly enough this means weighing each bone to each body part specifically as I'm using Rigify to speed up the rigging process. There's probably a method to auto binding the individual meshes to only one bone each. I still need to figure out the hair as it's one solid piece but it might be more interesting to make the hair into a poly segment snake and animate it manually via programming since the auto rig doesn't provide custom options.
we in business
So just got off work and it's thursday here's my plan for finishing the game cutting up the environment texturing/modeling into 30 min chunks. Then switch to actually making the dang game 8 pm onwards til 3. I'm doing all of this quickly to make any time for the anime opening which might just be characters standing around who knows.
So today was Victoria day (a work day off holiday for Canadians as far as I know, not really in UK for some reason). So me and Cowberry the composer decided to work together in the same room for some good ol fashioned local game jamming like we used to before the pandemic. I got animations done for Avergmus and got them sort of okay blended together in the movement (some things seem to be missing from the run cycle somehow...). Truth be told there isn't much platforming in this, it's mostly an excuse to bounce between VN/dating +shooting segments. Some things came really well together, I also took a stab at animating a storyboard sequence for the anime opening and Cowberry timed out all the parts reall well as you can see in the devlog.
THE PROBLEM, is I forgot that doing ingame cinematics is a fucking nightmare especially when timing it to music. There are multiples ways of charting it out but since Godot's animation editor isn't as robust as say.. premiere where you can scrub through audio, it's really hard to line things up. I had to export the animation to 60 fps and did simple tests to make sure a cut would line up based on the exact frame, but no dice, the frames seem to be off by 7-8. At 60 fps this can get a little annoying so I'm considering at least trying for 24 fps to narrow it down, even if the output will do 60 fps (and EVEN if godot has a really bad measuring method). That's not even getting into syncing into the audio which is a bit of a headache along with the editing.
This isn't even getting into the animation part which I think I can handle. It's just a matter of making the characters and giving them simple posing and getting the most out of smart camera work. Lot of anime in the 80s tend to just have characters standing or walking in place (due to budgets) but also sometimes it was just impressive to animate a character spin around... which is easy with in-game cinematics and full 3D. Anyway you can see me complain about this in the devlog, and also listen to my cat meow to the music almost on beat (also I had no idea she was scratching the door, because I'm hearing impaired and with headphones).
So this is pretty much the run cycle finished... hopefully the rest of the animations such as jumping and landing will be pretty basic. Most of the animations are basic, I haven't had time to really inject the actual character and personality of Avergmus into the animation, but that usually adds 10+ hours to the animation process (and potentially a lifetime of professional experience).
Against my better judgement, I have about 2 hours of footage of me making the entire run cycle (though some extra time after recording was spent polishing aka 3 hours of tweaking graph handles). It's mostly me fumbling with Blender but hopefully this gives some insight on how 3D game animation is made:
I was going to do animations but instead I found this shader on github (https://github.com/paddy-exe/Godot-RealTimeCaustics) and had to try it out, now the water has caustics you can see through. Though you won't get underwater uhhhh and you probably won't see it maybe I'll find a use for it.
Maybe I'll have water in a beach cave and have that create caustics?
The problem with caustics is that it basically takes place inside of a cube that acts as a cut out, but if a polygon is angled like in the top middle, it kind of distorts due to the cube being basic (to save on processing I imagine), meaning I'll have to model the cave in a very boxy minecrafty way so it doesn't stretch.
But it seems doable! What's the purpose of the cave? Cause I have ADHD and need a way to justify a fancy toy I found on github. Uhhh potentially a dating spot location, yeah that's it.
I finally got around to modeling and texturing the main character, now 2-3 more to go... I'm probably just gonna double down on the first design and not stray too far with Gigantimus. I used the same shader I've been using since... Train Trip. Which was my first project in Godot and wow only one year ago? Just modified the same shader a lot to get the most mileage out of it. It merely takes two textures and celshades between the two rather than just pure color. You can do some neat stuff like the hair shine disappearing in shadow or eyes glowing in the dark wind waker style. Best of all you get complete control of the colors and can even use it with sprites using Material Overrides.
Managed to test out blinking. Because uhh robots need to liquify their camera eyes too you know.
The dirty secret is to offset the UVs by the percentage of total textures on a sheet. Pretty sure they did this for Megaman Legends.
Since most of the visual novel parts are going to be first person, I imagine there will be wayyyyy more faces to use for animations.
Here's a devlog that goes over some of the rigging stuff and how stuff is in motion. I recently got a new computer and started using it, so apologies if audio is a bit different or something is off.
Andddd we're doing some character modeling, because I figured I would switch gears and just get a character in the game to also gain some momentum, over the weekend I'll probably sit down and get some actual content in the game, but for now it's easier to just grind out some character models as I don't want them to be too last minute. Time is running out though and my time for working on this is effectively cut in half. Here's another video log to briefly talk about character modeling.
Edit: Also I decided to change the color of Avergmus' face, which movie is this face paint a reference to? It has lots of robots.
So I've been a bit busy as of late, started a new full time job at a game studio and well, have to adjust to waking up early and being tired at the end of the day (also known as being in your 30s). So I've been trying to do some easier tasks like drafting up some character designs: Averagmus, Singuliera and Damian
I realize doing a full 3D dating sim plus an action shooter means LOTS of characters especially if it takes place in a town so... hopefully I can model and rig these fast enough. I didn't bother with side view as I've gotten used to modeling from the front and going from there (yay jam habits). I made these in about 2 hours roughly so uh these aren't meant to be pretty just something to go off of when it comes time to model/texture them. What's left is Gigantimus but you can expect him to resemble Averagmus' design (totally because of motif and theming and not laziness). Don't know how I feel about the steel jaw, it's hard to convey... but I'll worry about it when it comes time to model. The atenna idea is me really wanting to communicate that the mech is going to be remote control, so expect cheesy radio waves when swapping to the mech.
As for the other characters I'm not entirely sure, I might have to wing it. There's also the alien ship designs but I might get a little lazy with that. I really don't want to leave the characters to the last minute like last time when the sprites + designs were rushed in the last week or so. Very smart of me to multiply the work load by doing 3D for this one. No video update I'm just going to sleep.
So I lied and implemented a few shaders and basic colors to the base scene. However I also realized the groundhog day esque mechanic needed to be further elaborated so that multiple different ways could game over and funnel into the scene that Damian keeps rewinding back to. Now the game properly resets and can remember things that carry over between resets. Here's what I mean:
Basically from the Damian scene you can branch out and explore the town to prepare properly for the date. You can start the date any time you want but without certain knowledge that Damian aquires from your past failures or triggering certain events the date will eventually reset back to the Damian scene. Every time you do an event or progress the date, time will forward. Enemies will invade the city prompting you to defend it, but if you're in the middle of the date you will just have to let the city take it. The city isn't gauranteed to be destroyed in a single invasion but if you let too many invasions happen while you're in the date then both you and Singuilera will perish.
So the whole objective of the game is to not only prepare for the date but to make sure the date happens at the right timing. Damian will also let you know when invasions happen the first time you encounter them. I'm wondering if the date could be split into multiple dates as well, like you meet up with Singuilara at certain spots at certain times but that might be complicating it a bit.
I updated with a quick devlog to show how the game works as of now: