One Small Step for Game; One Giant Jiggle for Game Boobs.

This progress update took a little longer to get to than planned. It was originally just going to be a demo for the new walking loop, but like pulling on a loose thread that kept leading to new tasks I wanted to finish before showing it off. In no particular order, the gif above shows off:

•     Our main character has a top-down representation! This will be the view you will use to move around the world and interact with people. When you interact with someone their character image will slide in from the side, and menu options will be displayed down the middle.
•     She can walk around! You can click-and-hold to lead her around, or just click to set a destination. Navigation is "dumb" right now, but once I have a house map with colliders I can build a nav mesh so she'll walk through doorways, around obstacles, ect.
•     The camera tracks her! Alright, that's not super impressive, but it also has a mouse following bias that lets you explore around your environment a little more naturally. Her torso and head also track the mouse cursor as it moves around.
•     Her boobs jiggle! In particular, they are tied into Live2D's physics system, so they jiggle dynamically based on how she has been moving around. This is my first application of their physics system, and I'm really happy with how it's turned out. Expect to see more dynamic movement like this in the future!
•     Interactable objects are set up! When right clicked these objects trigger an associated lua script which includes information for dialogue, which characters to display, ect. This is the first step to writing up interactions between characters!
•     Our Cheerleader's moving model! I showed this off in a previous post, but here it is in engine with everything rigged up properly.

There are a bunch of major things that aren't easy to shown in that gif, but are important enough that I want to mention them anyways:

•     Character tokens (the top down view) share the same outfit state as their portrait representation. They can share other parameter states as well, which I am planning to use so that the MC's token and portrait can have the same walk state in both states.
•     Character portraits have been massively optimized. In the demo all of the character portraits are constantly being rendered even when off screen. Now characters are drawn only when requested in a lua script, and hidden otherwise.
•     Characters can now have multiple models associated with them. A model is a single pose a character could be in (sitting, looking towards the camera, looking away, ect). Now I can start drawing art for our characters in different poses and easily add them into the game. Models all share the same parameters as well, so outfit state, expressions, and so on will all carry over seamlessly.

That's a good amount of progress, but there's still a lot to do before we've got a game instead of a tech demo! I'll keep you updated!