Monday Milestones: Week of November 20th, 2023

Happy Monday once again, Science Team! Our predominately European team is working through the week to make sure turkeys aren't the only things getting stuffed~

• Collabs - we are working on a number of exciting collaborations that we cannot talk in detail about (yet). These collabs aim to add unique characters, outfits and more to the game and help us grow!
• Improve Production Management Performance - Currently investigating new tools to improve our production management performance / efficiency. We are a small team with a lot of unique responsibilities. Even though our communication is already really good, there are still ways to improve.
•  Team Management - Overseeing the progress each department and team member makes. Having tons of short conversations to check up on how things go. Communicating and setting goals to help align the task prioritization between departments

• Getting subchapter 07 to a playable state! Fleshing out sequences before combat, getting the NPC AI fully functional
• Working with Programming team to fix all issues and bugs preventing subchapter 07 from being playable
• Completing animations for subchapter 07

• Added Health and fall damage and death in a basic form. This is also necessary for combat in the near future.
• Fix some issues we have with our ai spline navigation system so that our next chapter can be completed and things work correctly for when Melody is supposed to walk and talk at the same time.
• Looking (read "FRANTICALLY TRYING OUT DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS TO FIX IT") at some issues we have with the data layers from goddess into new game and going through tasks that needs debugging (should have finished all critical and major ones now so there are mainly minor issues left).

• Review of subchapter 15's two boss fights scripts and mechanics with Audio and Production departments
• Laying out a timeline and rough draft for Melody's dating timeline.
• Fleshing out said dating timeline for Melody, working on dialogue and events etc in order to bring it to the final draft.

• Continuing formatting and implementing additional character audio for the sandbox overhaul (System32, Goddess)
• Partner with Animation team to ensure we have all the SFX needed for subchapter 07
• Prepping schedules for recording VAs for December

• Out of Office for portion of week
• Prepping new Sandbox 2.0 preview videos with FMC
• Drafting contracts for potential collaboration partners

• Planning of *FUTURE* boss split parts as enemies + Full fusion with Rigging department
• Planning for Jellody's materials.
• Continuing with the painting of the Witch but closer to a final result (she's got a LOT of frills).

• Researching and implementing a reliable retargeting system to apply animations across multiple characters - Currently, we're using generic per skeleton retargeting, however, this causes bone misalignment on certain animations when applied to certain characters. We're looking into utilizing Unreal Engine 5's IK retargeting system to solve the issue, respecting character's bone transforms.
• Implementing procedural hand and finger aligment system for sandbox sessions, aligning them to partner's body parts - Currently in sandbox, hands does not align to the partner's body parts, especially with variety of characters. This system aims to solve this issue and make sandbox scenes more impressive.
• Finishing filling out VLT's empty spaces