May `23 DEVLOG

Heyhey Scientists!

A lot has happened since the last development blog:

• New Characters
• Animation Pipeline V2
• Character Creator

New Characters

We worked on many new characters, from 2D Concepts to 3D Models, with many of them coming to the game over the next months. Check out a few of the things we worked on below:

But we did not just work on 2D Concepts, we also worked on 3D Models!

Here you can see a early preview of our new player character meshes, the Goddess in the next subchapter and Silica´s "silicon flesh" body-type (you learn a lot more about her other body types in the future).

Animation Pipeline V2

For a long time we have animated our characters in blender. We initially had planned to stay in that pipeline since we had already made big investments into it previously to going public with the patreon. Over the past year we discovered, that the pipeline we had build, was not scalable to the degree we had hoped for.

We decided to take a slight gamble over the past 6 months and simplify the pipeline even further, in order reduce the impact of each new character on development time - and slowly moved our entire pipeline INTO unreal engine 5´s "Control Rig".

The benefits of the pipeline are manifold:

• No more switching Softwares
• Animating directly in the actual game world
• No more guesswork - Animators see exactly what the players get!
• Procedural Rigging! Game-Changer.

And best of all: Control Rig can be used in runtime, which is one of the ways we will enable you to pose characters in our upcoming Sandbox v2 update later this year.

For the upcoming chapter all of the work is done in UE5 - no input from our blender pipeline. 

We are looking forward to showcasing our new upgraded capabilities!

Character Creator

We have created the first iteration of the character creator, which will be playable in the next release towards mid / end of June.

Our goal with the character creator was to keep things as simple and straight forward as possible - check out the preview below!

What did you like most about the last month? What are you looking forward to in the coming months? Leave your thoughts, questions and comments down below!

Thanks for your continued support <3