Hey guys,
So if it wasn't obvious already this update will be shorter due to the amount of time in between these updates being substantially less.
In spite of that, we have some awesome stuff we have been working on these past two weeks that we would like to share with you:
Interview with RadioSEGA
We had the pleasure of being interviewed by KC of RadioSEGA's The SEGA Lounge. It was a super fun interview where we talk about developments in the game, a bit about our new team members, some of the story of ES, and play a SEGA music guessing game! Also throughout the interview clips of our new music are played!
Multitrack animation
To make the characters’ current weapon show up sheathed on his body or in his hands during combat and allow him to pick up, hold, kick, and push objects in the environment while simultaneously rendering a different outfit for the current equipped Echo (job/class), we have to use some fairly advanced skeletal animation techniques involving dividing animations into multiple “tracks” for each body part and having them animate independently. The good news is that Spine’s runtime supports multitrack animations. The bad news is that their editor does not even allow you to represent or configure multitrack animations. Up until this point, we’ve had to write Lua data tables to feed the engine aggregate animation data using multiple Spine tracks, but this has proven to be a cumbersome pain in the ass that is ultimately not sustainable, as suddenly configuring animations becomes a task for Lua scripting rather than something an artist can do. To address this issue and streamline our workflow, Falco decided to add multitrack animation support to ESTk. Now when viewing the selected entity’s Skeleton component, you can dynamically add, remove, and manage aggregate animations and even modify them at run-time. The Toolkit provides autocompletion and drop-down menus for specifying track names from spine animations and even allows you to press a play button that appears when you mouse-over an aggregate animation to preview it in-game. This will drastically improve out workflow and speed up our development time when dealing with multitrack animations, and since we have yet to see any other tools or development kits solving this issue, we think you guys will also benefit quite a bit too when ESTk is released.
The EStk flags invalid Spine and skeletal animation data red, so level designers and artists know when there is an issue.
Livestreams
The team is back to livestreaming! We have been livestreaming together every other Sunday. We have been using them as time to hang out and chat with fans as well as use them as time to show off our development process. Going forward most of the time we will be using it to show off development. We post when we are livestreaming on our YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook so follow those to keep updated when we stream. We also post little updates on Twitter and Facebook throughout the month so if you can't wait for more updates check those out!
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Elysian_Shadows
Facebook: facebook.com/elysianshadows/?tsid=0.3363124304522713&source=typeahead
Youtube: youtube.com/user/GyroVorbis
Twitch: twitch.tv/elysianshadowsdev
Monster Design Contest
We have decided to extend the contest entry time period until AiGD 35. Don't be afraid to put in an entry if your art skills aren't the best! Put a little backstory to the monster to help us imagine your idea. Just a reminder, you can send up to 3 submissions in. Use #MyESMonsters on twitter and facebook or send your submission(s) to press@elysianshadows.gmail.com.
Music
Our new musician Jeremy has been hard at work scoring our game! These past two weeks he has written two character themes, the theme for our museum, the Death theme, the song for our church, and he wasn't satisfied with how the Loren theme sounded so he even remastered that! On top of that he has been implementing a bunch of sound effects for the game.
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To wrap up, we have AiGD 34 coming up with the behind the scenes of all this stuff we have talked about! Also thank you so much for the feedback on the EVMU! Your feedback is vital to making it a more cohesive product. Talk to you guys in two weeks.
