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Extremely WIP animation to test out character physics. It's not got a whole bunch of life to it and isn't super anatomically accurate yet, but I wanted to share something this week. Very happy with how things are shaping so far.

I was hoping to be able to finish their clothing and environment in time but that's increasingly becoming it's own whole project for when the animations are finished, so for now enjoy the generic onesie and blank test-desert.

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Oh no

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Quick status update: Not dead and working on This Guy! This is a super-WIP texture that's not finished yet (proper renders to share by next week is the goal), but I'm very happy with how the new Stekh model is going. Still needs the whiskers, fur, and lots of cleanup around the legs, forearms, ears, etc. They are already animation-ready and this time I've been keeping the design modular so I can quickly generate distinct people from this as a base in future projects.

I'm working to design clothes from two historical periods too, lots of stuff to share when it's ready! My current goal is to use them in some slice of life style animations around one of the cities they inhabit, in three different time periods.

Also a quick thing for 3D people: This was textured in Blender! My first time using a tool called Ravage, so far I've found it to be very reliable and as feature complete as it needs to be to replace my reliance on substance painter (finally).

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Behold! Some "real" Stekh bones! Made in 3D printed resin.

First (successful) attempt at using an SLA machine to bring some of my creations 'to life', as it were. Ran out of material while the skull was printing, but overall am extremely impressed with the result!

There will be a bunch more (digital) stekh content upcoming too, though it's still too early to comment on that much as well. Things are looking up in terms of 'amount of personal creative projects needing to release soon', now that things are less demanding at work and I have more energy to put into everything personally important.

Also: Still working on Train Game:tm: in the background, there's some substantial updates to share soon (Namely: it's top-down now).

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A really rough écorché showcase.

To be retopologized as a character base in upcoming animations.

Stekh got a lot of visual redesign this year, the 'heart' of them ( ethology, evolutionary niche, cultures, individuals, etc that've been worked on for years) remain mostly the same.

I feel this design 'fits' them a lot better, that's also much improved over the original as I learned more about anatomy and biomechanics.

Museums are very helpful!

I'm most excited about the development of the hindlimbs. Keeping in line with the niche of a projectile-throwing predator, Stekh now have a novel way to do this via whipcracking!

TLDR: The force of the main body moving can be transferred to the hindlimbs, which conserves energy towards the end as an acceleration of the hand, reaching incredible throwing speeds.

It took a lot of trial and error to make this aspect 'real'. Lots of CAD modelling bone segments and 3D print experimentation until I made a physical model which really behaved as a whip in the real world.

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Small world building update: This is roughly how Stekh are shaped now! I've had a few gripes about my previous designs as I come to learn a lot more about bio-mechanics and anatomical structures in general. They still have their same ethology, environmental role, and general body-plan; but this form really accentuates the throwing-niche specialization and allows them to move a lot more efficiently in their environment.

It looks like a tail from this angle, but those are actually the two hind-limbs. In this case they are a lot more articulated and fish-like, never having evolved to carry weight and more adapted for maintaining stability. Early ancestors also used their tails as a defensive tool similar to monitor lizards, though in Stekh this whiplike motion was adapted for killer underhand-throws.

More to come eventually, I've got quite a lot of work to do!

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Behold the Jet Fighters! They fly! They strafe! They dodge! They fill the role of 'elite' enemy, bringing super-aggressive damage potential in a small/nimble profile. Luckily they are rather fragile so any good AOE weapon can prevent them from being an overwhelming challenge.

Ignore the weird bullets and disappearing fighter, they still need death animations as of posting.

I will post some spec-bio stuff soon! It's been too long since I've shared what I initially made this blog for.

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I appear to have accidentally made some sort of lightning gun, but it's fun so we may be rolling with it!

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Been working on a lot of silent refactoring this month. We how have a train editor that lets you pick your cars, and the projectile system was reworked multiple times into something very high quality.

Some new content was added in the form of two new enemies. The composite enemy shown has multiple different 'modules' it can spawn with. Current loadouts for this enemy include nuclear bombs which KO your entire train if they land, but can do the same to enemies if shot down early, shield generators that absorb X hits regardless of damage before burning out, drone spawners, and a missile launcher to keep you on your toes.

(PS Pay the rapid-fire cannon no mind. I'm still working on rebuilding the old guns to use the new weapon system and just needed a test weapon to show how you can juggle nukes)

It almost feels like a full game! Now that we can customize/load trains and build levels, all that seems missing is the polish and environment art + actual levels. I hope to get a playtest launched sometime before febuary? No promises.

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Also:

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Not dead!

I spent most of the month working on something called gradient descent optimization. It took way too much effort, but I'm extremely proud of how it turned out and now I can use this tool a lot easier in the future, which is cool!

What does it do?

This test enemy has three thrusters placed sorta randomly, yet it knows how to fly! This is pretty impossible to figure out a clean math equation to do, especially with arbitrary positions and thrusters.

But even when a thruster is destroyed, our gradient descent code immediately knows how to re-configure the thrusters into something that lets it stay airborne. We can place any amount of thrusters in any configuration and our ship knows exactly what to do.

I can try to explain how this problem was solved in more detail if it's of anybody's interest, but essentially we boiled each thruster down to float variables in an array, and each frame the game does multiple iterations of wiggling the variables and comparing if these new variables would make the ship move closer to a desired direction/rotation (this is called minimizing the error).

Also shown here is a WIP shield unique to this enemy, which will try to get in the way of the last cannon to shoot at them.

Audio still very WIP.

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Progress update

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Progress update: Train commands!

We worked on adding trains to our train game this week! Currently they aren't animated properly or with correct sound effects or anything and they'll get more polished eventually.

New command system:

Taproute still keeps the 'rts-lite' theme of giving orders to most of your turrets, with only one type of turret being under manual control. We will still probably have hotkeys, but we also added this nifty radial menu to control your lads!

The menu slows time and allows you to tell a specific turret to fire on something, it'll aim when selected and fire when you let go of right click. The aimer will also follow your cursor if you move far enough away as to tell the game you wanna reposition the aimer.

Behind the scenes: Train generator system:

You can customize your own train this time! The game requires your train to be under a set length, but you can choose to add basically any cars to the train in any order as long as it fits! There's a nifty bit of game balance where larger train cars are generally more powerful, but the space they take up means you have fewer cars overall to work with!

New weapons:

We added the original cannon to the game! I explained how it bounces off of armour before, but can instakill many unarmoured opponents.

We also added the versatile holman projector as a primary weapon! It's 'pressure' mechanic allows it to act closer to a light cannon which evolves into a lighter but faster machine-gun as you keep firing. Do you space out your shots to take advantage of the accuracy and explosiveness of high pressure shots, or do you just want to spray a torrent of metal chunks at your enemies? Now you can do both!

PS: Don't worry about the irritating reflect sound, it's a placeholder until we get nicer metal-ricochet sounds for lighter projectiles. This one is only meant to be used on the cannon.

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More bullet testing, this time a smart-bouncing type.

Will probably be the last video for a bit, I hope to share something more substantial next.

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BEHOLD!

Very WIP but we can now blow up enemies1!

Each enemy's individual parts can be destroyed and cause all kinds of chaos. In this case you can destroy movement-enabling thrusters, the weapon bay (which also destroys the protective armour segments which attach to it, nice), or cause explosions by hitting a fuel tank.

...Not that you need a fuel tank to cause explosions with this one. The cannon in Taproute is much meatier than Scalepiercer, capable of disintegrating most weaker enemies. It's also capable of bouncing off of armour! Part of me wants to add friendly fire for if you deflect the projectile into your own train but some of us on the development team think that would be too evil.

I think it'd be fun.

1: Though we didn't have the actual explosion effects in the game at the recording of this video

Minor dev log stuff:

Enemies are now made of hitbox-volume nodes which track health, deletion, and bullet collision. We also have a modular destruction-spawner node for spawning things on death.

Combined these allow for a huge amount of interesting behaviours, like spawning explosions, debris or entire other enemies on death! Health volumes have attributes (health, shape, material), bullets can interact with that last attribute to define behaviours (I.E: The cannon explodes on Standard but deflects against Hardened materials).

I may share some more in-depth dev stuff later, right now a lot of this is in flux!

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Some super early tests of a bomb-dropping enemy from our Scalepiercer sequel, codenamed Taproute for now.

This lad showcases a lot of the planned changes/improvements from the original game, namely that enemies are now made of individually destructable parts, use thrusters to control physics-simulated movement, and utilize normal maps for real-time lighting.

These systems combine in really neat ways, e.g: enemies are now more of a 'shooting puzzle' where you can choose to disable specific parts to change their functionality. We have a ton of variations of these planned and are excited to show you in the future!

PS:

I'll try to share more of my writing/personal worldbuilding stuff mixed between the game dev stuff too. I'm glad people seem to have interest according to the poll! Lately I've been working on some social ethology stuff for Stekh, and how it compares homologously to eyebrow-flashing type behaviors in humans.

Until text time!

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Scalepiercer: Real time lighting in pixel art

I wanted to share some sprite normal mapping that we're implementing for our game! One reason I prefer 3D artworks is the dynamism of lighting that can be easily achieved with a renderer, something you couldn't historically do in 2D art with ease.

But lots of modern 2D engines adopted the 3D concept of 'normals' and now we can do stuff like this!

In Scalepiercer, we are using normal maps for characters and weapons/explosions. Our characters will react to light in real time similar to games like CRYPTARK and Airships: Conquer the Skies!

So how do normals work? What if you wanted to do this for your own game? Well there's many ways to normal map sprites! but here's how we did it:

We went into Blender and created a 'shape-sheet' like this by positioning 3D objects and taking a screenshot of their normals as viewed from above. The funky colours are because we are actually encoding *directions* for how individual pixels are "rotated" in 3D space! That's a normal map!

A TLDR of the directions are as follows:

A color value of 128 means "middle/no angle", with 0 and 255 being 90* facing one way or the other.

Red is the East/West facing angle

Green is the North/South facing angle

Blue is "tangent"/facing-camera and is always 255 (which is why our 'normal map color' is this specific 128,128,255 blue for a flat surface).

Knowing this information, we paint over our cargo container by sampling the 'directions' from or normal map sheet to create something like:

Keep in mind different game engines may have different direction encoding, if your sprite lighting looks backwards try inverting the red or green channels!

This is human-readable data too if you keep in mind that the presence or lack of a color means a direction! After some time you may be able to read (and even possibly paint) your own normals without constant reference.

P.S: I didn't know where to fit this but a note on automatic normal mappers: There's great tools like Laighter and Modlab which let you instantly create normal maps from sprites! These tools are very powerful and often make it very easy to do these effects, the reason we avoid them here is because they rely on the *brightness* of a sprite instead of intentionally knowing the *direction* of one. We found that the generated results often don't "understand" the 3D forms of a sprite as well a human who can think abstractly. If you want to mess with these techniques with little effort, or your art style is compatible with how these programs 'read' files, I'd recommend trying it! It's fun!