Episode 4, Update #28

Ahoy there,

Last week I made the decision to cut out some (what I believed) useless fight moves. I was looking to lighten the load on the creation of them. The ground game by far has the most renders, so I was evaluating what I could remove from there. I decided to cut the defensive abilities of closing the guard. I couldn't imagine anyone ever using that, and they basically doubled my workload for each ground position. Removing something sounds like an easy thing to do, but in cases like this, it's not. The NPC ai utilizes these moves, so I need to go through it and make sure they don't. Same for the MC abilities, I have to cut out all the options from every position. If I forget some of them anywhere, the game will break, and we don't want that.

I wasn't happy with the transitions (or lack there of) in the submission game, as they're instant render switches and that just looks ugly. I managed to add some transitions and it should now be visually more pleasing. In general for linear story progression, transitions are really easy to add. Unfortunately in my case and the way I use "ConditionSwitch" to pick the right image for the right fighter, of course it didn't work and wouldn't apply as it normally would. But I found ways around the problem and managed to get it to work eventually in a hacky way.

I was hoping to finish the red sparring session this weekend, but I didn't quite get it all done. It's very close, but I can't sign off on it completely yet. There are a few submissions left to set up, as we have some new ones to learn this episode. I absolutely loathe doing these sparring matches... it's a big enough time-sink that doesn't progress anything, and I hate the thought of people just pressing that easy skip-button and throw a week or more of work in the trash. 🥹

Lastly, there's a couple of new additions that I'm adding to the matches. I think I touched down on them briefly before. As it is, anything you throw at the NPC and vice versa, always lands 100%. Combos are guaranteed hits, takedowns always succeed, etc. I'm adding skill levels for each characters that have the ability to avoid or block incoming attacks, including your own skill levels. This'll make the matches more exciting, as you don't know if anything will land 100% or not. I should be finishing the red match soon, and then I'll move onto the blue path training sessions. After that, I joyfully have to create another sparring match... kill... me... now... 😒

As mentioned before, I was hoping to be ready by the end of October. I don't think I'll make that exact date, as I've also got a week where I have to go abroad for my job... (great timing, boss!). It's one thing to get everything ready regarding the story, but another where I need to add all the unlocks/rewards, refinements, bug fixing, not to mention the huge amount of work that needs to be tested by our wonderful QA folk. But I'll give more info on that closer to the time and see more precisely and exactly where we're at!

Cheers,

Ezy