MNL Progress Report #115

Hey there, nudies! Back with a weekend progress report! Got a good amount of visuals to go for this one! This week, I got in and finalized the opening cutscene of the game, adding title cards, illustrations, transitions, sound effects, music... basically everyone on the team has SOMETHING in this 6 minute long intro to the game! It required a ton of rewrites and work since it needed to establish so much in as natural of a way as possible, but I'm really happy with how it came out. In fact, let's see what the reviews of the opening are saying!

"This feels like an Animal Crossing opening in the best ways." - Bear Festival, 3D modeler.

"dude we have something so fucking special on our hands right now. i'm just beaming watching this whole thing" - Anne, 2D art director.

Wow! Incredibly high praise from the crew! But yeah, it took me FOREVER to finish this cutscene, but I'm so happy with how it came out. And hopefully, you all will get to see it (relatively) soon! We're definitely trying to get it out to you as soon as we can!

Next up on the agenda is getting this cafe area populated and the rest of these cutscenes going. Which thankfully, won't be quite as rewrite-intensive as the opening cutscene was, but has its own unique set of problems.

The rigs for our characters have been edited to better utilize a pool of animations across everyone, but our big boy Freddie here has a much more unique model, making other animations look a bit... weird on him. He's going to need some quick custom animations!

Thankfully, Invertex has whipped up a great animation preview for us, which will be extremely useful for immediately seeing at a glance how each character will look with a specific animation.

Work that runway, Freddie!

But yeah, gotta get Freddie some animations, plop in the other NPCs, add a couple more props, and then set up a couple more, mercifully shorter cutscenes, and then this cafe zone is DONE. That doesn't mean the entire opening is done, but this is by far the biggest, most complicated thing. So worth it, though. So, so happy with it!

That's all for today, though! Thank you so much for the support, and see you next week with more!

PS. Expect the return of the prequel comic early next month!