I am not great with art or getting a clean circular shape into a UI thing, so I tried to use a shader instead. I used a similar one for the chest + spirit interactions to give a slight glow, with the goal of not needing to match their coloring 100%.

Started playing with HUD ideas and working on the interaction popups. I'd like to keep as much color and charm as possible, without falling into the "white bars + small text remaster UI" meme, but it's hard to get the quirky shapes and fun fonts to look reasonable in higher res.

Been going through for the last week or so and getting the blocked vertical slice building and ironing out the issues, it's slowly becoming almost playable.

Animation is pretty new for me (minus very minor edits to accentuate an impact or release), so all the scaling particulars about getting from blender into unity were driving me insane lol.

The little 100x scaling between fbx and blend formats kept weaseling in and turning man eater into a planet.

Trying to do the Man Eater from scratch, minus some bone models and a ground texture. It's turning out alright, and this will hopefully help my confidence when starting the NPCs.

Used some of the day off to finish blocking Dondoran's interiors.

If you've been following this project for a while, this may seem like reverse progress, but I wanted to go back and redo some areas to sure the general feel and muscle memory came through.

The goofy system I've been using to block the dondoran building heights -- moving brian until he's on the roof.

Started blocking out Dondoran yesterday, also fiddling with the door exit animations to use root motion.

It does bring the autowalk doors much closer to the original though.

#devtober day 31 - Shannon blinking

Wanted to finish with something visual, and luckily I found a nice tutorial on how to implement blinking with blendshapes by @evepaints_ -- linked below.

The Shannon model was a commission last year from k_catz on fiverr, briefly shown to the Quest 64 discord.

#devtober day 30 - easier ik look for npcs

There were 2 previous attempts with this with the newer Rigging system, but I learned today that there is just a built-in function for this on the default animator object. Way simpler and just takes a few seconds to set up.

#devtober day 29 - more blocking and camera work

The stairwell areas are blocked with the lua data, and the stencil issue was just a typo somewhere. The last camera issue is handling collision and closeness, and figuring out why the npcs now talk to you while pouting.

#devtober day 28 - blocking and door issues

Adjusted the animation / IK stuff to play nicely with doors and the new 30 fps sim stuff, but the denser layouts are inviting problems with the stencil door trick from last year.

#devtober day 25 - starting magnet rock

About 20m in, I remembered why I kept skipping this one. Added a rock dissolve shader and updated the particle event stuff to take a scaling coefficient. The rolling rock dust is too aggressive atm and overall colors feel mushy.

#devtober day 24 - fiddling with magnet rock ideas

The decal thing from magma ball would make it easier to do a dirt trail from the original's sliding rock animation, but the current placeholder has grown on me. Maybe there's another place to use this one.

#devtober day 23 - spinning I guess

Spent the majority of today's time matching brian's rotation to the fps vs. the original 30 fps sim, but then realized that recording this would not show anything -- "rtx on" etc.

So instead I tied the animator to the sim, and it now does the spin thing.

#devtober day 22 - magma ball visual arrangement

This was one of the trickier ones to date, and was the first to require 2 unique shaders -- a wobbly lava one and a decal to let me partially "reveal" a lava texture in the travel path.

Also thinking of doing an october recap vid, lmk if interested.

#devtober day 19 - fire pillar 2nd iteration

Sped up the main motion after being surprised at how fast the original animation is. Agreed with ratdev's comment yesterday about it looking more like lava, so I added some of the fire 1/2/3 trail sprites and adjusted the color some.

#devtober day 18 - fire pillar attempt 1

Trying to use the particle system as much as I can, along with a pretty versatile shader from the Hovl kits for the base pillars. Cutout feels to aggressive atm.

#devtober day 17 - studying fire pillar

Recorded and studied the Fire Pillar visual today and I will probably end up doing a fully scripted visual for this. I think without the little shuffling motion it does in the middle, Unity's particle system could get pretty close though.