Just a quick post.

Player Characters

The poll to decide species for the last 3 player characters has now closed, and I have taken some liberties with the results. Let me explain...

Female Character 2

• 22.2% - Fox
• 19.4% - Cheetah
• 16.7% - Rabbit
• 15.3% - Kobold
• 13.9% - Canine

Male Character 1

• 35.2% - Canine
• 21.1% - Fox
• 16.9% - Kobold
• 5.6% - Cheetah

Male Character 2

• 29.6% - Fox
• 16.9% - Canine
• 9.9% - Cheetah / Otter
• 8.5% - Rabbit
• 7% - Kobold

Looking at the results, there's a recurring few species. I see this being entirely my fault for not filtering the options to avoid recursion. So as a way to balance it now, I decided that Fox shouldn't be one of the options. In fact, I've removed canines entirely from the list and dropped down to the next most popular options.

Why have all canines been dropped?

Simple answer: they haven't. They've just been ignored from the voting.

Part of the plan is to add female versions of enemies, and of course there's already canids in the game, so adding a female variant is already on the cards relatively shortly. But there's one more reason, which needs a vague explanation of part of the modelling process.

When you build a model, for example, one of the wolves, once the mesh has been completed, you can add ShapeKeys(Blender), which when imported to Unreal become Morphs. You start with the basic mesh shape, then add a shapekey and distort that mesh to the new configuration. There's already a few of these in action in the game.

When a wolf gets erect, that's a morph going from 0 to 1, incrementing by 0.01 every game tick. The base morph is small and hidden in his sheath while the full morph is fully erect. Same applies for eyelids for blinking.

The reason this is important is that a shapekey doesn't have to be for something you want to change during the game. It can be for something as simple as narrowing the muzzle and changing the ear shape to turn your wolf into a fox. This could in theory work for changing your base wolf into any of the above species, but it's generally easier to go with unique meshes for now, though physiologically similar species can be switched through shapekeys.

So going back to why canids aren't in the poll, it's because the model is already there for male ones, female ones are coming shortly and foxes can be achieved through shapekeys from whichever gender. There's no point wasting player slots in a vote on something that is going to be in the game regardless, shortly.

What are the Player Characters then?

Female Rabbit - Technically the Cheetah won on this one, but I dropped down to the next result due to the male results.

Male Cheetah - After removing the canids, Cheetah and Otter tied, but cheetah also appeared in second place for the other male character,  so this one got bumped up over otter.

Male Kobold - This one was 1st after canids, so was an obvious choice.

So for a bit more justification on rabbit and cheetah situation, a mitigating factor for dropping otters was species traits. They're known for being good at water, but the game doesn't have swimming mechanics yet, so adding a swimming species at this point would be a waste of an otter. Other than that, a feminine bunny or cheetah is equally nice, but I quite like the aesthetic of long ears as an analogue for hair.

Of course, these are just the starting characters, and male/female canines are in on the player roster as well. All the above species will get the opposing gender once the game is completed, and additional species are planned as extra content later on, so it's not so much a case of not adding things to the game and more not adding them to the game yet.

I fully welcome feedback on these decisions. I've tried to balance public opinion with practicality, but thats so easy to get wrong.

Progress Update

None since the last post about completing Phase 1a!

The original plan was to have 2 weeks per sprint for development, but I've bumped that up to 3 weeks as 2 weeks is usually achievable as long as I don't have other work. Unfortunately, I need to live so I've got a few animations I need to complete on deadlines, and I've potentially got some occasionally paying work. That is what has taken up most of this week. I was hoping to get back into 1b tomorrow, but I've got 4 scenes to animate and render for halloween, so running a little behind at the moment.

As a reminder, Phase 1b has:

• New enemy type
• Female versions of enemies
• wolf jiggles
• Fur
• Basic clothing
• AI Alert system upgrade (tbh, really need to redo the whole behaviour tree for wolves)
• Animation Gallery/unlockables
• Make wolves notice plants a bit more often (the wolves are supposed to be recurring enemies through an entire playthrough, not get eaten by plants within minutes of starting)