It's ya girl Rebecca here, trying to sound cool (I'm still workshopping personal intros).
So it's the end of another month and that means that the only thing you've been looking forward to all this time---another Ooblets devlog---is here.
Despite spending most of our time working on something super top secret that we'll be revealing around E3 (which I'll talk a bit more about below), we actually still ended up with a decent amount of cool things I can show you.
Take a look IF YOU DARE:
Ooblets in E3?
E3 is fast approaching and folks have been asking us what our involvement might be this year.
We're not gonna make it there in person [imagine a sad but also secretly relieved face emoji here] and I think we can safely say we won't have a demo or anything on the show floor, but Ooblets will be a part of the festivities in one way or another.
We recently found out that we get to be a part of something we're super excited about but I don't think we can announce it just yet. WITHIN this secret thing we've got an even bigger secret thing to show off, so there's a lot to get hyped for.
Bigger secret thing you say?
Most of the work we've done this month has actually been related to the big secret thing we'll be revealing around E3, so that's like 90% of our potential devlog content we can't post. Instead, please accept this gif of some dumb mocapped gestures I did:
Animations
As you can see above, we've been adding in a bunch of new animations. We do the mocap ourselves on a cheap-as-far-as-mocap-goes $1000 system that involves strapping a bunch of sensors all over our bodies. [That product link isn't an endorsement just yet since we want to play with the system a bit more before giving a final verdict, or until they give us a bunch of money to say nice things about them.]
There's a whole post about it on my Patreon if you're interested.
We've also been working with an animator to get sleeker hand-made animations like this hoeing one:
If you think that's the sort of thing we could mocap and not need an animator for, you should have seen us trying to mime what we imagine farming looks like in our living room...
Lotsa dialogue
Ben has been working on filling in all the dumb dialogue for the townspeople of Badgetown. We're aiming to have about 40 dumb things each character will say (which could range from a single dumb line to a whole dumb conversation), and across 16+ characters that ends up being a lot of dumb lines.
Cake (and other item) holding system
In the latest cake-based scientific breakthrough, characters can now visually hold items.
We've had item holding for a little while, but this month I came up with a new way to get them to adjust their arm/hand positions to actually sorta grasp the items with their useless little club hands instead of just awkwardly hoverhanding them.
For reference, this is what it used to look like:
BOOO
Hairstravaganza
Since I've made way too many feminine hairstyles, I asked my bud Sander to design some dude-style hairdos to even things up, and he went all out. Here are just some of them:
Now you can be a conehead, a stooge, one of those dudes from the Matrix 2, or an Elvis impersonator. Like some sort of fever-dream Village People.
Region design testing
I've taken a break from outer-Badgetown region design for a while, so we thought we'd ask Sander to do it instead. We've tried doing the layout for our desert region like 3 times and not been super happy with it yet, so maybe he'll come up with something we can use.
Here's a little peek at what he's done so far:
Gee, deep ear
Even we were not immune to the effects of the GDPR, and so as to not have to deal with too many hassles, we decided to just shut down our mailing list after just 4 emails.
For you weirdos who want to keep getting emails from me, the best way is to join the $1/m tier on my Patreon which will get you even more emails from me.
Since shutting down the mailing list a couple days ago, like 65 new people decided to become patrons, which is nice consolation.
Over the past month, my patrons have gotten to see new potential pin designs, a guide on how I mix 3D meshes in UI, a look at the terminology we've come up with in the game, and that mocap post I talked about.
Fanart
It's been a while since we've shown off some fanart but that doesn't mean people haven't been making it! Here are just a few of our recent favorites:
by @jmarieray
by @igorcanova
by @mattydraws
Next up!
Our next big focus will be finishing Badgetown, the friendship system, and trying to get the game in a state suitable for early testing. So much stuff to do... but we got this. Just gotta keep telling myself that.
Make sure you're following along with all our junk on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook so you don't miss anything, especially with whatever might be unveiled around E3...
Love ya!
Rebecca