June 2021

As a reminder, devblogs will be available only for Patreon patrons until the next game update. After which, every devblog posted prior to this update release date will be publicly posted, one by one, on the game’s website.

Macro Artificial Intelligence

To put it simply, over the span of this month, I have mainly focused on the creation of a toolkit that AI shall use in game, so that it can be autonomous. AI is one of the biggest parts created in v0.4 and is something rather new to me, making me unable to show off as many things as I would usually do. On top of this, lots of invisible code has been reworked to ensure that everything works all together, but did not have any direct impact.

In Talas' case, thanks to this month's progress, he shall have a great freedom of action with needs and wills that change over time and with his environment. Talas will not only walk towards you and crush you down, he will also attempt to grab you if you are high enough, throw things if you are out of reach or prepare traps for you.

Talas trying to Grab Micro:

He may be tired and ignore you, or be angry if you start breaking things or disobeying him.

I can only show a couple interactions so far but it is far from showing the full potential this evolution offered, as there shall be many more different situations available.

AI Animation

Alongside AI, I worked on animation scripts and created new ones, so that Talas reacts correctly to the different situations mentioned earlier. From this, the amount of available animations quickly grows exponentially, without taking into account procedural alternatives. So far, I can count over 250 hand-made animations, most of them being cycles and poses. Once compiled, the game weights a good 8Gb.

 

Player arms

Cobble can now spread his arms like in v0.3 to interact with the game elements, but this part still is in development and no gameplay is associated with this feature yet. I shall focus on this through the following month.

 

House update

This is not the final design of it, but I finally started working on the outskirts of Talas' home. Houses, mountains to the horizon, everything is there to reinforce the feeling of being tiny.