A Peak at Progress #4

This post is only exciting if you are interested in the technical bits of my work. The obvious big thing was showing off Night Crawlers in the previous devlog. So, for the most part, this post is a way to get back in alignment with the weekly schedule. However, for me I made a massive technical achievement Friday: I finally figured out a bugle shader that reliably merges multiple bumps:

One of the biggest road bumps I always hit when making infestation games was handling the most important part: the squirming. On paper it sounds simple? Just animate a bunch of worms slithering around. But that raise a multitude of issues:

• What if you wanted to dynamically control each one? 
• What if you wanted to randomize when they appear? 
• What if you want multiple creatures to be inserted or removed?
• What if their bulges need to overlap? 
• What if body parts needed to shrink and grow?
• This list goes on ad nauseam.

Trying to solve this problem by drawing more sprites and making more layers quickly piles up. This issue is why I was never able to expand on the concepts in Infectious Designs. The animation system was a mess:

Each ball size needed a set of worm animations. This was well over 100 frames of animation. Additionally, the urethra effect was handled by layering two cock images and offsetting the animation timings. It was a mess, and this problem has been killing projects since 2019. But, after two years of searching and experimenting, I've finally made a potential shader that solves this problem. It was an incredible amount of work to figure out, but this detour was absolutely worth it.

As for what my plans are for this week: more art, start writing, and code clean up. I still have more art to create for up-and-coming events. Additionally, I want to start writing out some of the sequence I already drawn. Finally,  I'm planning on cleaning up a lot of Chitinous Carnival's structure. I want to streamline the process of creating story sections, managing characters, and switching into interactive segments.

Also, if you have any questions about this effect, I'll try my best to answer them.