SATEC animation player (Public) (Edit 1)

Hello!

It's time I made the full detailed post for what I've been recently working on alongside the main game SATEC.

It's an animation player for the base animations you see in the SATEC game that are done in Spine 2D.

Which you can try out via the download links in this post! Though I'll just warn you, as I'm relatively new in using Unity and the coding language it uses. I have no doubt there are plenty of bugs/issue with the current versions and function over looks is the goal until near the end for the layout. Performance is also likely to be an issue on some machines as I've not done any optimizations yet (GPU usage seems relatively high from my early tests) and is something I'll look in to early on as I need to see if character resolution/mesh counts need to be reduced in Spine or not if it was to use this exclusively. And a last note on this, I've been doing some bug fixes right up until just a few minutes ago, so hopefully it didn't add any new issues that I've missed.

But why even make this..?

Well, it seemed like such a waste to rig up characters only to end up using it for a single animation and not have a bunch of variation at several points in the game (which I currently don't really want to do with the animations just being video files as they'll take up a very very large amount of room very quickly.)

So I wanted to start learning an engine that has the Spine 2D runtime, which would let me a do lot more CGs with variations a lot quicker, almost no increase to the game size, no waiting for renders. Of course at the cost of certain effects that's currently pre rendered and alternatives to such effects would have to be done either in Spine 2d or via another method in engine.

Which brings me to this simple animation player for the current Spine 2d animations in SATEC. It's something that I'll spend a little time on every now and then going forward. With my end goal to use everything I learn while working on this to eventually either make some sort of ported version of SATEC with significantly more CG variations (along with improvements to the base Spine animations and added randomization during the animation to make it more alive and less of just single loops) or use the knowledge for a another future project. Either of which is only planned to be after the current Ren'Py made version of SATEC is done. Though anything can change and this idea might be scrapped entirely.

For the Animation Player there will be two versions:

The public preview version, which you can check out for yourself and see exactly what it is without needing to be a subscriber. It will have a single character (don't worry I made it the most popular one, Lilia) and most of the same features as the Patreon version, excluding any new experimental ones in testing.

And a version for my Patreons ($5+ tier) which will have multiple characters and any early experimental features which will be things that aren't fully complete and likely to change significantly.

*As all the current animations weren't created with being used in a Realtime rendered scenario in mind (such as this animation player), they will require tweaks and changes. As such not all characters with all their animations will be available at the start, they will get added slowly as time goes on to catch up with the current list of CGs as the SATEC game is my main focus. All currently supported character CGs will be publicly listed below next to the download links along with any new features and kept up to date.

Current features (v0.11)(Public):

• Play a set of animations in loop preview mode for a released character*

*Certain animations for a character may be excluded due to needing more than minor changes, they however might still be added at some point in the future.

• Add animations to a timeline:

  • Have keyframes for each animation on a timeline of any duration you want.

    • Animation transitions won't loop without adding the same keyframe each time.

    • Animation loops will continually loop without needing to re-add the keyframe.

• Mixing animations:

  • You can use two different animations on two separate animation tracks (Main and Overlay) and set their mixing amount, letting you create variations that would otherwise not exist.

• Animation blending:

  • Set a time in second to blend in to the next animation on the same timeline track, so you can have a slow or fast transition to the next animation (make sure it's not longer than the keyframe animation itself).

• Custom background:

  • Add any png image as a background

    • You can add the background in your equivalent of the following path:

      C:/Users/"YourUserName"/AppData/LocalLow/AdrihelDev Games/SATEC Spine 2D Animation Player/UserAssets/Backgrounds

  • Scale or move it to the wanted position

• Color system:

  • Adjust the tint of the character and background

    • Each can be set independently from one another.

• Save/load:

  • Save/load the timeline and most other changes (background, tint, etc...) to separate saves.

• Settings menu:

  • Change resolution

  • Change window mode

  • Turn Bloom off/on
    

What this player doesn't have vs the in-game video file based CGs (at the moment):

• Any of the pre-rendered effects, such as:

  • Main energy drain effects

  • God rays

  • Distortion/blur

• Audio

• A few of the transitions/loops per character as they weren't made with the player in mind (likely to be added later when changes are made to make some of them work better)

Current planned features/goals (priority roughly in the order listed with top being highest/soonest)*:

• Performance options and optimizations where possible so it can run better on lower end machines.

• Some QOL stuff:

  • Select multiple keyframes

  • Edit existing keyframes

  • Custom character scaling

  • Etc...

• Finalize a way to do the glow effects for the CGs that can be isolated to a specific character and use keyframes along with color customization (eyes/tattoo/outline)

• Set custom color tint/hue for a character's features (hair, eyes, clothes... etc...)

• Energy Drain effects (via Spine 2d or some other way in engine, I'm not sure yet.)

• Normal maps based lighting system (I'm especially interested in this one, as it'll add some real time lighting to the character).

• Add screen effects that can be keyframed (blurring, vignetting, distortion, etc...)

• Expanded camera control (Including the option to keyframe its position)

• Audio (whether tied to animations or in some other way, I'm not sure yet, tricky with the overlay being able to alter animations).

• And once most of the above are done, an alternate mode that let's you make a CG similar to a game where you can have text and scenes only progress after the text is seen with some other features such as:

  • Add randomization option which uses a set of character animations (like expressions changes, blinking, slight body shifting...) to switch between at random to add more life to the animation.

  • Add and test an interaction system in a CG (like using the mouse to affect the character/cg in some way during an animation such as touching boobs or main character struggling).

• Final optimizations where possible

• UI improvements and final QOL features

• Reach a completed 1.0 version

• Make a CG built from the ground up specifically for the animation player to take full advantages of all the features.

• Look in to and try implementing buttplug.io or something similar

*This list is not final and will likely change with stuff added/removed as time goes on.

Current known issues to be fixed (added as they are known and removed when fixed):

• The animation might not play perfectly for the next keyframe on each track (Main and Overlay) if you start part way through, but should play fine afterwards. You can play one keyframe before the part you wish to see and it should be fine.

• The Overlay track ignores the first keyframed animation but plays fine after that. Just make sure to place a placeholder keyframe (preferably at 0 Blend Amount) at the very start of the Overlay Timeline Track and have the rest as you wish (if you don't use the Overlay Timeline Track, you can ignore this).

• Some combination of animations on Main/Overlay might not be fully compatible (usually ones that have different objects in the animation or changing opacity)

• When you right click to delete and try click off, it won't disappear if you clicked too close. Just click far away and it should disappear for now.

• Some Antiviruses will flag the Animation Player as a virus, this is a false positive and is possibly with how I did the save/load system. I'll try a few changes to this system to hopefully resolve this.

And one last thing before the download... Most things should be labeled and I hope not too hard to understand, but I've attached a quick guide image that should help a little. In the future I'll make more detailed images/guides/tutorials and add them to this post as they are made.

The Animation Player should load up with an example setup for Lilia and you can clear the entire timeline in the Esc menu by clicking reset to start your own.

Public version download link/s:

MEGA

*List of supported character CGs and any experimental features currently available for the Patreon Version (Updated as they are added).

Patreon version* download:

Patreon Post Link

*List of supported character CGs and any experimental features currently available for the Patreon Version (Updated as they are added).

Currently supported CG:

• Lilia cowgirl

• Selena cowgirl

• Victoria cowgirl

• Aziela boobjob

• Bellatrix facesit

Current WIP Experimental Features (Patreon version):

• WIP/Experimental color options:

  • Set glow colors independently in game for the following:

    • Outline

    • Eyes

    • Tattoos

  • Change none glowing parts of the Succubus such as*1*:

    • Hair

    • Clothes

    • Skin

    • Eyes

    • Demon Features (tail, wings & horns)

*1*Currently not supported parts per character for color change (Many require the assets to be separated, such as clothes and skin to be able to change them independently. This will be done once the feature is complete):

• Selena

  • Clothes & skin

• Victoria

  • Hair & skin

• Aziela

  • Skin

• Bellatrix

  • Skin & clothes

If you have any feature/ideas to add, feel fee to let me know and I'll consider it! But know the SATEC game is still the priority and as such this is likely to have extra slow progress, especially on the larger features.

If anything isn't clear, also let me know and I'll do my best to explain it or add the necessary image guide/tutorials.

And as I'm not a fan of having to make people who already supported me in the past subscribe again just for this, feel free to message me here if you want the Patreon Version and supported me in the past ($5+ tier, so if you had the $1 tier for 5 months, that's enough). I hope to find a better solution to this in the future if I can (likely done via discord).

Have a great day!

P.S.

Sorry for the longer than normal post, I hope it doesn't have too may mistakes. I'll likely make a combined post for both SATEC and this animation player in the future at some point to make it easier to keep track of the current features/releases in one place without the word soup.

P.S.S.

For those interested in pure SATEC game news, I'm currently working on reworked audio for the recent CGs (as well as some other improvements/additions suggested for them) as I've now expanded my selection of audio assets for sex CGs.