Gladiator Dev Update - Week 3.1

Hallo all, been a bit quiet while I've grinded on this but I've managed to hit a milestone so I thought it would behoooove you all to see where we're at!

The gladiator model is, finally, done! Or at least, done to an adequate level to allow me to put it in the Unity Engine and actually make a game out of it. The mp4. footage has been included below of the animations I'll be using, just some idles, a squirm, and a tentative use of a 'fade into being a drone' animation that we'll use as a stop-gap until I have the leisure time to do the version I have in mind. Above you may, of course, see the individual greyscale images of the different equipment the gladiator will be inflicted with by their opponents as it goes on, ballet heels, armbinders, headmasks, etc.

These are all greyscale as the colours are going to be applied in-engine, thus allowing you to change colours to customize your gladiator a wee bit! Which is just as well, as though I have outlined other hair designs, I'm aware that in order to deliever anything remotely timely I've had to basically just give you the option of 'short and spikey' or 'bald' for hair designs currently.

Suffice to say, I way overcooked on doing this model even with corner cutting- Also, I think maybe rather than Live2d something a bit more spline-y would go better, with a skeleton and things like that, but I feel that'd be a stop-gap measure for the more fun expressiveness I'd want the models to eventually have, so that's ok.

Glad Gaming and Release

Tomorrow, we start the task of 'drawing the rest of the owl' i.e. getting the actual GAME part of this together. I feel I'm maybe 5 days at least behind schedule, so we'll be rolling a little bit into hypnovember, but I think that's probably okay. I think probably the thing to do will be that when I get the battle-system up and running, I'll release that to you all here on the patreon/substars for you to enjoy and so you can offer feedback/what you might like to see more of while I do a smidge more splash art for a week to plonk in the menus/polish it up a little for a public release.

I'm not sure I specifically stated my goals for this project, but I think I'll be able to hit them all-

• Make a game for more community events, with chances for poll options/higher-tier additions

• Learn multiplayer coding for future projects (Important for the more complicated ponygirl game that I stalled on due to said difficulties)

• Learn how to apply shaders to Live2D models in a useful manner (mainly to be used in Reorientation, but useful for pretty much every project)

After the public release is done, other than the odd weekend per month to add in new content or a discord tournament, we'll be back to Volition and Reorientation as per. I'm very much looking forward to getting back to both, to be honest!

I post somewhat more glib but frequent gamedev updates on my bluesky if you want to keep up with how the coding's going to go; elsewise I'll see you again in around a week/a week and a half!

Ciaoooooo