June Status Post!

 I made everything in this pic. Except the background. Bass Pro Shop is not affiliated with Goblin Layer.

New month, new news.

I decided to start using Blender(3d program for modelling + animation) for all renders and animations! I said before I was gonna do some other side-games to practice first, but in the end I said 'eh fuck it', I'll just make the move now. In fact, the latest Patreon version (0.54), has the first scene made 100% in Blender, involving an interview in the Town Hall. The learning curve has been pretty rough, which has slowed things down a bit, but it's getting there. First time I tried creating an outfit for a character it took me like 2-3 days lol, including texturing, optmizing and preparing for animation. Now I can do it in a couple hours.

I guess some might think, why even move at all? I talked about it before, but basically I kinda hit the 'roof' for what was possible in the old program, but with Blender the sky is the limit. There are scenes, quests, objects, characters and even future game ideas, that wouldn't even be possible to create if I stayed with the old program. There's also the quality. In the old program, if characters become too... curvy, you're gonna start seeing pointy edges due to the low poly-ness. After making the scenes in the old program, I had to spend a lot of time in various image editors to cover up all the flaws, as well as only uses certain poses, and putting the camera in certain positions to cover up the ugly parts of the models. This will not be a limitation with Blender.

...............

Anyway, regarding the actual game:

At the moment I am working on the next big quest. A mysterious request for "the Goblin Layer" arrives from the warm and sandy Southern Frontier. Previously ruled by the ancient Uwuptians until they disappeared, currently ruled by Catwomen. The crew sets off to find out what's it about. Bath Girl has a cameo role.

After this quest is done, and we're back in the main town, it's time for Goblin Layer to sort out some of his goblin-related psychological issues.

I had hoped to finish the Desert Quest in May, but as mentioned, things take a bit longer now, it's a bit of a transitional phase, but I think once I've gotten used through it, and the main characters and props are all set up, things are gonna speed up for sure. I will try my best to get the big quet done now in June.

And you might also get some smaller updates along the way! Right now I'm implementing a small quest-chain for the Town Hall girl. The idea is have an interview/reporting session after each quest, y'know an after-action report of sorts, which will become gradually more intense after each main quest. The first session is in 0.54.

...............

Two additional notes:

Blender handles light, skin shading and the rig/animation differently, which leads to a different look. I'm still getting used to it, and editing stuff, so the appearance should improve as I get better (along with the camera work). Gonna look over the skin maps in particular. This also includes the outfit(s). The actual 3d models will be close to the orignals though, maybe slightly thicker :)

Additionally scenes in the old program actually got a subtle filter that makes everything look a bit more cartoonish, while atm the Blender scenes are 'raw' 3D. It's perfectly possible to add a similar filter to the Blender scenes though. I will put out some comparative pictures later and we can vote on what you prefer.

...............

Technical notes:

Disclaimer: You probably don't care about this part.

I used the special SSGI build for EEVEE to render the recent Town Hall scenes. Blender also got another render engine call Cycles, which tends to look a bit better to be honest. But in exchange it's slow as fuck compared to EEVEE. So I went with EEVEE to keep up the pace. On top of that EEVEE's gonna get a visual upgrade in future Blender version.

Unreal Engine is pretty well-known for games, but it can also be used as a really fast render engine. Which got me interested. The main problem is not all materials/textures work out of the box when importing them, so while the rendering is fast, there's more prep-work when going from Blender to Unreal. I'm still running some experiments currently to see if the extra preparatory work is worth the faster rendering speed.

...............

Anyway, as always, thanks for your support and see you next update!