We are still missing a human made title screen and logo; I considered trying to bring an artist into the team but it might be just too late. Talking with Alcaraz he suggested he could work a basic logo and for the title screen we could use a render of the scene and Miku; I think that’ll have to do, and probably will look great! I’m still considering bringing my sister to work on the logo, but she’s been busy.
Lately it feels like there’s not a lot much to do besides waiting to integrate new art… I did something that was annoying me a bit and it was about the loading bar, which seemed to jump randomly. Turns out the way we are loading assets doesn’t await for all the resources to be loaded to be enqueued, so we don’t know in advance how many of them are there, hence the random jumps. I had to work around that and also account for the final phase of song playback readiness which is included in this loading cycle as well and had to be represented in the loading bar somehow.
After doing this, I went to playtest a bit in mobile; found out a detail that had to be addressed: some of the default browser gestures, like punching to zoom, were damaging the player experience, so I disabled them.
What else should I work on? As I played a bit more I saw there was something missing to make Miku feel more alive: eye expressions. I went back to work on using the morph targets that Alcaraz set up in the model, but then I found out we will probably need some additional controls in order to create wink :0 and kawaii face ^^ expressions.
For now, the control allow us to create “deep in the feeling” and “princess” faces, which already give a lot of life to the model; I put this alongside the looping blinking animation, and also made it so that the mouth “openness” values are lerped (very quickly) instead of set instantly, which looks less robotic.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 