Soggy Horror November Devlog

Hey there, 

I finally got some time to sit done and do a render of the improved yet still WIP Bella model as well as do a devlog with what I have been up to in the month of November.

My two main priorities this month have been adding and touching up the unreleased accident animations for both the cultists and NPCs and exploring AI for the cultists and their different behaviors used against the player in their varying states. As of this writing I am looking into giving each of the main encounters different behavior such as giving deceptive cultists ways of tricking the players and more brutish cultists enraged states where they can charge at the player with reckless abandon but can be outmaneuvered if the player is quick on their feet. I am also working with a rudimentary director AI system that will encourage the AI to hunt down the player if they have been missing for too long and will penalize a cultist for chasing for too long. Usually in the form of a soggy or mushy diaper that requires a trip to the outhouse or nursery.

On the graphical side of things, I have also polished a few things that have been nagging at me for a while such as finally adding auto-exposure to the graphical pipeline which neatly solves the problem of already well-lit areas getting overexposed when shined with either a lantern or flashlight. I have improved the look and feel of the flashlight beam and made it able to illuminate much more especially when fully charged. Down the line, I will add an improved 2nd tier flashlight that will replace the old one when found by the player. Also on the graphical end, I have been going through environmental effects and effects for the cultists and their abilities.

With the interactive elements I have been slowly building up on there have been several improvements with cutscenes and NPC interactions which will eventually lead to making decent peaceful NPC interactions a thing for the supporting case when I really start building that up next year.

As for December, the dirty truth is I am still getting overworked at my main job due to a few recent departures and I did accept to go through a week-long out-of-state training stint next week, but I am still working on porting over the majority of the good content from Alpha 1 onto Alpha 2 with my limited. As I have stated in the past, the main reason I haven't been working on gameplay stuff and adding in objectives is it would be counter-productive since the way objectives and AI are coded is not compatible with the old system which really shouldn't be a shock to anyone at this point as I feel rushing out half-baked content just causes headaches down the line.

It really is worth reiterating that I really appreciate people's patience with this approach as it's generally unpopular. I suppose what I mean to say is that I will always be grateful that I have a following that doesn't ask me to burn myself out at every waking opportunity.

Peace.

-HP