Soggy Horror Dev update for first quarter of '24 1/2

Hey all, figured I would take a brief break from my usual night of game dev work to talk about what I have been working on these past 3 months for Soggy Horror. I'm going to break these down into 2 or 3 separate dev-logs since I'm still in the middle of a long work week. And I feel like I owe multiple devlogs for these past 3 months.

One area I've been struggling to make noticeable improvements is the game's physics for both gameplay and aesthetic purposes. One thing that always bothered me with the old builds is a lot of the softer interactable objects felt too stiff and dragging them around and crawling on them to access new areas was always a crap-shoot. I also felt that many of the cultists needed to come accross as more limber and the game should react correctly when they push objects around when chasing or searching for the player. 

To address this, I've been working with Soft-Bodies , cloth physics , and physic bones. I teased Soft-Bodies last year with this shitpost https://twitter.com/HodgePodgeDL/status/1611527908819931138 however I held off including it in the first 2 alpha 2 builds since the initial implementation was poor and far too restrictive. Since then I've been making slow but steady progress with it and expanding it so I can use it on characters as well. I've been getting some promising results on Bella's rather expansive body and I need to get better at opening OBS to share some of the work on that front.

Having good Cloth Physics is pretty much a no-brainer for this type of game and I've been getting better at using it for the cultist's clothing and hair to sell them as they are either stalking around or making a mad dash to you to make you a permeant resident in their nursery.  

The last area I've been heavily experimenting with is physics bones which essentially allows me to have a character interact with the game world so they kick or push objects that block their path to you or have a dragon character like Amber use their tail to clear a path to you when you are hiding poorly behind objects. This work always leads me to explore active ragdolls which means if ever implemented well in the future I should be able to have it set up so you can briefly knock out a cultist and have them ragdoll a bit and cause a good deal of chaos especially in a room full of objects before they get back up and continue their pursuit.

Tomorrow I will talk more about some of the new characters, AI, and environments. That will include the new caretaker characters, Amber the dragon cultist teased on the cover of this post and interactivity with characters and objects. Following that I will talk a bit about the short-term Depravity Quest revival.

The '23 artpack has not been forgotten and I'm working to upgrade a few renders and drawings before I push it since I feel like the value of picking it up just isn't there yet.