Finishing Week 3 Hugging, Beginning Week 4: Mini Games

Hugging has been finished and also been integrated to work with the other behaviors. An "angry" variant has also been added to work differently when she is in an angry mood:

When she is angry, she will become slightly embarrassed and will lean back as you approach her while hugging. Hugging has also been simplified to not require any buttons. Merely placing your hands behind her torso in a hugging fashion will trigger the behavior.

When she is happy she will gladly open her arms for you and hug you. There are also now sounds playing when you hug up close:

It worked very well in VR. A new feature I added for VR is the ability to free one of your hands while hugging if your hand is above her head, effectively allowing you to headpat her with one hand and hold her torso with the other. Another interesting thing I ran into while testing was the ability for her to hug you backwards. This was originally a bug and was not intended to be a thing but it was kinda cute so I kept it in:

This variant is kind of hard to trigger but walking backwards into her triggers it sometimes.

 The first Beta for this will be released tonight for you to try out.

Week 4 started on Wednesday and I've had a lot done in preparation for the community voted new feature: a mini game. First, the type of mini game that I've decided to implement is UNO but with a twist. See, if I made a deck of cards for UNO, I wouldn't be able to reuse those card models for anything else besides UNO. And well, gamedeving is all about optimizing your workflow and resources. Therefore I decided to remake UNO with a standard Poker deck of 52 cards and call it DOS (also dodging legal issues with Mattel). This game will play similarly to UNO but with the bonus of allowing me to reuse the poker deck for other games.

And so I sat down and started brainstorming ways for me to make my own deck of cards for my game. It was an interesting problem because 52 cards sounds like 52 textures with 52 models. That doesn't sound very manageable. So I began writing a script that would build the card models for me in a procedural fashion. This would save me the texture and model space and make it easy to edit designs on the fly. First I made a table of what I needed.

Card numbers; 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

Suits: Heart, Spades, Clover, Diamond

Special: Jack, Queen, King, Ace, Joker

I then built a PNG with all the designs for this table:

Then in a script I pulled out different cropped sections from this texture and built a model for every kind of poker card:

Cards therefore have a "Number" attribute: 1-10 is a number, 11 is Jack, 12 is Queen, 13 is King, 14 is Ace, and 15 is Joker.  And a "Suit" attribute: Heart, Spade, Clover, Diamond.

To reuse as much texture space as possible, I colored a certain section of the texture red if the suit was a heart or diamond (because those are the only suits that are red), the rest of the texture is taken as it is. And with that I made my own optimized Poker deck:

When I say "optimized", I'm referring to the texture space and draw calls for each object. The naive way to make your own Poker card would have been to have your own texture for each card but that can be bloaty and offer poor texel density. My cards are high resolution because I packed everything I wanted into a single texture. Everything can also be batched into a single render call with instancing without changing textures too (because again there's only 1 texture for all 52 cards).

I couldn't think of a design for the Joker I let one of our web devs pick a design.

So I will be using this deck to implement DOS. Each card is a regular item that you can grab and pickup. However I may need to implement a way to hold multiple items in your hand. Hopefully that does not eat too much time from development time.

Oh and also the Game Launcher is almost almost ready.

Stay tuned!