66.6 Percent Live2D

Where did all the time go?

So... I dove in and decided that if I'm already using Live2D in the game for various animations, I should also utilize it for character sprites. I debated it with myself. The upfront cost to produce Live2D models is quite expensive. There's a lot of scenarios in which I might need a new sprite and can just go and draw a new one, and I can just expense my time as that comes up. However, as a Live2D model, I can set a handful of parameters to generate a new pose.

Live2D models plug into NaniNovel easily. The only issue I came across was that there's not necessarily a great way to handle multiple outfits. For whatever reason, Live2D says that their Expression feature has been deprecated for the Unity SDK, that if someone needs to change outfits you'd need to create a script and then code something into the LateUpdate function of Unity where it performs that action every tick... something something... my head hurts trying to think what I needed to do...

So... Playmaker it is.

I absolutely understand why the NaniNovel dev doesn't want to support Live2D Expressions when the Unity SDK documentation says it's been deprecated.  But that means I had to jury-rig something together.

There is an Expression Controller script built into the Unity SDK (which confuses me to no end), and if I can't update it directly through NaniNovel, I can use Playmaker as an intermediary. In the NaniScript I assign a GLOBAL VARIABLE (the outfit number for Wren) and trigger a Playmaker EVENT that tells the FSM(finite state machine) to update the Expression Controller with the outfit number.

I was fully prepared to export every character pose/animation with each outfit variant... a .motion3 file is roughly in the double-digit kb in file size. Playmaker was the most elegant solution I could come up with. Probably not the best out there, but it works and I'm quite happy with that.

With it being the end of the year, going to reflect a little here.

Yup. I should know better than to scope creep. Much like, I should know that I shouldn't have updated to NaniNovel v1.19  while everything else was working just fine. It did only take a week to rebuild after that. And I certainly know that rebuilding all my sprites as Live2D models is a pretty extensive rework...  I'm going to try not to kick myself too much over it. All the pieces are in place... and the list of what needs to go in before I build the alpha version:

• Place the Actors into their places in their script and assign their 'pose/animation'.
  • Continue to build the library of poses. Placeholders are fine.
    • Tinting the Actor to remind myself that it's a placeholder.
  • Characters should at the very least have the right outfit for when they're outdoors vs indoors.
• Assign the relevant Background pieces.
  • Greybox/Flat BGs can stand-in until I do some shading passes.
• Triple-Check for dead-ends.
  • One of the reasons I wanted to update to v1.19 was because the updated VSCode extension now checks if there are no destinations for any links--and that's extremely helpful for how scatterbrained I am.
• NSFW Flags
• Get it into the hands of my Alpha-Testers.
  • I can also test various Unity builds to see how they behave, PC, Android, WebGL. (I use iOS... so RIP me)

Once it's out for Alpha-Testing, that's ample time to go in and make the missing character poses/animations, finish the backgrounds, work on several of the Cutscene CGs. UI Customization...

Haha, really no rest for the wicked.

If you've made it this far, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I appreciate you and your time. It's been a particularly tough year, plans fell through on a few big things. Overall, it's on rolling steadily toward something playable.