Desktop Mascot Engine - GamerzDan



This is one of the many to come Developer Logs in which we will try to preview some of the changes and list changes, updates and progress we are making or next things we are working on. We hope to get feedback from the community on present work and things were thinking to work on and implement after it.

## New Characters ##
We have added 4 new characters to our current set of Mascot Lineup from which you can choose your mascot to use.
We have added a Anime Girl, 1 low poly dragon, 1 dragon baby and a weird orange thing, which we have named "WeirdLittleThing" internally in the app. Don't ask how that came to be.








## Minor Updates ##
-Auto Animation change
Now the animation switches to a new animation once the previous animation has finished playing. Previously the animation would either loop or stop playing (well stuck at last frame). This change will further allow us to create a more dynamic and interaction/event based Animation Engine to give more dynamic and live feel to the character, as then the animations would change and play based on certain conditions in real time.

-New Logo/Icons
Yeah its still not upto the mark but we think it looks and feels way better than we we are currently using (more or less current one is plain text). Unfortunately, were a two man team and neither of us is too good at graphic designing. ːsteammockingː






## Current Roadmap ##
Here is what we are and will be working on next, with some estimated timeline of each feature.

-Character Sound Responses (May-2018~)
We plan to add voice and audio response for the mascot characters to make them feel more real, lively and interactive.

-Quality of Life Changes (May-June-2018~)
Including Windows Startup option, Steam Achievements, Better support for 2D characters and animations, improved character interactions and event handling, etc.

-Steam Workshop (June-2018~)
One of our priorities to enable the community to help us and fellow users by contributing more mascot characters, models, animations, artwork and possibly help us in rapid-development of the AI Assistant by helping us develop parts of the APIs and integration of various services.

-Use Custom 3D Model (July-2018~)
One of our priorities to enable you users to load your own 3D models or the ones available online. We intend to make this feature as simple and straight forward as possible and this will allow you to use much more 3d models and characters more freely, which otherwise we cannot provide or ship with our engine due to various copyright or other issues.

-AI Assistant (2018~/Monthly)
We have already started work on this and this will be a very large and vast component due to a vast diversity of feature requests we are getting. As such, we are creating the whole AI in component modules so you can only enable/load the functionalities or categories you want to use (like enable only movies part and disable Anime or utilities part, etc.)
We plan to release the AI as components and modules as regular bi-weekly or monthly updates.
We plan to start releasing this starting June-July 2018

-Settings Screen (2018~)
Yes, this is needed but were going to hold a bit to work on this to have more time to create a proper layout for this and what all settings we should let editable. There is also a internal discussion to keep settings web/cloud based due to certain reasons and compatibility with the AI-Assistant component once released.
For now we are keeping much needed settings configurable via hotkeys


--------------------------------------------

What do you guys think ? And should we add Steam Achievements ?
...