Updated player UI, not it shows the current weapon level and experience bar, move the mana bar to a bar as well and added a new more compact design. Also I updated the Skill menu with new illustrations I made myself for each playstyle. I will me adding more content now on until the release.
For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been working on making the cut scene – the first one, which would introduce the first part of the story to the player. What I’ve learned is that it’s much harder than I thought.
My assumptions before starting
I thought that since I have experience with animations and key framing, I would have ease going through the cutscene animations. After all, I have rigged characters ready to animate, all I need is a reference footage and I can start animating! Spoiler alert -> I was wrong. So very wrong.
Characters
Even if you have rigged characters, you might not have what you need. There are countless amounts of different rigs that different engines use to animate a character. E.g. Some characters might have 25 bones on their face just to control their expressions, others might just have 1 head bone because they don’t require facial expressions. They might be okay with just the head movement
3d Software
It took me 2 weeks just to get comfortable with Blender – an open source 3d software that many indies like myself use for animations, modelling and sculpting etc. The community is amazing and supportive, I had tonnes of people volunteering to help out. A special shout out to fudgenuggets87 whose great advice on reddit encouraged me to start learning blender.
Reference Footage
Note to self -> It’s impossible to record your own video from an orthographic view rather than a perspective view. It’s impossible to align your own reference footage with the animation because there will be no amount of angles that you can use to compensate for the fact that your camera has only 1 lens. And if you don’t use a reference footage, you risk animating your characters a little too cartoonish. Here’s what I mean:
Trying to sync the movement with my reference footage. Note how the feet and arms are not aligned fully because of the perspective of the camera So where am I now?
Finally, now I am fluent enough with Blender to produce an acceptable animation. But still, it takes me 3 hours to do about 15-20 seconds right. Having said that, All in your head game will not have more than 3 3 or 4 minutes of animated cutscenes. So I think we’re good for as far as the timeline is concerned.
Here’s a sneak peak of the new features of the level. What do you think?
As always, feel free to comment your feedback, email me or follow me on twitter. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you in the next one.
The human mind reels at the enormity and consequence of time that must follow from the fact that The Shrouded Isle came out in a year with a seemingly reasonable number (2017) and yet this means that, at time of writing, the Earth has revolved around the sun a full 5 times and is halfway towards a sixth!
It's been some years, is what I'm saying.
In honor of Lovecraftian Days (click through the banner at the top of the store page to find other eldritch delights), we're opening a portal through time to look back and ask the Kitfoxes of yesteryear a few questions, such as...
What is The Shrouded Isle? Why is The Shrouded Isle? How is The Shrouded Isle?
Surely you have no holidays of "rebirth" and "springtime" to attend tomorrow! So join us, you straggling remainders of the Houses past, to peer into the wonders of bygone eras:
Stream 1: Sunday April 9, 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern Stream 2: Sunday April 9, 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern
The spawn of a game jam, nurtured from a spore of potential, this game has since flowered and now reclines, sated, perhaps even bloated, with the adoration of the many it has consumed.
The last couple of weeks we've been showcasing the new Boss Battle. This week we implemented the ability to triggers links during each phase of a Boss Battle, allowing the designer to create custom fights! We'll be testing the new system and seeing what changes need to be made!
We'll be interacting with the chat so feel free to come chat with us and share any questions or suggestions you might have about the game.
We stream Super Dungeon Designer every Friday at 8:30pm ET on Twitch and to our Steam page.
Give us a follow on Twitch to get notifications when we're live:
FIXED - Picking up Tranquilized animals from cart or truck would sometimes display them as dead and could not be added to the Barn. FIXED - Dropped dead animals into a river could not be recovered. FIXED - Some info popups when looking at the stove would not go away until you look at another item/object. FIXED - Cart would sometimes clip through the floors in some POI buildings. FIXED - More Mike related issues. FIXED - Could not attack AI with Axes and Pickaxes. FIXED - AI would sometimes magically jump through doors. FIXED - Tech book blank page. CHANGE - More optimization of meshes and textures.
We're release date official and you don't have much longer to wait. Until then, why not check out the demo as all progress transfers to the full release. And please do Wishlist us, it helps the game enormously!
You can also check out a brand new overview trailer which shows off the game in full. You may even learn a few things you didn't know before.
Thank you for all the kind comments and feedback you've left us. We appreciate every single one and are so very excited for you to check out Mr Sun's Hatbox on April 20!
So much has happened behind the scenes since the last Steam announcement. Working on improving development methods, squashing bugs and getting feedback from testers is only a fraction of it. We've also looked into including Elin on Steam Deck and requested a testing kit, found great tools to track development goals and worked on some things that we want to surprise the community with.
For those who are interested, we want to give one last reminder of the other platforms we interact with.
