Hello everyone!
I don't know how about you, but for the past couple of weeks, I'm basically counting down every single day until September 19. Today we have 36 days to go, and it literally feels like yesterday when my mental counter was at 90.
The news that I'll be sharing today won't be reflected inside the demo, as these things are still very much in development.
Customers
(And all in-game characters in general)
What would be a mall without it's customers? Well, after a couple of weeks or months, there would probably be no mall, that's for sure. And the same goes for Mall Craze as well. Luckilly, Mall Craze is a game, so we were able to go without customers a little longer, but sooner or later they had to come.
That is what I've been working on over the last 30 days since the last update.
Creating customers
Creating believable-looking characters was always a bit of a struggle, as you can see here:
Animations
As the game's graphics evolved over the course of the development, so did the characters needed a new model and animations. Especially the rigging and animations were in need of better solution, as I've only used pre-existing animation database in the past, which produces results very fast, but can be limiting at times. If I wanted a full control over the character animations, I knew that I need to handcraft them. And that's what I did.
Hand gestures and facial expressions
Crating new characters from scratch gave me an opportunity to take a fresh look at their design. Design features that I've been always thinking about are hand and facial animations. These things really do bring customers to life. The characters now have more bones, and I had way too much fun with the new rig:
Giving our customers a new home
Time to move the customers from Blender to Unreal Engine. Here's a couple of screenshots from the process:
First steps.
Absolute chaos!
Lighting test.
Updated products and materials
Mannequins
Because of the new character models, I had to update some products as well. Most importantly - the mannequins inside the clothing store, as they were base off of the old models. The new character rig also gave me more control over their poses:
Other products
While I was at it, I also updated a couple of other products. The biggest viasual change was probably for the fridge and various accessories:
This visual update of products that were not very detailed before had a reason that I will most likely talk about in the next update.
Materials and their order
For some products (actually a lot of them), materials and their order didn't always made sense. One such example could be the piano, where it was previously impossible to change the piano and piano stool colors separately. In other cases, the order was mixed up. What would change the rack color on one product would change the color of something else on a different product.
I've remade the materials of majority of products to mitigate these exact problems.
The general order of product materials from now on should be something like this:
- 1 - 2 materials for the rack/stand/table
- 1 - 2 main product colors,
- everything else
36 days to go
With this countdown, it may seem like September 19 is the end of something, but quite the opposite is true actually. I can't wait to reach this milestone, and seeing how the game has transformed in the last few months, I'm really looking forward to the months to come!
See you in the next update!
Thank you everyone, and take care!
- Milan, developer
