I’ve spent the last few days working on the equipment system (video at the bottom), making its way in v0.2 and below I’m going to give you some details.
When you purchase a skin with in-game currency, you will get main 4 items, all of which containing a collection of things your Soma can wear:
- Head gear – hairstyle, glasses and so on..
- Body gear – shirts, pants, socks, gloves and so on..
- Lingerie.
- Accessories – earrings, rings, chokers..
My decision was to make a skin system similar to games like LoL or hero shooters, but make it better, by giving you these main parts listed above, which relate to a skin, so you can mix the “Head gear” from SkinA with “Body gear” of SkinB and Accessories of SkinC. Even more than that, you can unequip each individual part of the skin, for example the gloves and boots can be unequipped while the rest of the skin stays on. Imagine how awesome it would be if in hero shooters, you could mix and match, using a hairstyle from one favorite skin while wearing the outfit from another, well in Sombionic you could do that.
I’d say this is a system, that fits Sombionic’s scope and is an extension of the skin system you see in most games. The reason why I didn’t want to go with an RPG style inventory is because when you design each new shirt you have to worry if it’s going to overextend and clip into each of the pants models you have in-game (what if they are 200..).
Now both systems have downsides, the one I’ve decided to go with requires me to design a whole outfit + hairstyle before bringing it to the in-game shop, so a total of minimum 4 items (hairstyle, shirt, pants, boots), while in the RPG style inventory, I can just put gloves in the store and do the rest as time goes on.
In the next update, I will bring customization to each item, you’ll be able to change textures, colors and other shader-related things for each item and even turn-off certain parts of the items – for example the jacket, which is a part of the Lab-Girl skin has “top” and “bottom” part and you’ll be able to make each part invisible (see below).
There’s a new h-scene that’s a work in progress...
I’m hoping to get it done in the next few days and the only problem is that one of the characters is using a different scale in-engine (scaled up after rigging) while I’ve been told to never change scales after rigging and now I’m experiencing a lot of difficulties transferring the animation, my plan now is to unbind the bones, scale up the character, bind again and import the fresh scaled model in-engine.
As I’m wrapping things for the v0.2 demo, I want to tell you about the other small things I had to update in the meantime.
- Enemies can drop items that heal you upon interaction.
- Limit the amount of enemies and enemies of the same type that can attack you concurrently.
- Default crosshair, which is always visible even if you don’t aim with a gun. You can turn it off from the game settings, if you don’t want to see it.
- The player camera was moved to the right to give you a better view and going from non-ADS to ADS mode easier.