It’s been another month of development and with that, I realized that top-down art style I had originally chosen for the game wasn’t a good fit. Originally I wanted to use VN style for the cutscenes, but swapping between the two styles turned out to be very jarring. The top-down style doesn’t show enough of the character so adding them to a cutscene was kind of pointless.

So I switched over the sprite style to something closer “enter the gungeon” and decided to merge the two styles in “persona 4” cutscene way. This allows more motion then a VN could provide but still retains the personal aspect. Lucky for me I haven’t hired anyone to do the art yet, so it only cost me time.

Doing it in this style basically set me back because I had to reprogram everything. AI and basic movement didn’t work anymore and getting the gun to rotate correctly became much more challenging task. But it looks better than “enter the gungeon’s” rotation.

So here is an intro cutscene from new characters with one of the endings. Keep in mind this is still all temp art so more proof of concept than the final product.

 

 

Rant on Unity Timeline:
Unity animation set up kind of sucks. I am currently using unity’s timeline for my animation and I’ve hooked it up to my dialogue script to give it a better controller of when to play animation sequences but there is no clean way to access script information. I believe this has to do with unity being artist-focused, but come on. The closest thing I have working is a signal Receivers but there just pre-loading information which is not Timeline specific, so if you change it, it affects that object across the board.
Example; if you want to change the direction the character is facing instead of giving them an angle, you have to make a “unique signal” for each angle and call it. (you can also do this in an animation clip but it’s not visual clean)