(Posted originally on our blog)

Hi guys!

This week we finally got back to work with full force, we started tackling Oirbo character final design and animations and the whole loading/unloading of each section and areas.

Funny enough, we spend the whole week thinking about Stellar Interface. Why? Because we remember exactly the point in time where we did the "main menu - game - main menu" loop, and it was a clear turning point on the whole development. In SI case, 6 weeks later we launched on Steam early access. This is something that won't happen with Oirbo (we still need a few more months) but mentally reaching this milestone enhances our commitment and overall motivation, since somehow the crappy menu makes the game feel more like a game. It's a sensation hard to explain, but somehow this makes us feel like there isn't a way back now, the only path is forward and there is no time for doubts.

The unimpressive gif above somehow cleared our doubts and the overall feel of project stagnation that we had since we finished the Nature Area, Not bad for stock unity buttons xDD.

That being said, there is a lot of under the hood work to make something like above work, especially since we want to work on the same Unity Scenes that you will eventually play, that means that we need to have 2 different load systems in place for development and actual builds, so we spent a couple of days tweaking that in order to boost productivity in the long run.

On the character side of things, we finally dropped dragon bones and started animating stuff directly on Unity. The export and Dragon Bones plugin was causing too many issues and nuisances for us, so our Eggwad booted up Unity and started playing. After a few hours, we had solid control over the animations, so expect greater animations for the future.  (FYI we are using Unity "Native" 2D skeleton animation)

The menu system as we said is up and running, the most bothersome part here is the usual controller support and control over which object is active. On Stellar Interface, we fixed this by removing the mouse entirely of the game, this time we know better and our UI will be controlled both by the mouse and keyboard/gamepads. For this, we thank ourselves XD, the work that we did on Stellar Interface was really spotted on an although it lacks a bunch of functionality, it just works! (Honestly, I made the system and don't remember how it all works now, but don't really care xDD)

The final progress made last week was the start of our loading system, it will still take a while to be fully functional, but the first steps are taken, meaning that we can start stitching up all content that we've made until now.

This week, we will try to finalize the first iteration of the loading system, with individual area load and unload and integrate it with our already functional section loader/unloader. This one means that we finally have to do some Switch tests in order to double-check that everything goes smooth on it too, so hopefully, we will have some cool surprises this week for you guys ;)