Hello everyone!!

I am BACK to being active again!! I've just been taking a big break from all of that activeness, which tbf, I will never be able to keep it up so consistently, but I'm sure y'all don't care about that lol.

Anyways, about ANaB 2. Like I said before, development on programming has been pretty stationary. But when it comes to EVERYTHING ELSE, it's going pretty great!! I'd say that overall, considering all the scripts I have to write, about 49% of writting is done and still going!

Due to the way Dreams handles models, the expessions and lip syncing on human characters are not gonna be made by distorting the face, but rather, by having different mouth shapes that can be turned on and off to give the slight illusion that the character is speaking. To clarify, models in Dreams are solid and cannot be deformed, the closest thing to that that is in the realm of possibility is stretching the entire model up, down or to the sides.

There ARE some people that managed to pull off a rig that doesn't need different models of the mouth, by seperating a bunch of the pieces of the mouth and making keyframes that control the shapes it does. But we tried doing that, and because the humans' designs are a bit cartoonish, their faces were too smooth to make those cuts seamlessly. The reason it works better on more realistic human faces is because humans have a bunch of wrinkles, which helps hide the cracks of the face.

Therefore, I had to sacrifice a bit of the quality of the animations in cutscenes in order to make the character at least look like she doesn't have Heath Ledger Joker scars on her face bru

Here's two screenshots of the tests that were done with the method we're going with:

These were merely tests tho. As much as I'd like to have these cool expressions where the mouth is slightly to the side, it would look odd when it came to animating her lip sync, cuz you'd just see her mouth snapping to a different position instead of staying in the middle.

And if we were to include these, we'd have to make 3 different sets for every mouth shape, so as to not break the the already flawed illusion that she's moving her mouth. But adding that would occupy a great load of every scene the model would be added to, causing us to have to lower the details on certain models like the animatronics and the human characters themselves (yes Dreams limitations are a bitch and a half).

So unfortunately, when the human characters talk, it'll look like they came straight out of Minecraft: Story Mode 💀

Now, some cutscenes had to be scrapped and are now in the process of being redone using newer models. They're gonna have to be a lot simpler, since you can't just transfer animations to different rigs in Dreams, so I'd have to reanimate EVERYTHING. And it's a LOT to reanimate!!

So, for the sake of time AND my sanity, they're gonna be a lot simpler. BUT, to compensate for the lack of cool animations in those specific cutscenes, I rewrote the entire script of those cutscenes to fit their new aesthetic. And I LOVE what I've written so far!! A part of me feels that these are actually better than the old ones, for the simple fact that now the script was optimized for story telling, making the old script for these cutscenes feel almost kinda flat and uninteresting imo!!

So, yeah! That's what's been going on!

I really love the way this is going, even if programming is a bit slow atm!

And please, don't flame me for having this game in the works for over 3 years.

There have been a lot of ups and downs in development, but I don't plan on giving up this game. Only things that could potentially cancel it would be either my death or Dreams' servers shutting down.

I wanna take my time with this game to make it a fantastic sendoff to the Dreams PS4/PS5 Community as I transition into UE5 and Blender with Bobby's Rewind!!

Anyways,

SEE Y'ALL ON THE NEXT DEVLOG!!