Hello everyone, welcome to the June 2023 devlog of Hack's Custom Night!
Every month, on the 20th, I'll go over what I have been doing over the past month/30(ish) days! I am very excited about this devlog in particular, because there is a lot to uncover as this game progressed in a more variety of ways since the last few devlogs. With that said, let's get right into it!
Art Assets
From the May 2023 Devlog, I mentioned how I can finally implement and allow other artists to draw their characters into the game.
Because we have a good amount of base room renders, characters can finally be added into the game (for real!) For a long time, there are a lot of characters that are programmed into the game using placeholders visuals. However, now that we have actual character drawings/renders in the rooms, seeing the characters work became much more astonishing to look at. You can go to the "Special Shader (Wobble Effect)" section to see the results, you'll know why it is there instead of here.
However, I do have these three samples of a character in the Red Hallway. Their name is Emma! A black wolf you have to purchase a specific plush for.
Unlike Ultimate Custom Night, in Hack's Custom Night, you are required to wait until the plush collector figures out what plush they want from you. Purchasing the wrong plush will add little to no effect on them. Additionally, if you have purchased the correct plush, the collector can be seen going to the Dining or Cafe Area to enjoy their plush!
Special Shader (Wobble Effect)
Unlike a lot of FNaF fangames, Hack's Custom Night aims for a more 2D art style approach that enables more expression and personality to its presentation. The characters can be drawn in different variations, the environment is more sharp and clear, and the UI designs have higher expression for better communication. Even with all of that drawn, I still wanted more details to be included or enhanced for the presentation.
For this instance, I wanted to create a "wobbly effect' that would make certain assets shake or "move' a slight bit. This is to make certain visuals have an "active" or "alive" state in which can communicate to the player for multiple different reasons. If you have played or seen OMORI, you may have noticed how multiple scenes have a "movement" effect even in its stationary state. That is because for each drawing or scene, they are drawn in a total of 3 times in order to achieve the effect. They move back and forth from a sequence from drawing variation "1 2 3 2" and repeating.
I wanted to achieve the same effect redraw a majority of assets of the game two more times to give it a wobbly effect. However, as I develop the game more, I realized that it would take a lot more time than I had anticipated. Making a wobbly effect with a drawing that takes two hours would take around six hours in total. That is when I asked for help...
I commissioned a friend of mine to create a specific shader to mostly eliminate the work of recreating a drawing three times. The results? Absolutely superb.
(Keep in mind that everything in this footage is a work-in-progress.)
As you can see Hack walking down to the end of the hallway, his visual presentation has a shaky effect where you can distinctively see him compared to the other visuals in the game. Normally from this effect, you would expect the amount of work to be 9 drawings in total from the 3 poses you have seen in the video. However, you would be wrong!
In the video, a shader is applied to the character layer to slightly shake or wobble in two variations from the initial drawing, meaning there is only 3 drawings in total created! There is a way to make an "infinite amount of variations" with the shader I have, however I am still going to go for the original sequence for the sake of consistency.
The one who created the shader is "NaitorStudios!" He has helped my project in many ways regarding its technical work and some assistance. I really feel he deserves some support. He creates Clickteam extensions, shaders, and even enhances anyone's projects or any old properties!
To any Clickteam Fusion developer or potential supporters, please support "NaitorStudios" on any of these websites/social media below! He is a long-time Clickteam freelancer who is a moderator on the Click Converse Discord Server and Forum, creates extensions, ports and polishes shaders, and optimizes others' games!
Technicalities
Ever since the programming break, I went all out on getting so much work reprogrammed and done. Getting all the quality assurance and new obscure features done.
Gamepad Cam Switching
Using a gamepad, you can now roam around the map switching cameras! Just hold the Right Trigger, roam using either Joystick or D-Pad, and press the A button to switch cameras! There are four variations to simply switch cameras.
OFF (or Traditional): Using the in-game joystick mouse controls, you can press the A button to click on a camera.
Type 1: You can auto-select a camera while roaming to each camera.
Type 2: You can select a camera while roaming to each camera using the A button.
Type 3: You can select a camera while roaming to each camera using the A button or letting go of the Right Trigger.
Dynamic Character AI System
When I returned to programming, I wanted to see if I can potentially replace all of the character programming with one entire system. What lead me to that point was considering how categorized characters like the duct climbers are programmed nearly the exact same way with slight variating speeds.
Because of that, I had created a new and final character AI system that can handle EVERY single character within the game! So instead of five duplicated programming lines each duct climber, there is only ONE system for ANY amount! And the best part? I can still make each of the characters unique to each other!~
This is the best I can really demonstrate this, but here you can see there is a huge amount of duct climbers displayed on-screen. In the actual workframe, there are 20 active duct characters with NO additional programming besides some parameter changes.
What does this mean you may ask?
The idea of being able to manage different categories of characters will make programming and management much easier to bare with. If there's enough interest, it may be possible I'll create an entire Character Mod Loader! Although keep in mind, I will not be creating that straight away anytime soon. It's not exactly because of the overambition of the project, but I primarily rather have everyone play the main campaign of the game first before I add any bizarre additions. I don't know, I will have to think about what I am doing.
Nearly 5 Years of Developing Hack's Custom Night
Yep, you've seen that right. Almost 5 years ago, June 28, 2018, is when Hack's Custom Night has first started development, at least I believe so. During that night, I was gifted the vanilla Clickteam Fusion 2.5 to start developing the game. From that point on, it has changed my life forever.
Unfortunately, I do not have anything to celebrate that milestone knowing how busy I am IRL. I can't promise that development of this game is gonna continue going smoothly forever, nor it'll have some sort of release. But hey, even if this project goes down, I did at least try to create something at least somewhat special to everyone? I dunno.
Anyway, that is all I have to say for this post. I hope everything I have showcased here would satisfy at least someone. I cannot wait for more progress for the next 30 days, one of the days being my birthday (July 2nd.) lol
Have a good day/night, everyone! Thank you for your continued support.
— Hack 💜
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