Hello everyone and welcome to our end of week devlog for Dead Heat!

We haven't done a devlog since Halloween, so we are well overdue for one. And we have a ton of progress to look over.
We planned to have phase 1 of the demo ready by Halloween, but that was honestly an unrealistic expectation at best. There was simply far too much to do and do right before we could move on to phase 2. Including characters, character animations, dialogue, evidence, puzzles and cutscenes that all needed attention.

There was simply too much to do. So instead we will be working towards a far more realistic goal of mid-December for the last of Phase 1 to be completed. This is all in between other responsibilities, so the deadline may be pushed back depending on how busy we all are.
In the past few weeks, we have made great progress with the textures and animations of the characters. One issue we noticed with the old character models was that their textures were very low quality, and had some discoloured pixels in places. In fact, you can see this in the banner for the game.

We soon found out what was the issue. By default, unity sets the compression of textures to Normal Compression (naturally). However, this compression is a little too overzealous with its quality reduction and will result in pixel discolouring such as below Sonja's eye, or around where her corset starts and her breasts begin. (it's ok to stare)
We increased the texture compression quality to very high, allowing the textures to show off their detail without compromise.

And of course, it's black and white Noir variant.

We created new models for Sonja and Lilith which now feature faces segmented into eye and mouth meshes to change their textures separately to create new faces. The way we went about this was originally to change the offset of the texture sheets created by our artist, however, this proved to be time-consuming and largely inaccurate, so we instead copied the standard sheet into however many expressions we needed, then replaced the bottom left face with the face that texture would show off. That way, we could create new materials for each eye and mouth expression, while giving AC the textures it needed for its expression handling. 

Sonja's expressions

The expressions eyes and mouths can be mixed and matched on the model to create more expressions than are on the sheet.
This made lip-syncing possible for our characters. We experimented with Sonja first so we could get the method down right. For Sonja to have lip-syncing, she needed a lip-sync component and a separate mouth mesh. Once she had them, AC needed phonemes (the shape your mouth makes to form words) to map each mouth texture to its appropriate phoneme. 

Sonja's lip-sync is now up and running and looking good!

While working on the lipsync, we also worked on Sonja's blinking animation. This required the eye texture to have its animator to handle the blinking. The blinking textures had a little bit of a bump as you can see above. The blinking issue was quickly resolved.

Soon, the same would be done for Lilith. Her model would feature the same range of expressions that reflect her character.

And Just like with Sonja, she got her blinking animations to give her more life (figuratively speaking).

After Lilith's animations were ready. We looked into Glen Bishop. As stated in the last devlog before Halloween, Glen's old design was not very interesting. His new design added much more personality into his look. The look of an aged man who had seen much of the world and didn't particularly care for it. And his range of expressions reflects this.

Originally, the plan was for only his human eye to blink, however, this design decision was not communicated to our artist before the animation was ready. Upon testing, I realised that the cybernetic eye blinking made a strange kind of sense. After all, lenses need to be cleaned somehow. And Bishop would want the best to replace his eye. So what if there were some models of eyes in the world that didn't have cybernetic eyelids? They would need to be cleaned manually each day or whenever they got particularly dirty. After a while, seeing out of that thing must be hell. So perhaps having an eyelid for your eye would be beneficial. At least to those who could afford it.

After all the characters were set up. We moved onto our next challenge. Having Glen react differently to what scenario is currently running. The game will randomise what Glen will do when you talk to him at the end of the alleyway. In some scenarios he will simply leave with the body, in others, he will follow either you or both you and your partner up to the apartment and help you search around for evidence since you didn't get a proper tour around by CSI (kind fella, isn't he!). Getting the following and animations ready for a third character wasn't too difficult, but was time-consuming. It was by this point I realised the absolute absurdity of trying to get all of this done and more by Halloween.

In future, I will endeavour to set better and more realistic time frames for deadlines.
Currently, we now have Glen following the player into the apartment alone and with your partner.
Thank you for reading our devlog. This has been a long time coming and we hope to have another one next week. I would just like to add a big thank you to everyone that has followed us in the interim and getting us to 246 followers. Welcome to the Dead Heat community!
We hope you will join our discord to ask us any questions you may have on the project, receive updates on any new content added to the game!

Hope to see you next time, until then. Have a better one!