Speaking of that, I realized from last night's stream that there's currently no slot available on the Prototype's equip menu for the kusarigama. I guess that menu was going to be given an intense overhaul anyway, huh? I hope you guys can manage to keep the weapon-swapping nice and quick in the finished version.
Currently the 5th weapon is Weapon Switch + the All-Block button, which works fine. Switching is still R1 + another button, and will remain as simple as that. We don't have to show the slot for the 5th weapon until you get it, which means by then you'll be used to switching weapons. We tried press-Weapon-Switch-and-release-without-choosing-something to go back to Bare Hands but that sucked.
Since different weapon designs (Not just palette swaps) can't easily be added the animators can use transparent parts of the weapon to make different weapons. So think of it like this. [snip]
Oh, sounds so
easy, why didn't we think of that? </sarc>
We
did this, for Parasoul's glasses and other things on SG.
You want an explanation of why it is not feasible? No problem, here you go:
If the weapon is in the same art as the character, then you need transparent-weapon-color-on-top-of-character-shirt, so that you can make that color match the shirt color when that part is not present. AND you need transparent-weapon-color-on-top-of-character-pants, transparent-weapon-color-on-top-of-character-skin, transparent-weapon-color-on-top-of-hair, etc, a separate color for EVERY COLOR that SINGLE transparent part can overlap.
And you need DIFFERENT colors for any OTHER transparent parts, so that you can make them different colors from each other when they aren't transparent; so it becomes "transparent parts * character colors" additional colors, which quickly outnumbers the initial palette. It's a nightmare both to draw/clean up and to palettize in-game.
AND, each of those transparent parts must be a
flat color, because it cannot be shaded to match the weapon part since the shading has to match the contours of whatever is underneath when that part is transparent. Otherwise you would see the weapon part's shading in her shirt, for example.
Parasoul's glasses are a single flat color when they are present, and just to do that Parasoul's palette includes the following:
Glasses (above background color)
Glasses above hair
Glasses above face
Glasses above eye
Glasses above iris
Glasses above eyeshadow
and it only stops there because her glasses are very small and limited to only overlapping her head. If she were holding them in her hand, she would need an entire duplicate palette that was just glasses-over-every-other-color.
(If the weapon is in a separate layer, that's great because all you need is transparent-weapon-part color...but if the weapon is in a separate layer you can just swap it out anyway...but then you have to position it for every frame as well as drawing it to match specific animations, which is even more work, which is why we aren't doing that either, see below.)
I can see how others would be able to run with this and do something
We ran with it already, for Beowulf's chair. We ran with it already, for Robo-Fortune's headlight. We have
done it already for over 3,000 frames. We KNOW how much work it is, and we KNOW whether the tradeoff is worth it. If we were doing puppet-style animation like Vanillaware it would be easy, and we wouldn't think twice about it, but we're not.
Look, I appreciate that people want to chime in with suggestions. I DON'T appreciate when I say, "We already considered this/have done this/know how much work this is compared to what we want for the game," and people continue to chime in with suggestions. I'll back my
thang statements up with facts, because we're like that, but I'll get annoyed in the process. (^.^)
I was asking cause I was quite sure there was talk, near the beginning of the campaign, about just buying better weapons from shops after we unlock the originals.
Still not sure about this, since we are actually trying to hella avoid shops; but "better weapons" can be "upgrade the blue spear to the green spear".