So, to start things off I just want to thank everyone who, favorited, voted on, donated on itch,io and anyone who just enjoyed The Busty Creeper. Also a big thanks to everyone who's become a fan. I know I'm not the best keeping you guys happy but it means alot and I appreciate everything. I wouldn't be doing any of this without you guys or at least put in nearly as much effort as I do, So again thank you guys so much.

But most importantly I just want to keep you guys up to date on what I'm doing, Honestly though, be prepared for a lot of me faffing about, I've said in the past I like to jump around between projects, but I'm getting alot better at focusing on one thing. But right now I don't have a big focus, just projects I need to get off the ground.

So while I sort that I out I just want to let you all know what's happening with Luka.

Luka's Current Design.

Now, I won't be too surprised if some of you hate this new design, it took me a while to accept it, but simply this is where things were being drawn. I wanted her to hold things, so I needed to have hands and fingers or atleast to make it believable, Without hands I was spending a lot of time trying to make her holding something and not look silly. SO, then once I added hands the hands on blocky arms just looked wrong, so I have to reshape the arms to look more realistic and I just hated the way it looked. one decision lead to another and I eventually got to where she is now. I must have iterated on just Luka alone hundreds of time, just small nitpicky things, like, you know, I think the boobs should be more like that, or are forearms too long, too short, or I think her feet look cute like this but not like that.

Basically Luka's design went in one direction and my minecraft girls went in the other.

Minecraft Girl Design.

As you can see there is a lot of common DNA between the two, but really what truley happened was I was getting frustrated with Luka's design or I should say the changes that I wanted to make just not working. So I went in the other direction, more blocky, more minecrafty, make that work. I sorta ended up solving a problem with one an brought it over to the other and vice versa. Or I decided that doesn't work here but maybe if I tweak it there.

Luka's design changed so much really because with her I wanted to make her distinct from Minecraft and the Minecraft Girl obviously I wanted to make her more minecraft.

With the more blocky design I was pretty limited in what I could do versus what I wanted to do and finding creative solutions to problems is always fun, it's just not what I wanted to do with Luka.That was exactly what I wanted to do with my creeper model, I spent a lot of time just trying to make her legs work on a fundamental level, like how would it even work!?

Peak creativity.

However with Luka that was not my goal and on top of that I have a lot of other issues I need to solve apart from character designs. Building blocky landscapes is a difficult and time consuming task. In the picture above I tryed to make the land mass in the background but eventually just became frustrated with how crap is was coming out and how much time it was gonna take for it not to be crap. so I said screw it, opened up minecraft, took a screen shot and called it a day.

I'm currently working on a tool that will aid in the world building process and today I just had a bit of a brain blast when it comes to solving a problem I wanted to solve for the longest time... slopes. Slopes are tricky not because they are somehow hard to add, they are tricky because you go from having one basic unit of geometry, a cube, to dozens. A east facing slope, a west facing slope, a north west facing outside slope, a south east facing inside slope and lets not forget about, sloped ceilings either. I tryed implementing this and it just became a nightmare ,so I decided to stop, this isn't working or at the very least is too complex for not much gain. I said to myself what if I just made everything a cube instead, and I was like yeah that could work that that's another nightmare of edge cases and arbitrary logic.

To demonstrate what I'm getting at with making everything a cube this picture will demonstrate the basic idea.

On the left is a stair-step shape, 90 degree angles and all, but on the right is the same shape just with the points that make it up shifted around just a smidge.

Left: Unsmoothed Stairs. Right: Smoothed Stairs.

my solution to this problem isn't quite so simple as move the points around but basically it is, but it's a general solution and not a mess of in this case do that and in this case do this, I haven't tested it extensively but I got high hopes it's gonna work.My old solution was on a per-block level but this one is on a per-vertex level and because of that it should just work.

But to circle back to Luka just for a minute, The major thing about the new designs is that It allows me to do more with out saying to myself how, I just have to do it. I desiged a bunch of peasants to populate Luka's world and none of them are done not by a long shot but the new designs just allowed be to really just try whatever because now I can change more than just the skin and hair, now I can really reshape the body and face and eyes and the clothes.so yeah I think I'm sticking with it.

Rough Peasant Designs (WIP)

Anyways, I hope you guys found any of that interesting if not, oh well. I am going to from now on do a bi-weekly post about what I'm working on. Just trying to keep you guys in the loop. I get a lot of questions and request from you guys. feel free to let me know what you think, what you want to see from me or any other thing,

And with that, See y'all again soon.