Added a time warp component to the meditation ability to make it seem as though meditation just flies by for Juda!

All righty all of you cool people. My wife and I have packed up our entire life and are starting the long journey to Michigan (from Oregon) tomorrow! We will be on the road for a while as we plan to take our time to see some cool things I have never seen before. Among them are the red woods in california, the grand canyon, and some other various things :)

I will be unable to respond to things in the discord at my usual rate, but I do plan to still check it very frequently throughout our road trip. Additionally, although I won't be able to develop, I have a backlog of videos to post for new things you guys haven't seen yet.

To start things off, I would like to show you a new Juda ability: Meditation! If Juda gets injured in combat, he doesn't have to collect hearts or drink a potion. Instead, he simply has to find a quiet spot away from the enemy as he gathers himself and his health regenerates. See below:

Was originally using a plugin but it was causing some issues, so I decided to create my own custom skybox, lighting, and sky rotation system. I am really happy with how it turned out! Now it should be fairly simple to get consistent lighting on all of my levels.

Took this video while testing out Juda's new dual blade spinning attack and I just had to post. It's so matrix-esque!

Pretty much immediately after posting that last special ability, I realized I forgot to animate Juda's luma (his antennae thing on his head). So here is the adjusted animation:

Added a cool new ability for when Juda attacks with his throwing knives far below him!

​What if wings could be knives? And what if those knives could be thrown? And instead of you going to pick up the knife like a boring little dude you front flipped quickly as if the knife was pulling you to itself? These are the questions we must ask ourselves in game development...

This was my first attempt at a projectile-based ability. It had to be constructed quite differently because I had to add two wings as static meshes as opposed to having the wings be a part of Juda's skeletal mesh. At any rate, I am extremely happy with it. The movement is super satisfying and fun. This ability will be fairly late game as it negates a lot of other forms of travel and will make early platforming puzzles fairly trivial (although it will add a whole bunch of complexity for future platforming).

-----------

I am closing in on completing all of Juda's abilities that I have planned. Here's what is left:

- cleanup sword and shield animations and redo the backend code (it is a little messy and unreliable)
- add a special spin attack to the dual blades ability
- add a boomerang ability

Once I have all of these abilities done, I am going to start building an environment specifically for a well-polished demo complete with a nice environment, puzzles, and enemies. Then I will be asking for some playtesters to give me feedback on how everything fits together. So look forward to that! My beginning goal was to create a decent demo in sixth months. So far everything I have built in Juda has taken four months (including a lot of basic UI, and backend systems that will make things smooth going forward). I think it will be difficult but possible to get a nice demo done in my original timeline.

​My wife and I are also moving across the country at the end of this month, so that will take a chunk of time away from development as well. Anyway, I am not going to rush anything, but I am anxious to get a working playable thing for people to start giving me better feedback on. We shall see what happens!