As part of assessing how the current museum music implementation is likely to scale/map against a growing museum with a diversity of themed rooms, I put together a little example museum with a dozen or so rooms full of placeholder models and varied the lighting a little.

I think walking around the extended space does a better job of communicating where this is headed, but still feels empty without customiseable light placement and wall displays. This'll do for now though!

The January progress update video is running a little late (January's been busy in general, and this video is a bit bigger than usual). I've still been doing bits and pieces though.

Today I finished implementing size variation for skeletons across the assembly phase/museum. Not sure to what extent I'm going to try to express ontogeny, but regardless, it's cool to have every skeleton be unique now \o/

Still unsure on expressing ontogeny in this, but if I do, smaller will have younger features

Expanding the perimeter by one tile in cardinal directions helps get rid of the single-tile "protrusions" seen on the far left side of the previous screenshot (those tend to be awkward/more likely to require a guess, which is less-interesting gameplay).

Still need to think about what all this means for coordinates when playing with TTS (don't think I'll do anything special, but there's a big amount of "wasted" coordinate space in the top left and bottom left).

Because these are generated, I get a bunch of variation for free. I don't think that variation feels like "content," but it helps make digs feel less samey, which is a big deal for the sort of game this is.

I've still got a bunch of other stuff to wrap up before I can start focusing in earnest on content and variation density, but it's exciting to on the cusp of.

I mocked up some museum floor textures for the last video, and variation there from such a minimal change is more than I expected.

I spent some of today's stream poking around with hotloading meshes and attaching them to existing skeletons (for character customisation).

I already do this in places with skeleton fossil chunks, and I'd done some previous experiments, but it seems I'd overlooked that vertex group information seems to get broken/stomped on if meshes are exported separately - and not consistently (if they're *imported* as separate files, that's fine). A little frustrating, but I think I have something workable.