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.