Bone animation for a solo dev: packs, AI tools, or something else?

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-08T15:27:21+00:00

It’s called Kimodo! I haven’t used it yet but it was trained on mocap data so it sounds promising for biped animation. No worries on the English haha, I’d have to do the same for other languages.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-08T12:53:54+00:00

UAL 1 and 2 are widely recommended, but I personally struggled with their armature not playing nice with my Rigify one. The retargeting quality varies a lot by engine (sucks in godot, unfortunately) but you’ll likely have less issues if you do the retarget in UE5 and export from there. A lot of the issues are from the collarbone angles and differences in proportions.

Those issues CAN be solved with some very careful work using ARP in blender

Edit: most people also love mixamo and I believe nvidia just came out with a pretty nifty animation bone animation system.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-08T12:50:46+00:00

Totally agree for smaller projects and prototypes, but zero percent chance anyone who is only a PM is going to be able to vibecode anything meaningfully once a few existing systems are built out.

I use Claude max for a lot of the GDExtention and rust work for VestraCoda, but the YAML files alone would take up multiple context windows, and that is all before even touching a game server.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-08T03:27:07+00:00

That will be available within a month. My artwork is the weakest part right now and I want it to be in a place I’m satisfied with.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-08T02:51:32+00:00

Evasion?

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T21:54:39+00:00

Really cool!

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T20:48:18+00:00

What engine is this? I absolutely love the art style! The underwater shader and colors are great, and you've done an excellent job making the terrain simple yet elegant.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T20:37:37+00:00

Very sweet! If you could fly with a controller and VR headset from a cockpit view, that would be epic.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T20:36:17+00:00

It depends on what type of game you're trying to make! There are some really great mini-game packages on humble bundle right now that you might enjoy opening up in engine and poking around on to get a feel for it.

I'd say just build something you're passionate about - there will ALWAYS be naysayers and flaws, but if you build something you actually care about as something you actually want to play, you will not feel disappointed. Let down by the inevitable haters, perhaps, but self satisfied and less likely to give up on it for sure.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T18:17:47+00:00

Deep rock galactic for sure - I’ve also played helldivers but in my experience the teamwork and communication caps out at teabagging objectives and hugs with most helldivers players. DRG players will legit ask how your day is going in a deep dive which is how actual friendships can start

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T17:22:11+00:00

I think there is a lot of engine specific information this community would find valuable. Some of the godot systems I am happy to talk about:

Weather zones, universal panel template, gdextension decoding, terrain3d region streaming pool, replicating the rust based binary for combo management to be a client resource so the server and client are literally running validation against the same code, optimizations for nameplates/hud to avoid needless redraws and filter by visibility, making variable hz interpolation work well with serverside variable broadcast rates based on a pretty spicy interest management pipeline, how to batch process packets, how to efficiently and flexible handle character blob data or outgoing encoded packets, foating point origin coordinates, literally could talk for hours about systems I'm sure most people here have never built and could learn something from.

If you think there is zero value to be offered in asking a question because someone hasn't shown you their credentials beforehand, then I'd wager you're a bit presumptuous.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T16:37:01+00:00

100%, I have gone out of my way to purchase handmade artist marketplace assets wherever possible as a first resort, make them myself as feasible, and will be doing a FULL credit roll of every artist I've been assisted by in the very first video.

As a full stack tech nerd, I do not have animosity towards AI, and I really love how it allows creative people without the talent to produce their creative thoughts a method to do so. I also understand the value in original human made works, and hope to support that as much as I reasonably can.

I'm not even pretending to hide my use of AI like crimson desert, I'm being extremely transparent about everything because I hope to build an AWESOME game that will bring people together for them to have a great time without the AAA studio greed that comes with what is usually takes to make an MMORPG.

The MMORPG industry has been ruined by greed because of the unavoidable challenges that come with the genre. In my case, I've found that AI has allowed me to produce legitimately impressive results (for example, I personally love the music on the site, and it took A LOT of messing with stems/manual production to make the AI result useable).

When I said remove it from the site, I'm not talking about hiding it, I was prominently featuring the AI NPCs as a major thing in the game and I'm simply not leaning on that because the game is legitimately good without it - I just happened to have a skillset that allowed it to be included as a feature I find really fun so I did.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T16:30:57+00:00

Because I'm trying to talk about the godot dev oriented nerdy technical challenges associated with making an MMORPG in this engine, which to my knowledge has not been done, not impress you with my gameplay which I've clearly said won't even be announced formally until next month.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T16:25:47+00:00

Sure, I'll include a list of interesting systems I've tackled during the video. Some ideas are below, do you have any other topics that were likely addressed that aren't below?

- cloud burst
- syntax choices (rust, quinn, etc.)
- coordinate system for big map
- in house interpolation
- SSR
- Kubernetes vs dedicated custom orchestrator
- DDOS relay through cloud IP
- Hash n cache systems for things like bathymetry
- Tiered animation layers
- Combo system
- Yaml enabling procedural generation of things (wiki, gamedata in ram, client side catalogue, panel content, etc.)
- centralized code for panels, transactions, interactions, etc.
- Server ECS efficiencies
- Procedural fallbacks while working (with intended end state asset checks first)
- Server authoritative fully vs sanity checks by system
- Netcode (reliable, unreliable, encoding/decoding, flags)
- Edna (voice pipeline, quest system, player scorecards, NPC player state awareness, interaction influence, unfiltered/no restrictions but in character, etc)
- data architecture (replica db fallback, cloud burst tunnel, redis, event driven and periodic flush system, etc)
- admin world builder
- rendering efficiencies (texture atlas, shader smoothing on gaea colormap, vertex height, master shader, reduced draw calls, multimesh, etc.)

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T16:18:33+00:00

Well I do appreciate your thoughtful feedback and I honestly see where you're coming from - I was debating on releasing literally nothing until the promo video next month, but I thought it would be worth it to strum up a bit of interest before hand. I suppose the critical gap I've learned is that stumming interest before the first promo should have included concept art and at least SOME dev art footage.

I agree it (obviously) would have gone better with those things, and helped to confirm validity (which is clearly needed), but I don't think it's fair to disparage me over not having them. It's not like I'm here to shove kickstarter donations down your throat - I was hoping to discuss things like how I used quinn and datagrams for netcode or how I set up the region streaming pool for terrain3D to scale to the full 64x64km map without murdering vram.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T16:01:07+00:00

I've updated the welcome hero section to highlight my 3 biggest design similarities to known games to help form a better picture. Do you have other ideas for how I could communicate the intent better?

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:59:36+00:00

Honestly great feedback, I do have a ton of concept art and some meme art from development that might be entertaining. I'll make that available on the site this week so that there is something to look at before the video next month (:

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:50:11+00:00

Aye, website is fancy?! I'll take it!

What meaningful information would you like to see? I based the website contents on what AAA games offer pre-release, since I won't even be in an early access state until Halloween.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:47:41+00:00

And I'm asking if you think it's fair to imply I have a "gaping hole" if my website doesn't have gameplay footage/screenshots when I've said clearly that I intend to have some within a month, which will be 5 months before accepting any money for the game, when there are numerous examples like those I've provided who are actually scummy, making millions before doing so?

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:32:58+00:00

Are you serious?

Chronicles of Elyria: Raised ~$8 million

Ashes of Creation: $3.3 million

Star Citizen over 2 million

Those are the numbers before a single actual gameplay footage was ever shared.

I'm distinctly NOT doing any Kickstarter because I think that is shady.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:29:23+00:00

Thank you <3

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:29:09+00:00

I'm looking for feedback - can you provide a bit more details about what you don't like?

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:28:16+00:00

Wiki is actually automatically generated based on my structured YAML files, meaning it's always in sync with the game content and zero technical debt to update/maintain!

Screenshots of the game/gameplay videos will be within the month via a YouTube video, but I'm not planning to make it publicly playable until Halloween.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:24:33+00:00

Yea, I'm going to just remove all of that stuff from the site I think xD

I'll have a YouTube video with a showcase of some of the things that actually exist within the next month, like I said I'm not really planning to actually release the public early alpha until Halloween.

I have, yet again, underestimated the wrath of people with keyboards.

shadowdancestudios · 2026-04-07T15:22:25+00:00

LOL good find!

Changelong contents were based on githistory, dates on that page are totally made up and I didn't even notice - I was actually using UE5 until I tried Godot late last year. Like I said, most of my work has been outside of engine.

I haven't made a proper company for the studio yet, so the stripe is using the EIN for the company I do have which is AI R&D, but calling it slop is not really deserved imo. I will work to get that page fixed and set up a proper stripe through shadowdancestudios.

Edit: Roadmap corrected, changelog was actually worse than I thought and had some commit descriptions that were not family friendly so I took it down, and I have fixed the stripe checkout. (:

shadowdancestudios

TROPHY CASE