May Progress Update!

Guten días frens, here is the progress update for May. Scene management done! Also cathedral done!

This month was mostly a continuation of the town scene management development. It involved grouping the buildings from the left side of the town into scenes that I then included into the scene management script along with the rest of the town.

^ Left side complete, yay ^

Cathedral here!

I made the cathedral for the town!

Up until now, it was just a huge black monolith stand in, so I decided to replace now that I'm working on the town.

Is the first time I design in Blender something so complex. I'm happy how it turned out.

The rose window is one of the most important elements of a gothic-style cathedral.

You wouln't believe how happy I was when I realized I could design one pretty much the same way I design mandalas in Clip Studio.

Funny enough, rose windows' designs and mandalas share a lot of symbology.

^ This is what I ended up with ^

Being a symbol of a church that worships humans, This whole design is meant to represent humanity as divine. I decided that, of course, little stylized vitruvian man should be in the middle.

Seemed very clear to me that the human body's shape itself should be a sacred symbol, and the best way to represent it is with Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian man.

^ Blender render of central piece ^

Around it, there's little silhouettes that I took from Dark Souls humanity. I thought it would be fitting.

They can symbolize community/union/solidarity (humans being a hyper social species and whatnot), but they are there mostly to emphasize some shapes and rhythms of the main design.

And also, I think they are cute. I made their heads slightly pointy cus the design gets pointer at the outer parts.

The crown element on the edge is meant to be fire. The way I see it is, what makes humans so impressive compared to other animals is our usage of tools, fire being a universal tool whose discovery shaped our identity. So fire here can symbolize creation, creativity, expansion, destruction, civilization...

But fire has other meanings, like warmth, refuge/safety, enlightment, etc etc... I think fire has too many meanings, most of which, if not all of them, can be attributed to humanity.

Fire is cool...

I am very pleased with my design, which is very fortunate because is literally front and center of the main structure of the town. So I'm relieved...

I also like to think that people from this world can take different meanings from it.

This is another think I was happy with. These niches for holy figures:

The upper niches should be reserved for more important figures, like saints, but I haven't made sculptures for them yet... So for now, they are filled with representations of followers of the church.

This big dome structure I straight up copied from the Hungarian Parliament Building.

Not a lot of symbolic meaning, I just really loved the building, and I needed something big and tall so it could be seen from afar from multiple points in the town.

I also made these little cat thingies that serve as ornamentation.

We are finally on the las stretch of this big update. These last couple days I started working on finally connecting the main systems for a full closed gameplay loop. It's still rough, but this means what I need to work on next is polishing them so they are somewhat presentable.

Possibly I wont make every single one of the scenes of the town beautiful yet, tho. That's still the thing that will end up taking most time.

At least I'm happy the scenes are nice and neatly separated so I have more freedom for props and whatnot. After that, there's still some small optimization I'll still need to work on, but should be trivial compared to what's done already.

Thank you for your support and for following the development of Theanthria. It really has been and still is an adventure for me. I hope we can soon be done with this long wait, because things will only get more fun after that. There's still many cool ideas and things I want to work on that I haven't even mentioned before... but that will have to wait.

Well, thank you, and see you in the next progress report, frens 🫂