hey, that Kick the Bangar game you were working on a few years ago, do you have any videos, screenshots, etc of what progress was made? Really interested in seeing!
A lot of plans have changed around since then. TLDR; It's still on the backburner, but in a much different form, and I have other priorities at the moment. When I made that announcement, obviously given the fact that it was on April 1st, I was being half serious about it, and if I ever decided to cancel it, I could just say "April fools!" and be done with it, but I didn't have any intention of -not- doing it either. The thing is, the announcement came at the very tail end of my interest in the GW2 scene. It's hard to express how catastrophic the Icebrood Saga was for my interest in the game, having been a hardcore charr player and lore fan since before aging into adulthood, seeing the flagrant butchering of established lore, brainrot fan service, superficial anti-war messaging, and plot contrivances being shoehorned in, and the ambivalent attitude from the playerbase, I felt really alienated and unmotivated to maintain interest. That in combination with some personal drama in the community and seeing some true colors flying around really pushed me away. I ended up moving on to my own creative and artistic pursuits with my own IP, unshackled by whatever nonsense Anet has on it's agenda, and free from people who just want the game to be their gay furry sex fantasy. (pardon my candor) Since then I have been learning a lot about character and environment design for realtime graphics, scripting and logic, and game engine behavior while working on VRChat avatars and worlds, and especially while modding Boneworks/Bonelab. Firstly, in Boneworks, I actually got my Charr character, Haruka working as an NPC, but this was a while before Icebrood Saga came and ruined my life. That's where this video comes from:
Obviously, Bangar didn't exist yet, so he couldn't suffer the Boneworks NPC experience, but if I did make him into an NPC like this, this video somewhat shows part of the vision I had for Kick the Bangar. However, by the time I had actually created that Bangar model, I was coming to terms with a fact that I had been obstinate about for a long time; My charr models suck, bad. It may not be obvious in my renders, but just about every aspect of them, from the anatomy to the material conventions, to the rigging, it's all humiliatingly terrible and totally unacceptable for a serious game. In a similar way, I made my charr character into a VRChat avatar, but it also faced the problem that it just wasn't made for game engines, and wasn't practical for realtime graphics, so I left all my old charr models behind when I stopped playing GW2, and just focused on making VRChat avatars of my own original species, this time, developed specifically to work in Unity, and I've been a lot happier with how they are turning out. I even made my Enochian avatar into a Bonelab avatar that I did a challenge run of finishing the entire game as. During it all, in the back of my mind, I always had plans to revisit the charr and make a charr VRChat avatar base for old time's sake. I suppose now that when I do that -if I do that- I would make a Bangar version of it, and create a VRChat world with a custom active ragdoll made out of him that you can pick up, pummel, and shoot to your heart's content, accompanied by various voice lines that I hope to one day hire the original VA for Bangar to do. Either that or make a Bonelab NPC which can be tortured in any way native to Bonelab, which I considered doing a while back, but official NPC modding support for Bonelab isn't here yet, and I don't know if I'm going to bother with it anymore, especially since it requires a VR headset, and VRChat doesn't. If I made a Kick the Bangar VRChat world, anyone could enjoy it for free, even on their mobile devices, as long as I make the world cross platform. In that case, you can expect something along the lines of what you saw in the above video, just with more variety, such as increasingly extravagant methods of 'kicking' the Bangar, various outfits to humiliate him with, and of course the voice lines, if possible.
