The following dev blog post is from November 17th and was released for free on my Patreon.

The past few days I worked on implementing gestures. I have added gestures for "come here" and "take this". This system is meant for natural hand movements and zero buttons. The following are the first new gestures:

This is the "Come here" gesture which is triggered when the player shakes his hand in a certain fashion. Shinobu will now attempt to follow the player if she sees this.

However, if she is angry, she will shake her head at you from a distance. Make sure to keep her happy.

The next gesture is "Take this" which will be used to present Shinobu with objects that she can take or beg for. Visual example:

This means that she will no longer beg for any object. However, this lead me to adding a property to objects if they are highly desirable. For example, donuts are now begged for regardless while minor things like hats or reeds will need to be given to her. I will implement some sort of autonomy so she randomly picks up items that aren't set to highly desirable, just so she interacts with the environment by herself and relies less on the player.

A quick note on the gif above is that it was not in VR. This is because I had to implement a solution for mouse+keyboard users. By pressing and holding "E", the player will extend his right hand. The gesture system still reads the player's hand movements even if it's an animation.

Gestures are proving to be particularly tricky because I do not want them to fire randomly if the system reads the wrong gesture or if the player isn't trying to do anything. Thus, I will be carefully selecting what kind of gestures to add in the future. Unique and simple is best. If you have any cool ideas, let me know and I'll consider it. I like making more animations for small behaviors.

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