Post Demo Devlog (Patreon)

Hey everyone I hope you had a chance to play the latest demo! I'm took the weekend pretty easy just backing the project up, cleaning the structure and branching it at the demo milestone. I'm also updating my to-do lists and designs.

The demo was allot of work but a very large milestone to have passed. I can already do allot with what I've created. This should provide the foundation for every interaction, dialogue and sequence of events.

A huge thank you to all my Patrons this project is going remarkably well and we are clipping along at a great pace.

So I thought I would make this post a quick summery of what I've learnt from the demo and things I'm going to fix or change! Also feel free to post any feedback on things you liked and things you didn't. Although try and keep comments about mechanics (The dialogue and interactions obviously aren't final).  How it felt to run/press use things you found confusing or buggy.

Bugs

So 3 main bugs were shown up by this project and I'll explain the bug and what causes it. Feel free to skip this section if technical's don't interest you!

Stuck
So it is clearly possible to get stuck in the terrain with no way to exit. I think this is a near universal problem in every game I've ever played. I could carefully test the map for every way you could become trapped but that would take allot of time because it's not always clear visually what would trap you. I'm planning on creating a "bug" menu that will include a teleport feature to teleport you to a safe location on each map, the same feature can automatically activate should you somehow fall out of the map. You may loose some progress but better than a a full crash AND progress loss.

Can't Move
Interestingly this is partially from the previous demo. In order to perform an action on the player I need to lock out your control so the game can control you for a period. Unfortunately should something break or I forget to return control you will continue to be locked out.

This also has three solutions, firstly I'm going to put all player control into a single place so I don't have multiple systems trying to lock and unlock. That should remove 99 percent of the lock errors created by me.

Secondly I need a backup in case something fails and an event does not complete. This is also why you can become stuck while a character runs around in circles. Currently there is no safety if an action requires a character walk to you. If they have a blocked path they will continue to attempt and you cannot walk away. I need to put protections around more complex actions. My current plan is include forced exit points that will eject if a path can't be found in a pre-set period of time.

Finally I will include a "make unstuck" debug command that will force control back to the player if there is no easy remedy available. I would prefer to not have to include this because you could abuse this command and really break a complex sequence but sometimes good code can go bad at run time for no reason.

Badly aligned or buggy animation interactions

Okay this is the tricky one, in order to stop the player like falling through the world or walking through objects like a ghost there is a process that controls that. However for things like a spanking or diaper change you need to temporarily occupy the same space as as another object. Currently I turn off the process during this. However, this is very unreliable, a frame late or early turning it off can cause the character to move out of place and so the rest of the animation is now out of allignent.

There is no easy answer to this problem. My current plan is to turn off the movement mechanisms earlier to reduce the problem, I'm also planning on moving the visual and keeping the controller back in a safe place. However, it may never be absolutely perfect, I'll do what I can to polish but in the final product a character may go out of alignment sometimes. If I have an light-bulb moment with a great solution I'll tell you. This is most likely going to be solved with testing and just constant polish fixes.

Minor fixes

So minor things I want to fix,

I'm not a fan of characters clomping around when you cant see them, it's annoying to constantly hear footsteps of an out of range character.

I want to reduce the cost of characters. Mostly by turning them off if they aren't in range. this way you can have more characters so long as they aren't on screen at once. The university area is likely to be the maximum characters I would want in such a small space.

Load times are too long. This map size might be too big for a single loaded area. I might break up maps into smaller chunks and load them in the background or simply make them smaller. There might just be some ways to improve load times with a bit of work.

Whats next

Okay well this week I'm not going to be working on anything flashy. In order to get the demo done I had to put a few ugly hax in to get it out on time. I'm going to remove those hacks and replace them with better non hacked code. I'm also going to be upgrading the project to the latest versions of Unity as well as several of the internal plugins. I'm also going to start planning out the next demo and features I want to add into the game!

In my next post I'll share those plans and outline new features!

Again huge thank you and I'll have more information soon!