SHF3 January Progress Update (Patreon)

January's a little light on shippable content, so I wanted to talk about each project separately and let everyone know where the time went.

First, a tease

Over the past ~6 months, I've been slowly building up the foundations of SHF3 to pave the way for two big features. We're suuuper close to one of them right now, but there's still a couple pieces left to finish before I'm ready to fully announce it. So yeah, if the stuff in this post seems scattered, I promise there's a reason for it all! :3

Fluid Shaders

I spent a week or so doing a deep dive on fluid rendering, with the hope of writing a decent fluid shader for both games. Shaders are low-level, meaning written close to machine code, so they're hard to read, hard to write, and very easy to mess up. I learned a ton about how and when to use shaders for liquid effects. Eventually, though, I decided to put it aside to avoid sinking too much time into it. 

So, nothing to show just yet, but it was time well spent. Will keep chipping away at this.

Linking Senses to Toys, Sheath Code

I spent another week and a half working on allowing toys to transmit sensations to npcs. So, Character A is fucked by a dildo, and Character B feels what the dildo feels. This is a bit more challenging than it sounds, cause there really isn't a good foundation in the game for how dicks feel in different levels of tightness and wetness. 

So I had to sidetrack for this feature and work on standardizing how the code treats sheath toys and vaginas/butts. Still grappling a little with how to translate tightness/wetness to meaningful sensations for dicks. This all turned out to need a much fuller system built around treating a penetrator and penetratee as a two-way interaction. Finished that part of it, but... the rest isn't done yet. 

Gonna have to save this one for next update, unfortunately. :(

Inflation

While working on Factory, I was procrastinating by doing a little SHF3 rig work to test out cum inflation. It turned out to be the most straightforward of the features I tried to work on this month. Inflating bellies, storing fluid, expelling fluid. The feature is written and working. But, the rig animations need a bit more testing, and I need to add a button or two to transfer fluids from the tanks to the ponies. Gonna finish up the testing over the weekend and post whatever I've got on Monday.

It's a rudimentary feature to start out with but I'm excited to have inflation in SHF3 finally!

On workflow

I talked about goals for my workflow to reduce stress in one of my last posts. Most of them I've been feeling pretty good about. Been tracking time per task, and my ability to gauge how long a feature will take has improved massively. Not perfect yet though. And as you can probably tell, I still need to work on committing to a single shippable feature. I also need to make contact with my artists and helpers again. In trying to keep my workflow on track, I sort of pushed them aside. 

Stress levels this time around are much lower! I have a lot of things to improve still, but I didn't get overwhelmed, despite this month being hectic due to splitting time between Factory and SHF3. 

I think if I can get my head in the game and start properly outsourcing the art stuff again, I can hit a good mix of code and content for February.

Factory progress update incoming. SHF3 dev build on Monday.