SHF3 v.36 - Dragons, griffons, horses, and more! (Patreon)

It's time! This one's a content-focused update, adding dragons, griffons, and ponies, as well as mouth and face additions, and some more fun stuff. I ended up tunnel-visioning pretty hard on this one. Bad habits are hard to break >.< 

This update includes artwork from PussPuss (dragons and griffons), ParclyTaxel (non-pony vectors), and DigiQrow (ponies and accessories). I'm still putting in quite a bit of time with vectors, rigging, and animation, but daaaang it's nice to have help <3

Tier 2+ patrons can test it out here! 

Dragons, griffons, ponies

Dragons: Ember and Smolder, to start with. Pusspuss's help has been invaluable for getting the shapes right. Even still, I dragged my feet on these rigs for ages because they were pretty complicated. Now, most of the kinks are worked out. I'm excited to get the first WIP versions of these out to you guys and see what you think! (Also Spike isn't quite done yet, but there's a normal and mature version coming :3)

Griffons: Gallus and Gilda. Gags and collars now work on griffons, too. Right now, Gallus is the same size as the others. I'm not sure about this yet, but griffon sizes are a bit hard to judge in the show. Teen versions are in the works. There's also some bugfixes with the Gabby rig.

Horses: Sunset Shimmer, Windy Whistles and Bow Hothoof, and Lyra and Bon Bon. I tried a couple little things for these- Sunset's complicated-ass hair layers, Windy's cute lil freckles, and Bow's fetlocks. Gonna have to add these to some other rigs now.

Mouths, beaks, fangs

Mouths of all kinds have been reworked. Now they're all layered vectors, which means I can change their colors, and add elements like fangs and pointed tongues. Right now it's most obvious on the changelings, which finally have fangs! In the future, this'll also be useful for bat ponies, hybrid species, and any items that interact with the mouth in this pose. 

Pusspuss helped me redo the griffon beaks, and drew a full set of dragon mouths. It took a bit to get the vectoring right, and I'm still working on the new rigging, but I think this is a pretty big step forward!

Every mouth has a per-species set of assets and traits in the data now, which makes it easy to create facial expressions that work cross-species. 

Facial Expressions

Added a wide range of facial expression sets, from shy to grumpy, to evil, to tsundere (15 sets total). The different sets have small to drastic differences between them. For example, Confident and Cocky are similar, but the Cocky set turns nervous when the NPC is afraid or in pain. Amorous is similar to Yandere, but Yandere gets psychotic when you mistreat them. 

It's allll WIP of course. Since expressions are a result of multiple in-game factors, they're hard to thoroughly test. I'll need to tweak these sets a lot to more accurately portray the personalities they represent.

You can swap expression sets in the Brain menu if you think I got the personality for the character wrong :3

With a solid 40 characters in the game now, plus genderswapped and different-aged versions for some of them, it was time to get some facial expressions that better matched the characters' personalities. The capability has been there for a long while (Maud has always been deadpan, for example), but designing each new expression was a major pain in the bum. Due to the way the rigs work, I had to do it in-game, using a set of ~30 hotkeys to nudge the eyelids up and down, tilt them, etc. It was demoralizing. So instead, I developed a face debugging GUI for myself to make the process non-brain-melting. 

I also had to consider how to reduce redundancy for certain faces I wanted to reuse. So now in the backend, there's a list of emotional archetypes (nervous, happy, angry, etc), and for each expression set, I can pull individual faces from each archetype. For example, the "tsundere" set pulls mostly from the "angry" and "loving" archetypes. Woo efficiency.

Other stuff

The WIP shocking toy is now a cattle prod with some serious oomph at its highest setting. Use responsibly.

All the restraints are now leather cuffs, which I think look way better. The old metal cuffs can still be selected in the Accessories menu.

There's also a simple tape gag added for your gagging needs.

Thoughts

Non-pony rigs take a lot of work to set up initially. The bone structure I use to support the complex motion in the game has to be remapped using a bunch of imperfect methods, and it's never clear what'll work and what'll end up being unusable. Eyes, genitals, body patterns, and bulges take a lot of working and reworking to iron out the glitches. I had the fuckers like 90% complete, and that last 10% took longer than everything else combined.

Changelog

• Added Ember, Smolder, Gilda, Gallus, Sunset Shimmer, Windy Whistles, Bow Hothoof, Lyra, and Bon Bon
• Reworked mouths to be layered vectors
• Added changeling-specific teeth and tongues
• Added some minor inner mouth color variations (WIP)
• Added new set of griffon beaks
• Added set of dragon mouths
• Reworked gags to use new mouth system, tweaked all gags
• Added new facial expressions sets: Normal, Anxious, Confident, Cocky, Unfazed, Emotionless, Amorous, Grumpy, Happy, Evil, Shy, Tsundere, Yandere, Bipolar, Sensitive
• Set a facial expression for every npc, including alternate age/gender versions
• Facial expression sets can now properly swap (in the Brain menu)
• Changed Violet Wand (WIP) to Cattle Prod with high shock range
• Added leather cuffs as default restraints
• Added tape gag to all mouth types
• Added all gags to griffon beaks
• Added collar to griffon necks
• The orgasm "Buildup" meter no longer fully drains upon orgasm, instead draining around 25%. This should give a little more reward for taking the time to do foreplay or orgasm denial. 
• Shrank the NPC spawn buttons so the new characters would fit. Gonna need a better solution there.
• Fixed a major bug that caused toys to duplicate, disappear, and glitch out
• Fixed changeling's stomach bulge glitching out
• Fixed the Sheath toy on griffons clipping under the legs
• Fixed NPC names displaying code versions of their names
• Fixed a crash/error that would occur when alternating orgasms between 2 npcs
• Made data entry in backend better/way more complicated for various things
• Added a lot more bugs

Known bugs

• Ember extends out of her frame and the edges of her wings can be glitchy when trying to click on them.
• Mousing over dragon and griffon body parts will show pony anatomy terminology (e.g. dock, hooves, etc)
• When switching body types, the npc's face will get momentarily stuck in a weird expression.

More thoughts on this update

Dragons: Spike. Gotta get some Spike action.

And then there's some stuff WIP still- the wings need more animation, and the bulges aren't perfect yet, since the dragons have underbelly patterns making things complicated. Also, I want genital slits, tits, and more interaction with the toes/feet, since they're exposed. Adding new dragons is challenging compared to ponies, since every dragon has a totally different shape.

Griffons: I have a teen-sized (18+, as always) griffon rig in the works. That should cover all the needed body shapes for the species. There's still some variation to add to the paws and tails, and cat-style tits. All the griffon body shapes are pretty similar though, thankfully.

Mouths: I can now add a lot of minor variance to mouths, so that'll be a fun thing to play with. Some possibilities are: piercings, tongue shapes/lengths, braces, and so forth. 

Faces: I've put a lot of thought into how facial expressions ought to be treated in terms of game design. The current system uses an NPC's personality, current physical stimulation, AND the current expression set to decide what face to make. The expression sets are redundant. Ideally, all characters should be capable of making a psycho face or a cute face, depending on the situation. That'll have to be the topic of a future update. I decided to work within the current limited system for this update, and ensured that I can easily incorporate the current face sets into a more complex system in the future.

What's next?

Portals and Oral are the two big features coming up next. I'm pretty excited to dig into these, but both present their own challenges. 

Portals are complicated due to questions of physics, and how to represent a portalled body part. I have a plan already, but I'm going to need a lot of feedback on the first few iterations. It'll be a little different from the standard portal idea. 

Oral is hard because of the rigging problem. I'll need to rig a chin-up deepthroating pose for every character, and code in a pose switch (face forward to face up). I haven't done that in this game before, so that'll take some work. Thankfully, PussPuss has helped me figure out the deepthroating poses. 

After those two features, I'll be going through the process of fleshing out all the existing features of the game. Right now, in my opinion, SHF3 is a technical proof of concept with a bunch of disconnected mechanics. The plan is to turn it into a proper sandbox game. I'll talk a lot about this once these two features are finished.

Factory is still very much alive. While I want to get a working build out to everyone ASAP, I refuse to hobble my progress in order to do it. So there's a chance this next update still won't be playable. It sucks, but at the pace I work, my biggest priority is finishing the game's mechanics. If there's a playable build between now and then, awesome. 

The next Factory updates will be focused on the Rooms mechanic (having separate rooms with machines inside acting as mostly closed systems, that are connected via bigger pipes). Or it'll be an expansion on the Breeding machines. Whichever is done first.

A personal note

Yuuup. This was later than my usual lateness, and that was so very preventable. 

Honestly, I'm regressing into a lot of bad habits, including pushing people away, leaving everyone in the dark, and hyper-focusing on certain parts of my work while ignoring the big picture. Just letting my ADHD steer the ship, basically. I had been making decent progress on that front, but being stuck inside for so long is a mental health nightmare. 

Virus cases are rising in my area, and my state's reopening is stalling. I've got to develop some better quarantine habits instead of hoping that 2020 will stop sucking. The world needs lewds now more than ever, so I've got to stay healthy, happy, and productive. Gonna try my best to get back on the right path again.

Eat well, fap hard, and take care of yourselves out there <3