Weekly update! (Patreon)

First weekly update! It's actually only been a day, but there's still stuff to talk about!

What's being worked on?

I've been trying to sort out a decent workflow for the differently-sized skeletons. Basically, I need to store a bunch of different initial positions for a single skeleton in order to have the bones placed correctly on bigger/smaller characters. Usually you'd only have one initial position, so it's weird to need a bunch. It was harder than I thought, and so I spent today's stream drilling down into how to swap between different skeleton shapes/sizes.

I wasn't satisfied with the solution I came up with, but in the course of typing this post, I realized I'd stumbled upon a better way of doing it. Basically, I can store the root position (the standard character model) in a bare-bones reference skeleton. Then, I can use a Spine trick to store all the different starting positions in animation keyframes. Hard to describe it without getting way more technical, but this basically gives me a lot more ability to work with smol or large characters.

Barring any other challenges, this'll be the official workflow moving forward. Yay, that's one big hurdle down!

Also, I have an artist working on "soon-ish" features, including additional collars and ear types. They also showed me some promising assets for a Tongue toy type (for tactical licking). Dunno how soon this stuff will be in the game, but I'm excited. :3

Q&A!

I'll quickly summarize some questions and conversations about SHF3 development that came up during the stream. Note that this isn't stuff coming in the next update, just general talk about future plans or ideas.

Will there be more sound effects or music? I want to add more, but it takes me too long to do sound stuff myself, and the results are underwhelming. I plan on hiring/consulting an actual sound designer to help, cause it would be wasted energy for me to try to do it myself.

The UI needs improvement. Yep. I have my own ideas about how to start improving it, and am also getting some help from others. If I'm not satisfied with what we all come up with, I'll also look at bringing in professional help.

Milking? Watersports? These are frequent questions. Since fluids are already coded, the answer is "yes, probably". Technically I could add them now, but I want to wait until I can focus on expanding fluids properly. I'm getting a crash course on writing shaders, which I'm hoping will result in all kinds of nice-looking fluids when there's time.

Sweat and tears. Effects like these present small technical challenges, but basically, I think we can do some decent sweat and improved tears at some point. My main concern is adding stuff like this in ways that won't cause performance issues, which is why they haven't made it in yet.

Spank marks, whip marks, bruises, etc? Similar to above, the short answer "yes, I think so". I think this stuff is doable, but I'll need to take the time to dig into them. Only then will I know exactly how big the technical challenges are. But this is a bdsm game, so it's only a matter of time.

"What's the hardest thing to add?" Hair stuff. Anything to do with manipulating hair. It's hard as hell to animate.

Womb penetration? I've been avoiding this because I couldn't figure it out gameplay-wise, but some brainstorming on stream helped a lot. Basically, I didn't want it to happen unless the player intended to do it. But a special cervix-widening toy, a spell, or something like that, would be an easy way of starting to loosen the cervix, which could then be stretched out like a normal orifice. I'll definitely play with this after the current update.

Pregnancy/birth. This is a solid "maybe, but later". I'll talk more about this after the Oral and Portal updates come out. It'll be relevant to the features coming after that >.>

That's all for now. I'll be continuing to work on the remaining things mentioned in yesterday's post, and I'll see y'all next week! 

<3