Weekly update- July 8th (Patreon)

This one's light on pics. I'm gonna have to start recording gifs for these updates since there's so much animated stuff. 

What's being worked on?

Music! SkySprinter has been making music for my old game Love Collector. I'm super excited to start addressing the lack of decent sound in my games. We're still in the early stages of this, so I'll kept y'all updated as we get stuff done. Imagine... a world where SHF3 isn't eerily quiet. :3

Rig work. 

Some possibilities have come up as a result of simplifying everything- I could hand off the source files to a vector artist and get back 20 variations of a body part, then plug them in to the current rig, and it'd "just work". Will talk about this more once there are visual results to show, but it's exciting! 

An example is the torsos, which can have their external shapes and internal features swapped around easily now. If we want a ton of variation of fur tufts, hip sizes, etc, it's no longer difficult to do. This'll be visible in small ways in the current update, but will probably be more impressive as time goes on and I outsource stuff to the artists.

The heads were a main focus for the last couple of work blocks. They've been simplified from tons of bones to sort through down to just a couple for primary motion. 

Eyelids have their own bone set. I want to revisit eyes later and figure out a better system for them, but this'll work for now. Faces are pretty complicated.

All heads have a single mesh now, broken into four areas, making motion and the placement of hair, eyes, and mouths predictable. This is the same as most of the rig work I've been doing- simplifying lots of characters down into the smallest number of unique rig objects.

Animation stuff.

Been sorting out breathing, struggling, orgasm anims, and how they work in the new setup. Being able to simplify everything has revealed some old hacks that I can do away with now. Since it's easier to make content than before, I'd like to look at more unique and characterized orgasm animations, etc. But for now, I'm just utilizing the additive animations feature that this update has brought, and it's looking good. :3

Some bugs have emerged, obviously. In squishing them I've redone a batch of early code that deals with the most basic animations. This is the game's "response" system, which ties an animation (like breathing) to a character stat (in this case, heart rate). This code allows for a set of increasingly intense animations to play as a dynamic response. Now, they also react both in amplitude and play speed, as well as simply cycling through the animation set.

(This would be a great place for a gif to showcase the animations. Maybe next time!)

GIT.

So, more git tales. I hate git, btw. This story involves a time heist.

I realized that .pngs, the main image asset format in the game, still weren't being added to git-lfs. They should be, since git-lfs is designed for non-text type files. This mistake was seriously slowing my git workflow down. 

The saga begins with a rebase. That's not a crazy thing to do, but I'm not the best at git and so it was nerve-wracking. Git lets you go back to previous versions of your code to fix mistakes, but rebasing means rewriting that history (to remove past versions of the images, in this case). Any mistakes can't be undone after that.

It corrupted the repo.

A single hashed file was missing from a single point in the project's history, which broke the entire... everything. I couldn't pull the thing from the remote server, couldn't push it, etc. So I had to parse through the error logs to find the hash that represented the file, find the point in TIME it should've existed at, recreate that past version of the file, and plant it back when/where it was supposed to be.

I must be a time god, cause everything actually fucking works now.

Anyway, I hate git.

FAQ

Update when? Still trying my best. 

So far, there are no large bugs in the way, so I'm just moving forward as fast as possible toward a releasable build. Animation, assets, and finishing rig work are my primary goals, plus smoothing over any minor bugs that come up. I'm still cautiously optimistic. If this trend continues, then it's just a bunch of bite-sized things left to do. But, if these past months have taught me anything, it's that it's hard to predict this stuff. 

Update when? Hopefully soon.

Public build when? Same time as the update!

Will you add a toy with an inflatable knot? Yes, I think so! The game actually already has all the features needed to make an inflatable toy, or a toy that swells in size in one place. The size/shape of toys is all dynamic and code-based, meaning crazier things than inflatable knots are very possible. So it's a "yes, but not this update" sort of deal.

Use .gitignore! I do :3

Use SourceTree! I'd been using the built-in git features in my IDE (IntelliJ) to manage commits, and the command line for other stuff. I'm trying out Source Tree now, and it seems like an upgrade feature-wise, thanks for the suggestion! <3

Do you think players have overhyped expectations for this update's eventual release? Oof. I don't know, but I'm trying to let go of that worry and just focus. In the past, this exact fear sent me into a downward spiral where I tried to compensate by adding MORE features to an already-slow update. I've learned from that experience to just stick to the original plan. Anxiety doesn't make good project management decisions, after all. 

I do think the results of all this work may appear modest at first, but in this, or subsequent releases, it'll compound into something that was worth the wait.

Okay, that's all for now! 

SkySprinter has been streaming music work in my Discord server btw, which has been delightful. Once the music is ready I'll make sure to post it here. So check out my stream, his stream, or just wait for the recap posts :3

<3