Progress update- July 30th (Patreon)

Okay, quick text post this time to recap the week, since I'm kind of exhausted by the last few days >.<'

What's being worked on?

Toy stuff

I'm doing cleanup on toys code/data. Double-checking every possible interaction of every type of item. The updating process is thankfully complete, at least until after this release. I cannot wait to finish up all the toy automation stuff I started, but for now I'm holding back on that in favor of getting this version finished. 

In the process some old inconsistencies are getting fixed. E.g. the hairbrush tool can now be used anywhere, bulges are getting less glitchy, stuff like that.

Animation code! :D

Since the animation code update, alpha transitions are way easier to use now, since they're separated from color. This has been a constant annoyance that's resulted in a bunch of hacks to try to modify the color and transparency of things without causing conflicts. As a result of this, little glitches are getting fixed (like penis sheaths remaining visible when erect).

Animation code... D:

Aaand then there was the main problem of the week: path constraints. These are malleable curves that I can tell a bone to follow, or curve a set of bones around. E.g. eyelashes following the shape of the eye, sheath toys following the shape/size of the penis. I didn't notice originally, but a bug was causing eyelashes and sheath toys to fire off into space at near-light speed. Fixing that, they then froze in place. 

It was a whole saga that lasted several days. I delved into the madness of dynamic typing creating difficult-to-debug code, and eventually ending it all with some unreliable floating point precision errors. My solution ended up being as mad as the problem itself, but it's fixed now, so... yay?

This was tiring, but it's solid progress. Toys are all functioning as expected and the animation updates are performing surprisingly well, even the path constraints. 

Pose changes?

I shared a pic last time with a different leg pose. This was a test, but a good point was brought up about the legs potentially blocking the view of the rest of the body. This might not end up in the upcoming version of the game, but when it does appear, it'll be something the player can control. Eventually I'd like to let the player lock the characters into a range of different poses!

Sound, assets, and UI

Just a brief thing on all three fronts. I'm hoping to improve the audio and UI experience of the game dramatically in the future. They're areas I know I'm personally weak at, so I'm talking with others about how to improve on them. These are things I wanna dive head-first into, but need to push off until a playable build is out.

Plus, I have a good handful of people helping or ready to help with asset creation. I think the biggest thing I can do to make better use of everyone's time is to make it easier to create stuff for the game in general. Too much relies on me right now, which is a problem I've talked about at length before. 

And...

All of these things will be getting some extra benefits from the side project I teased before. I'll be dropping more info about the Project Maple tomorrow, so look out for that post!

That's all for now. Thank you all for following me this far. This update will maybe actually be playable soon. Fingers crossed! <3