Project Maple! (Patreon)

Meet the Maple the kobold, the focus of a small project between myself and PussPuss. For now we're calling it Project Maple. It'll be released for free when it's ready! Some concept art is above. If you wanna see more, PussPuss will be posting concept art and asset work on their Patreon during development.

We're going with an original non-pony character. It's different from my other attempts to include one of every pony. By making her the sole focus, it'll be easier to deliver some concentrated, quality lewd. I hope y'all will give her a chance to impress <3

The kobold will ride the player, and both the NPC and the player will have some level of control over the action. That's all I can say for now about the gameplay! It's a simple concept, similar to many other lewd games out there. It may have some subtle qualities that'll stand out, though... see below :3

The Engine

Project Maple will run on the SHF3 engine. It won't look anything like SHF3 on the outside, but the code will be the same!

I'm trying to be as clever as possible. There's nothing this game will have that SHF3 isn't capable of at a baseline. Most of the code work I've done on SHF3 could be classified as "engine work" - that is, building up the game engine to have the features I want for the actual game. I've already split SHF3 into two parts- the engine code, and the actual game code. So I'll be able to use the same engine as SHF3.

This requires some fixing of early mistakes in SHF3's development. Too much was originally hard-coded to SHF3 as a game. Luckily a huge amount of that work was already done while working on SHF3's current update. I even split the code into game and engine before coming up with Project Maple. The circumstances just so happened to align well for the new idea, so I decided to seize the opportunity for a test run.

Now, the engine isn't fully ready yet. There're still parts that need to be abstracted so they're usable in a new project. But Project Maple won't need the engine to be at 100%, since it won't be using every feature already in SHF3. The great thing is, both SHF3 and Project Maple (and all future games done like this) will receive all engine updates. That means that as features are transferred from SHF3 to the engine, they'll suddenly become usable in Project Maple too. Even if they're only used in small ways, that's a significant power boost to the old "play one animation at varying speeds until sploosh" style of lewd game :3

The game engine I originally started on is called StageXL, a Dart WebGL engine made primarily for web stuff, as a replacement for Flash. My fork of it is called StageDL. I'll open source it when it's ready to use. I probably won't stay on this engine forever, but instead port the good stuff to something more modern and maintained. That's further into the future though!

Reasoning

I'm using this as a test run for a somewhat hands-off type of project. I think we can make something worth playing without having it stuck in the pipeline forever. And I think it's possible to be creating content at a much, much faster pace than I currently am. It all depends on how much of a project I can successfully offload onto a team, and how much I can streamline the stuff I'm doing myself.

With a talented artist handling the visuals, a relatively simple rig, and everything I need from the engine already made, I have extremely high hopes for this. In this case, 'success' means a good game made with very low development time spent on it.

Gotta finish this SHF3 release first though. Soon, sooon >.<'

That's all for now! Thanks to the incredible support y'all have given me, I'm able to collab with high quality artists for stuff like this. It's the first of hopefully many, many experiments to perfect my lewd content creation pipeline. Your thoughts on this project, and the process in general, are always super appreciated! 

Thank you all for the opportunity to make my smutty ideas into an "honest" living. 

<3