SHF3 Progress Update- catchup! (Patreon)

Okay, this post is late. I'm sorry about that! This first bit is somewhat personal, so feel free to skip ahead to the game stuff. I just want to be open about what’s going on and why. Don’t panic though, everything’s still being worked on!

Personal biz

So, I’ve been struggling this past week or two with focusing. Those who have followed for a while have heard me talk at length about building up my work/life routine to a point where I can be productive and healthy despite the ADHD. Unfortunately, when IRL stress comes in, the whole routine gets blasted to pieces. Bad habits that I thought were conquered come roaring back, and I have to fight to put each piece back in place. Control over my time has to be reclaimed bit by agonizing bit.

One of those bad habits is just... avoidance. Due to lack of focus, I felt like I had nothing decent to show in my weekly progress update. Instead of dealing with it directly, I avoided posting. I know from experience that this can lead to a whole spiral, where with each passing week I’m more embarrassed about how little I have to show, cause it’s been so long, and avoid it even harder, and so on.

The weekly updates and streams are there partially to just keep me accountable to my supporters. If I feel embarrassed because of a lack of visible progress, that’s probably a sign I need to do something different. So, yeah, it means the accountability is working lol.

Anyway, I’ve been clawing my way back up to full productivity. One of the things I’ve noticed is that, thanks to how healthy and effective my habits have become normally, I’m still more productive during a bad week than I used to be during a good week just a year ago.

What’s being worked on?

Game architecture.

So the main thing is that I am grappling with the game’s architecture. I talked about it earlier when it came to how toys are handled in the code. By organizing the logic and animations into a more standardized format, I’m able to expand upon features and iterate way faster. But what I found was that, as I started applying the architecture, the structure of the entire game started becoming less of a daunting mess in my mind, and more of a series of understandable chunks that I could confidently handle. Those chunks formed a repeating pattern of essential data and functions that was startlingly clear.

I realized I had run across the idea of the elemental unit of this game- the game object. There are a set of visual and functional things that all basic objects in this game share. This is often the Sprite object in a typical game engine. For the SHF3 engine, the game object requires ways to do a whole list of thing: interact with body parts, hold info on their size/shape in case they’re involved with penetration, hold descriptive data for the basic AI, get splashed with naughty fluids, transfer or handle naughty fluids, run a universal function like vibrating and do visual and sound effects for it, cause stimulation to things it touches, receive stimulation from things touching it, be shown in the UI somehow, be grabbed by the mouse, be moved around and receive/apply force, contain a whole set of conditional animation data in them depending on what they’re doing, and be able to handle dynamic size/shape changes.

Not all game objects will use all of those functions (I'll probably utilize the ECS pattern for this eventually), but all game objects can be described using a collection of those traits. Toys have most of those traits. Body parts do too. Clothing has a decent set of them. Even restraints and pieces of the environment have a set of them. None of the things mentioned have anything outside of those traits. The only system still outside all of this is the AI personality mechanics, which should probably remain separate anyway? Will figure that out later.

But yeah, in the past months, most of the code for all of these things has already been refactored or completely rewritten. But I still stumbled with how to deal with what felt like so many completely different features. Doggy collars and butt plugs appear to be entirely separate objects with entirely different mechanics, but there are only a couple of key differences when you really boil it down.

Programmers reading this are absolutely face-palming right now cause I’m gushing over basic concepts, but nuts to you! I learn at my own pace! And I’m fueled by failure and the disastrous consequences of my own ignorance!

Right. So a little while ago I said “I won’t be doing any refactoring from this point on” and… well… here I am with my hand in the cookie jar again. This whole deal is a constant state of “should I do this now or should I put it off” and I still have no idea if I’m making the right call. I mean, this is a huge step toward stabilizing and speeding up all future features and content. Paired with the refactoring work and feature improvements already done for this update, the path forward for pretty much every major feature I’ve been planning becomes solid and clear. But I’m guessing that excuse is getting real old at this point.

The positive takeaway is that I can clearly see the final shape of this game’s code. Whatever gets added or expanded upon, it still fits into this architecture. We’ve gone from a wild, “whatever works” programming style to an enduring structure. Plus, this means I can pop out the game logic and put it into an entirely new game engine, if I ever want to upgrade to something newer. Cool stuff :3

Data.

Kinda related to architectural changes.

Been gutting a lot of useless repeated info out of the toys data file. I’ve been reading about how Kerbal Space Program approaches the sandbox game format and have absorbed some nice tips about data structure. I viewed a lot of this wisdom in the past as unnecessary, since it seemed to be targeted more toward modding than base game dev. Turns out, simplifying the structure of game data isn’t only beneficial for modding; it helps my poor bug brain grapple with how the game works.

Toy messes.

Fluids smearing on toys has this whole ridiculously overcomplicated system powering it, so I've been slicing it down into something more reasonable. I'm kinda struggling with representing fluids in general, but I think I'm finding some better ways. Making vector tools for highlights, shines, and fluid stains in Illustrator has been a great start, since I need a way to ensure that I can kinda mass-produce whatever effect I use across every toy/surface.

A big change was to remove all of its visuals from code and just put it into Spine. Programmatically creating visual stuff is just doing it the hard way, when Spine is capable of doing more, and more easily.

Assets!

Been getting some help with making new body part/type variations, clothing, toys, etc! I want to talk excitedly about all of these, but since I don’t know what’ll end up in the next update and what will have to wait, I’m gonna just say… there’s a bunch of fun stuff in the pipeline.

Q&A

Chastity? Yes, absolutely. And soon! For penises, and orifices of all kinds. The code is already there for it (blocking orifices, controlling erections, etc). It’s just a matter of me spending a little time implementing it. The reason I haven’t yet is because I want to make it decent! You should be able to manually put the device on, lock it with a key, etc. (This is the part that’ll require more code since there aren’t multi-piece toys yet). And I need to introduce a stimulation type for penises attempting erection within a cage. And the ability to stimulate through the cage/belt via a vibrator, etc. Dunno when exactly it’ll come, but it’s a definite yes.

Can we vote on adding new characters? Yes, at some point! I’d planned to do community voting on characters before this whole update fiasco began. Then I put it off, because adding new characters (even if an artist does the assets) creates a bunch of rigging work for me. I don’t want to end up burying myself in ever-increasing promises of content that I can’t deliver on. The solution is to introduce these polls when I’m able to spare the time for rigging, and/or to simplify character creation to the point where I can deliver on new characters without too much dev time spent. This’ll be intrinsically tied to progress on character customization options, btw.

When is the next update actually gonna be released!? I don’t know yet. I’m paying off a couple years’ worth of technical debt right now. My inexperience in the past created a giant sinkhole of messy code that worked, but became impossible to handle. So instead of adding more messes, I’ve been rebuilding the entire foundation with more solid materials. I’ve thought I was close to finishing many times over the course of this update, and have excitedly told my followers that a new build was just around the corner, only to suddenly learn that I had a lot more to do. All I can say is- it’ll be soonish, I hope!

Weekly stream VODs!

Watch them on Picarto, under the Videos tab at the top of my page. So far, I'm not super proud of the streams in terms of content. I'm still figuring out a format and vibe that'll both show off progress on the game, and educate a little for those curious about how what game dev looks like. Right now things are super casual, kinda unorganized, and full of Discord shenanigans. I'm working on it! >.<'

That's all for now! Project Maple update coming in a little bit! :3

I gotta find a better way to write these posts. They take a lot of mental energy to do all at once, and end up being late pretty often. I tried writing a little daily recap before and that seemed to be a decent approach, but ended up being highly technical cause it's mostly code talk. I'll try putting that into practice again this week and see what I can get from it.

It's hard for me to fathom just how lucky I am to have such a supportive and enthusiastic community. Thank you all so much! I'll do my best to keep earning that support!

<3