Progress Update- a serious game engine!? (Patreon)

Another technical post. Lots of progress under the covers ^^

Also, I’m going live on Picarto! For the next 4 hours, I’ll be streaming work on the game. If you miss the stream, VODS are also available. ('Videos' tab at the top.)

To new patrons: We’re in the middle of an absurdly-long update cycle. Here’s the summary and how to access content.

What’s being worked on?

Code maturity

Last time, I mentioned that I’d started simplifying entities. All potential game mechanics would be able to exist and interact with each other on anything in the game, whether it’s a body part, toy, the player’s “hand”, the environment, etc. The hard part was there could only be one type of each component on an entity at once.

A summary of the problem:

One component (like, the animations component) would have to store information from multiple sources. Like, the animation for legs kicking, for breathing, for an erection’s progress, etc, would all have to exist on the character’s rig. Separate components of the same type. No bueno.

But also, there are a multitude of influences on each of those animations. Like, the breathing animation may shift the position of the character’s chest at high values. That’s a separate static animation that stays frozen in place, and slowly slides back and forth in time to match the ‘breath’ value (animation time). The breathing in and out animation is constantly playing, and speeds up with the higher value (animation speed). It also gets more intense (animation alpha). The time, speed, and alpha for each animation are all components that need to exist in the dozens, maybe even in the hundreds, all on one entity. But there can only be one at a time. No bueno.

So I had to be more creative on how to store similar types of information on single components. And most importantly, how to allow that information to be swapped in and out at any point. The ECS really shines when it’s modular. Without that ability, we’d be sliding back into the spaghetti situation from before.

One of the main reasons this insane update cycle started was because I tried to do a simple pose change on the characters, and found that the code got tied into ridiculous knots to make it work. Things were just gonna get worse and worse with every tiny feature added. And even tiny changes were becoming near-impossible. I wanted to have a game where you could change the pose, or the character’s anatomy, or the game mechanics themselves, and it wouldn’t break ten thousand things all across the codebase.

One piece at a time

So the solution isn’t too grandiose. Just having a speed component, for example, store a set of indexed speeds. Then everything that uses a speed holds its own index. Not too hard. But then there needs to be a highly-controlled way to make sure everyone’s keeping their own information straight. Okay, not too hard.

But yeah. It broke everything.

I’ve been going through, piece by piece, and carefully crafting the creation and destruction of data and objects. It’s actually been great. The process has pulled a lot of the code that existed outside the ECS (creation and destruction of data) and put it into Systems instead.

This shift from outside code -> ECS is really good. It’s maturing the code from a ‘working’ state to a ‘reliable game engine’ state… which is pretty damn exciting.

Shoring up leaks

I’ve assimilated the ECS code library into my own codebase cause I wanted to make some custom changes. Mainly to fix a bug that’s been annoying af and slowing things down. Plus I’m thinking of modifying it to handle some lewd-specific things like stimulation and penetration better.

It’s not something the player will see, but it’s now part of the overall engine that I plan to use for things like my collaboration with PussPuss on Project Maple, which will see progress as soon as the engine is stable ^^

Important Q&A

Will you release WIP versions of this? Yes! As soon as the game is playable, I’ll be releasing it regularly again. So the first version to come out may be very small in size, with only a few features enabled. I’m not waiting until it’s at 100% to release it- just until it’s actually usable!

When? When it’s ready. :’(

Will you still keep X in the game? Probably! Things will look different, and content will be rearranged or presented a bit differently, but anything that was possible in the old versions should be kept and probably expanded upon. I’ll be prioritizing more on certain areas that I think are cool, for example when it comes to body types and including a more complete set of shapes and part configurations.

Patreon vs Substar? The only caveat on the previous answer is when it comes to Patreon TOS. I want to remain above-board on the platforms I exist on, and am not really interested in toeing the line. Currently my Patreon has all of my subscriber-only content available and uncensored. My website has all my free content. I don’t plan to change this… but- if at some point I start posting stuff that you can’t get on Patreon, I’ll alert y’all directly.

The Russia situation… Never thought I’d have to talk about this, but currently Russian patrons are getting cut off due to their country being blocked from the Swift payment system. If you’re a citizen affected by war, no matter where you are, please stay safe, and don’t worry about my patreon. When I start releasing content, I’ll try to make sure everyone has fair access to it. But hopefully by then, there will be peace for sovereign Ukraine and for Russian citizens. War fucking sucks.

Heavy stuff. That’s all I got for now!

I’ve decided to spend pre-stream time writing the weekly post, then letting the post serve as an announcement for streams. This feels more logical, and I can even point to the Patreon post during streams to answer questions and stuff. So yeah, maybe a good idea!

Every week, I sit down and assess my progress, hours of work logged, etc, and am consistently blown away that this is a job I get to do, thanks to everyone’s continued support. I don’t want to take your good will and opportunity for granted. I want to release content worthy of everyone’s incredible amount of faith they’ve put in me. And that’s what I put my effort into every day, since this is my full-time job now.

I sincerely hope the end result pleases you all, you beautiful perverts.

<3