Progress Update- a hybrid ECS approach (Patreon)

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?

Core mechanics

I’ve been doing testing this week on different ideas to find the final pattern for implementing the main game mechanics. And, well, I think I’ve got it? It’s pretty neat, but a little hard to write all that much about. I don’t wanna pad these posts so I’ll just give you the quick rundown of what it is, and what it means for getting an actual playable release out.

A hybrid ECS approach

I’ve landed on a stable partial-ECS approach to the code. Not having the ECS was a nightmare. Trying to solve every problem in the ECS was beyond my skill level and beyond the game’s needs. It’s the ol’ everything looks like a nail problem.

There are three major pieces of this game that have made the ECS (entity-component-system) architecture difficult. Here’s what they are:

Sexy nuanced bodies. Like, genuinely. The characters in this game are very complex. Their bodies and minds have a lot going on. In a simple platformer game, a single character could be a single Entity made of a few components (like position, move speed, health, sprite, etc). In this, there are hundreds. And you can’t have two components of the same type on an Entity. So, if there’s a position on dick, there can’t also be one on the hoof.

I’ve solved this by splitting the body into its individual parts, with the npc itself being essentially an Entity with a disembodied brain connected to them all.

Animations. The animation code is all one object. It was never meant to be used in the ECS pattern and I really can’t rewrite it all to do that well. But all those separate body part Entities need to be linked to the same single animation rig.

This has been a bit tricky, so I read npc data and create body part Entities outside the ECS where I have access to all the info. They get an object, like a remote control, that animates just the one piece of the body. It’s not ECS-pattern, but it’s the most practical for the game’s needs, I think.

UI. Argh. Most people don’t put UI into the ECS anyway. But it’s gotta be woven into the ECS just enough.

So yeah, I think I’ve got the right approach on this. Player interaction behaves like a normal program, with a mouse touch creating an event that alerts some code that something was clicked. The ECS adds tags to the game objects that are affected, which fire systems later in the game tick.

So, things aren’t instantly-updated the way a normal UI would work. Instead, the updates are delayed until the correct moment in the update order. Super important for not creating crazy spaghetti situations where the player clicks something before the game’s ready to think about it.

What all of this means

This is a new phase of development now. It’s back to steady and predictable progress.

I’m finally, finally, back to the point where I’m just methodically laying down bricks to build the house. This was a long detour to find all the right bricks and architectural design and whatnot. Now I’m just putting it together bit by bit.

It’s pretty exciting, but it’s hard to hype it up when all I can show is… like… “BOOM, this slider fuckin works now!”

I mean yay, it does work, and that is awesome, but not gonna blow anyone’s minds yet.

Q&A

When is the next release? When it’s ready!

Will there be urethral play? Yup, at some point :3

How about eggs and oviposition? I love it and yes. An explicit goal of mine is to include wonderful egginess.

Using 15.ai to create voices? I am not convinced that this is viable for a sandbox project with no dialogue trees. Just, straight up, I can’t see this being decent, as much as I’d love for it to be a thing. Instead, I’d probably use it for a game with enough dialogue to warrant 15.ai, but that isn’t so dialogue-focused that I’d rather hire a voice actor to give a better performance.

That’s all for now!

An update on my personal life- “oof”. That’s uh… that’s as far as I’m gonna go into it. It’s been a few months of a lot of turmoil. This week wasn’t the worst of them, but it was a pretty big blow. I’ll be all right though. I’m super grateful to have this project as an anchor to work on. It’s pretty hilarious to go from a heavy IRL moment to “Okay I gotta go work on my cartoon horse tiddies now”.

Thank you all so much for keeping this thing alive and giving me the opportunity to make a legit-ass smut game.

<3