Progress Update- sensation and stimulation (Patreon)

Part 2 of this week’s post is a breakdown of stimulation design in the game.

If you missed yesterday’s stream, check out the VOD here. ('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?

Stimulation -> state -> reaction

In last week’s stream, we had a long brainstorming session about how to handle the flow of information in the game. Designing how stimulation, sensation, and reactions work is the core of how the game delivers the fun and dynamic lewds. So the basic idea is-

Outside stimulation -> npc stimulated -> npc reaction

For example…

Poke butt with dildo -> character feels pleasure -> character blushes and gets hard.

This was really simple in the first versions of the game, but as the player is allowed to do more things, it’s more and more noticeable when interactions don’t feel right. Focusing on the first two links in the chain for a moment (outside stimulation -> npc stimulated), we can find some problems: a light touch might not be pleasurable at first… it might tickle, or feel uninteresting, or hurt. The old model looked like this:

A dildo’s touch is 1 point of pleasure. When it touches the character, add 1 point of pleasure times the speed of the dildo. Give outward reaction.

It works kinda, but removes all nuance. It might hurt at first, but become more pleasurable as things go. Some characters might derive much more pleasure from it. So I introduced the sensitivity mechanic, which amplifies or dulls how characters feel things. They can each have a unique sensitivity setting on each body part. That looked like this:

Outside stimulation -> npc’s sensitivity filter -> npc stimulated -> npc reaction

A dildo gives 1 pleasure point. When touching the character, add 1 point of pleasure times the speed of the dildo, times the unique sensitivity settings on their butt. Give outward reaction.

That’s an improvement, cause now characters will react differently. Plus, the sensitivity settings can introduce more nuance. When not aroused, they can be set to be ticklish instead, for example. But there’s something weird about this model still. This was best shown when I made the touch mechanic, where you can touch the characters anywhere with the mouse:

The mouse touch gives like, 0.5 points of pleasure. Which isn’t really accurate to real life. So I had to then adjust the sensitivity settings for every touchable body part to mostly nullify that pleasure, and convert it into tickling or other sensations, otherwise they’d cum from you rubbing their noses. And even for the dildo… being touched by a dildo isn’t really pleasurable all on its own. It feels like just a silicone thing nudging you.

I didn’t see an easy way to make this more realistic, so I fudged the sensitivity settings enough to hide the fact that the characters could only really feel a small handful of sensations: pleasure, pain, tickling, arousal, overstimulation. And I added emotional reactions to being touched in different places, which helped make it feel more natural.

Stimulation vs Sensation

Eventually, I abstracted the different types of touching. Instead of a dildo giving 1 pleasure point, a mouse touch giving .5, a vibrator giving 3, etc… they each gave an action. A dildo gives 1 fuck point, a touch gives 1 rub point, a vibrator gives 1 vibe point. Then I had code to turn each of those into real sensations. This is where I realized there was a distinction between stimulation (the actual thing happening to you) and sensation (the inner feelings it produces).

Now the model looked like this:

Outside stimulation -> stimulation converted to sensation -> npc’s sensitivity filter -> npc sensations state -> npc reaction

The “sensations state” being how much pleasure, pain, etc a character is feeling overall.

I also added some more sensations, things like a feeling of teasing, a feeling of roughness, desperation, tenseness, fatigue, composure, etc.. This helped with more nuanced stimulation conversion. But there was still something funny about this. 2 fuck points would be converted to 4 pleasure points, 1 roughness point, etc, and then go into the npc.

There’s a design problem there. The simplest example is- hard dragon scales act fundamentally different to mammal skin. I can tweak sensitivity settings, but those are just modifiers. The conversion function contains the logic of “what’s happening to my body?” So shouldn’t the fuck points go into the npc, and then be converted to sensation, based on a unique conversion filter specific to that npc?

Outside stimulation -> npc’s conversion filter turns stimulation to sensation -> npc’s sensitivity filter -> npc sensations state -> npc reaction

A breakdown

Outside stimulation: a vibrator touches a nipple. It gives 3 vibe points.

Conversion filter: Happens to the whole body. This npc is highly ticklish, so their conversion filter turns 3 vibe points (stimulation) into 12 tickling points, 2 pleasure points (sensation).

Sensitivity filter: Happens to a body part. The npc’s nipples themselves are highly erogenous, so the 2 pleasure points are amplified to 5, and 3 arousal points are added.

Npc state: The npc was already highly aroused, so they’re now 12 points tickled, 5 points pleasured, 67 points aroused, and are beginning to build toward orgasm.

Npc reaction: The npc makes an aroused laughing face, squirms a bit, etc. (will get into reactions more later)

The fuck function

A core mechanic is the Fuck conversion function. Originally “fuck” was just “add 2 points to pleasure”. Then, somewhere later in the code, the size/stretching mechanic would kick in, and amplify fucking feelings by the size of the toy. But that was weird, cause it’d mean that bigger toys were always more pleasurable. And somewhere after that, wetness would come into play and reduce pain/add pleasure.

Another change: the conversion filter can now take multiple types of stimulation at once and convert them into sensations.

So the new Fuck conversion function, which I wrote on yesterday’s stream, takes Fuck stimulation, lubrication levels, size of the toy/object inside, and any stretching that’s occurring, and uses them all together to try to produce a natural feeling result. Most characters will probably use this function but tweak its values. Some might use an entirely different one, depending on their biology.

I’m excited about this because it means no more fudging values to try to fake reactions. And weird results, like big toys being overpowered even when the character likes smaller ones, are super easy to trace down and adjust.

And there’s a lot of freedom in being able to say “I can’t tweak things quite right for this character, so I’ll just write a new function for them”. Yessss.

Other exciting things

The brainstorming session last week actually inspired a lot more design ideas and revelations, including:

• Customizing character reactions to their current state in data instead of code, allowing for much more unique behaviors
• The AI data flow is actually the same as the stimulation data flow, and therefore can use the same pattern and maybe even most of the code
• Allowing composite preferences in AI. As in, “I like tall unicorn stallions, but not stallions who aren’t tall, mares who are tall, or unicorns who aren’t tall stallions.” Designing personalities for the characters has been kind of frustrating without the ability to combine concepts like that.
• Research into finite state machines as an answer to giving the AI long term goals, wants, and reactions to the player.

Of course, not all of this is happening right now. But it’s happening :3

Q&A

Is there any timeline for the game? Milestone goals, maybe? Yes and no. I’ve been making predictions about how long things will take internally, but not sharing them, specifically because they’re always wayyy off. Milestones are important for both internal planning and for communicating to y’all where things are at. Since I’ve actually got my thoughts and plans organized into project management software now, I’ll try to share those and communicate better. This question hurts cause I know my communication isn’t great around this topic. I’ll keep trying to improve on this. Hopefully the next post will give a good breakdown of where things are, and what’s left to be done.

Will this stay strictly a pony game, or include furries? Undecided on this. I’m mostly making an underlying engine that just displays whatever you want on top of it. My current thought is that there might be a pony version, and other spinoffs using this engine with different types of characters and focuses. The kobold project I’m (eventually) doing with PussPuss is an example.

All the way through penetration? Yep, I’m gonna try. I’ve been designing the current systems with ideas like all the way through, multiple penetrations, penetration-in-penetration (e.g. a fleshlight shoved into a character and then fucked), and oother more creative things in mind.

Bigger, or even hyper genitals? No reason not to beyond just getting it to look right. I want a lot of customizability involved with the bodies, so bigger stuff yes, and hyper will probably happen at some point.

Macro/micro kink? Mayyybe. With the ability to zoom and move the camera, this is possible. Not immediately, but I like the idea of exploring size changes.

… and that’s all for now!

I’m feeling a lot more passionate in recent weeks about this project. I’m seeing the potential of it more directly now that things are falling into place. It’s exciting, but a lot of work. Certain things are still stressful, mainly around project management, as I talked about in the previous post. I’m determined to grow and get better at these aspects, cause damn I want to see all these ridiculous lewd ideas released already.

It’s insane to me that y’all are still supporting me through this huge learning process. Thank you, sincerely. I’ll get back to making weird horse game now ^^

<3