Progress Update- Making the body work (Patreon)

Quick roundup this time!

I have a coding stream starting in a two hours! 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?

Finite State Machines… working!

The FSM implementation I talked about last week is in the game and working! It’s a little more hard-coded than everything else, but that’s unavoidable right now cause each machine requires unique code to run. So I’m letting it stay that way.

Mental and body part states

Also talked about these last week. The game now properly reads in brain and body part state info from the data. Each body part can be configured with a list of states it’s allowed to have. E.g. the tongue can’t get an erection.

The chain of stimulation now looks like this:

Stimulation -> Filter to body part state -> Combine and filter to brain state -> reaction

There’s a second, shorter chain happening as well:

Lingering body part state -> Filters to brain per tick -> reaction

For things like a throbbing erection, or the lingering pain from a slap, etc, the body part has its own set of sensations it can feel for any length of time.

I’ll be working on more of this during today’s stream. The body part states are in progress, then I’ll be testing the full chain from stimulation to reaction. Once that chain is working, the game will be technically playable. Wooo!

HTML Debugging tools

So I’ve also been writing some tools to help develop the game, including an in-game debugging panel. Sounds pretty simple, but damn it’s nice to have a consistent tool for debugging. It’s been pretty manual in the past. And usually, debugging one thing means deleting the debug code for others. This’ll be especially important in testing the stimulation chain, which has quite a lot of passive and indirect influences that would be hard to track and test otherwise.

This is also serving as a test bed for using HTML as UI. So far, it’s far less painful than writing UI code in-engine, so there’s a good chance I’ll be making use of this for the first playable version.

Q&A

When will this be playable? This is the big, constant question. The short answer is I don’t know yet.

The long answer:

I’m happy to release a technical preview, or demo of certain features, as soon as that’s possible. I don’t think we’re actually far off from that, either. All the foundations of animation and whatnot are already there, so once the stimulation chain that I’m currently working on is complete, it’s just a matter of adding inputs (stimulation) and outputs (reactions) as content to play with.

It’ll be a limited features demo, including a handful of the current working systems.

For a feature complete demo, there are still a few big steps: Expressions, AI, Penetration.

In terms of a content complete demo, I need to do the characters, toys, clothes, and personalities.

For a 1.0 release, there’ll be a lot of finishing touches on animation, UI, and overall balance.

Most of those things are already partially or fully made. But each one needs to be worked through one at a time, so it fits well into the new code without adding in the old mistakes.

I’ll keep you updated on which stage we’re at, and how close we are to each.

… and that’s all for now!

I’m trying to keep focused on the goal: get to a playable version as fast as possible without cutting corners that will bite me in the ass later on. Lately, that’s been a life motto in everything I do. I honestly think it’s going quite well, but as with any long-term project like this, seeing is believing. We’re getting close to something technically playable. Can’t wait to start showing things off!

Thank you all so much for keeping me going throughout this. I will repay y’all in smut ^^

<3