Progress Update- making the brainsss (Patreon)

A rundown of the current progress, and a long answer to an important question.

I have a coding stream starting in an hour! 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?

Body part states, brain states, brain actions

This is the physiology chain at the core of the game that I’ve been talking about. It’s kinda complicated to talk about without diving super deep on the technical side. I’ve done that in previous posts, so instead I just wanna give y’all a rundown of what it looks like, what’s done, and what remains to be done.

Bold is stuff done this week. Italics are things left to do. Normal text is done.

Stimulation:

• Objects can touch bodies
• Objects hold stimulation data about what each kind of touch feels like
• Objects use presets- a collection of stimulation data that describes their material (e.g. soft silicone, hard metal, etc)
• All material presets defined
• Stimulation amounts balanced
• Objects (like body parts) can receive stimulation from other objects

Stimulation -> sensation:

• Stimulation (external touch) is transformed into sensation (internal experience) through a set of configurable filters
• Filters can be swapped around for each body part
• All filters created
• Filter strengths balanced

Sensation:

• Body parts can hold sensations (not possible in previous versions)
• Body parts can transform those sensations over time (for example pain lingering and fading even after the cause of the pain has stopped)
• All sensation transformations defined
• Body parts can have unique sensitivity data for each sensation
• All sensitivity data defined
• Body parts transmit current sensations to the brain

Sensation -> experience:

• The brain transforms those sensations into experiences through a set of filters (e.g. turning a soft touch into arousal, orgasm buildup, etc)
• All filters defined

Experience:

• The brain holds all current experiences
• The brain transforms its experiences over time (e.g. long periods of edging transforming into feeling pent-up, closeness to orgasm reducing over time, etc)
• All transforms defined

Experience -> action:

• The brain can turn internal experience into an appropriate action (currently testing)

Action:

• Abstract actions can be defined, and assigned as reactions to experiences (e.g. “squirm” when in pleasure)
• All characters can define their own actions, reactions, and conditions for what actions they take (e.g. an excitable character might be more quick to squirm or show expressions)
• All abstract actions defined
• All characters’ unique actions defined
• Abstract actions turned into concrete actions (e.g. a “squirm” animation for this character rig)
• All concrete actions defined

(Gonna add emotions to this chain pretty soon as well. It’s similar, but it skips the individual body parts and goes straight to the brain. And instead of “stimulation” we’re using things the character sees and experiences as input.)

I wanted a lot more progress this week, but we’re getting there regardless. Having the characters act and react to things visually will be a major milestone! As soon as that happens, SHF3 is technically a “game” again.

Q&A

Does the game need to be this complex? I’ve had a few questions around this. Also, some people have asked if I’m trying to make some kind of technically-accurate body simulator. I have a long, maybe slightly defensive answer.

So first, I do think it needs to be this complex. My previous experience trying to write NPC behavior made it clear that you can fake a lot of sexy behavior with a much easier setup than this. But the cracks start to show as you build more things on top of it.

My goal isn’t to make a technical body/brain simulation. It’s to make a kinky sandbox that feels right when you play. Kink is pretty deep and complex, and tends to touch on the entire range of human emotions and sexuality. Some game devs dive way too hard into the technically accurate simulator mindset and I think it’s a waste of dev time. It’s all about the core question- is this fun (or hot) to play?

A quick example is this- back in the early days of SHF3, you could “tickle” the characters, but it would actually just count toward the “overstimulation” meter. They would make a panicked face and struggle. I saw some tickling fans talking about the game and they expressed how that experience didn’t really fulfill the tickling fetish. I hadn’t put much work into that part so I wasn’t surprised, but it was disheartening to hear.

So I dove in and added tickling as a unique sensation, including facial expressions and behavior specific to it. That did a lot. But it was its own completely separate feature from pleasure, and the other sensations. There were some pieces that didn’t feel right if you wanted to really dig in to the tickling kink. If you touched the character in ticklish zones with a vibrator, they’d simply feel pleasure, cause that’s what the vibrator was programmed to do.

I added some more logic to make the “pleasure” sensation transform into “tickling” in ticklish areas. So vibrating an armpit would produce the expected tickling. There are still problems with that, though. Ticklish and erogenous areas often overlap. They should be able to feel both pleasure and tickling at the same time. There was more logic needed to make it feel real.

The end result was pretty nuanced, and worked all right. But it was still very limited, mostly because I was still faking a lot of the characters’ reactions, which made it hard to build new features on top of. Embarrassment is a good example- the old versions didn’t include this emotion because it was too much work to add to the system. But the game would be so much better with embarrassment, humiliation kinks, etc.

That’s what this current version addresses. I’m letting this be as complex as it needs to so I don’t have to compromise on or fake the core part of the gameplay- the characters’ reactions. It’s not about having a technical masterpiece, but about being able to fix the problems I ran into in previous attempts.

Sorry if that was ranty. I despise the “complex, technically accurate, but boring to actually play” genre of games, and want to be super clear that that’s not what I’m putting all this dev time into.

… and that’s all for now! >.>’

I read all your comments, even though I usually don’t respond! Thank y’all for the many words of encouragement. It’s really heartwarming to see how I’ve gathered such a genuinely kind community. It also helps me to see and understand how everyone feels about things like the timeline, the features I’m talking about, etc.

I want to move on to the release stage as fast as possible! I appreciate everyone’s reassurance, but also still feel the time pressure internally. This thing’s gotta ship!

Thank y’all crazy people so much for your support <3