Progress Update- Sensitive squishy bits (Patreon)

Body parts and touchiness!

I have a coding stream starting in a couple minutes! Last time, the streaming service kept dropping me and I switched to streaming via Discord. That might happen again, and if so, the discord link will be in the Picarto.tv chat. 

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 sensitivity. Last week I was working on personality/preferences. That's actually heavily linked to the way I customize body parts. The personality/preferences can be thought of as the mental sensitivity to certain things. The body parts have physical sensitivity.

The neat addition this time is more technical. In the past, all body parts had the same sensitivity code running on them, whether it was a forehead or a penis... which doesn't quite make sense. The penis becomes sensitive in different ways as it becomes erect, while the forehead doesn't. It took some experimenting, but I figured out a stable way to allow adding different sensitivity types on to a body part. You can have as many or few as you choose.

The standard one just makes a part feel each sensation more or less intensely. The erogenous one deals with how a body part's sensitivity to certain feelings changes with arousal. Others, like the penetrable one or insides ones, will deal with sensations likely to be experienced by internal parts, especially considering  how the body will squeeze and clench inside during intense moments.

This is a nuanced upgrade from previous versions, where adding new sensitivity types with different logic felt impossible. It still worked okay, but it was hard to get the right behaviors as more toys and types of stimulation became available. Now, I can deal with delicate balances. For example, how a ticklish body part might feel tickled, then pleasured, then overstimulated, all from just raising the power on a vibrator. 

Like many features, I suspect the true power of this addition is yet to be unlocked. It's modular and expandable, meant to grow as we figure out more sensations we wanna see in the game.

What's left before release?

Once Sensitivity is in a good spot (gonna be testing and debugging on stream today), the final features to take on are attention, reaction logic, facial expressions and penetration... and that's it? 

Attention- the next step. Getting characters to look at stuff. The concept from previous versions should be okay, so it'll just be some updating and adapting. It'll use the personality/preferences stuff from last week.

Reaction logic- an expansion of the current brain code. Right now character reactions are cosmetic. We need some logic to trigger from reactions too. Sounds nebulous but it's gonna be very similar to the cosmetic code.

Facial expressions- an addition to the character reactions. All the code is there, but we need some extra tools for making faces easier since they're pretty complex animation-wise. 

Penetration- a big one. Luckily I feel pretty confident in the old penetration code, so it's more about adapting it to the new code instead of re-imagining it from scratch.

Like... actually tho. I think we'll be feature complete. Once there, I'll be racing to flesh things out and release WIP playable updates as we go.

Q&A

(Regarding the personality updates last week)

Will we be able to "train" a character to have reactions to certain things? So, not yet, but yes. But not yet. It's not in the code yet, but I've been planning for the "training" feature for a long time. So, after this version is released, the next big feature is Portals, and after that, I'll be working on a big expansion of mental/emotional features... including the idea of "training" and memory. The current code should support it when we're ready to jump in on that.

Will we be able to have "closeted" characters? As in, characters who are secretly into a kink or gender, but who either don't want to show it, or don't realize it yet. This is complex. The answer for now is "kind of". It'll be a much simpler version of this idea until the bigger mental features mentioned above are added. I love this idea and intend to explore it in that future update.

... and that's all for now!

Y'all. Progress is happening. This is a big check off the list of remaining features, and also one that's been feeling intimidating up until this point. Turns out it wasn't so bad, it just needed some creative solutions. Feels good.

Also, I'm working on the sidelines to find creative ways to approach scaling up my content creation speeds. Outsourcing is the main answer here I think, and I'm looking to shift myself into more of a team manager position over the long term. We're in the early stages of this stuff still, but when things come together I'll post about it.

For now, I must go stream. Thank you, my amazing patrons, for supporting this absurd smut machine we're building.

<3