Development Blog #4 (Patreon)

Disclaimer: This blog is as usual a bit “technical”. We had to shorten some sections down in order to not write a book. We will be doing a Q&A developer stream where we can go into further detail with you.

Story Map

TLDR: We present to you the first look at the story map UI and how we intend to make it available to you. The Story Map will allow you to view missed opportunities and replay entire chapters from start.

The Story Map is divided into two interaction types: Developer & Player Interactions.

• Player Interactions with the Story Map:
• Restarting already started or completed Chapters
• Replaying already completed Scenes
• Review Scene Progression and Completion

The Story Map is going to be a full-screen UI Element that allows you to check on your current progression through the storyline and find out about things possibly missed.

On one side, the intent behind the Story Map is to allow for a broad oversight on your current progress. On the other side, the Story Map allows you to discover content that you might have missed and help with shaping a more complete experience.

You will select chapters in a separate UI looking like this.

You will then be able to do all other interactions within this UI.

The overall goal for bringing the Story Map to you is to increase re-playability. It should also allow you to play the game without “having to” read a guide beforehand. The Story Map offers a wide range of tools to either experience missed content, or simply restart a section of the game you feel you could have played better.

Developer Interactions with the Story Map:

• Chapter Node Setup
• Scene Transitions
• Unique Scene Data Setup
• Missions
• … and much more

Compared to the Player UI the Developer UI for the Story Map looks quite boring!

Currently seen here is a chapter node setup. A chapter graph like this can contain sequencer and exploration node - and might have even more node variety in the future (Hint: Combat!).

Sequencer Nodes are related to our dialogue graphs. We call it sequencer because the tool in Unreal Engine we use to drive our animations for dialogue and sex scenes is called “Sequencer”.

Sequencer node = Talking, Fucking, Chilling and Experiencing Linear Content!

Exploration Nodes relate to sections in the game that have a specific mission goal in the open world. Interact with another character, pick up a specific item, get to a specific location!

Exploration node = Walking, Discovering and Exploration!

We are currently working on the subsections of each graph node. They will eventually expand into “tabs”, further giving access to a wide variety of scene settings, for example: Custom Scene based Post Processing and Lighting! And much more.

Mocap

TLDR: We are using Motion Capture. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But there are many small issues we are facing, so let's take a closer look!

Mocap was and is a long term strategy for pretty much any independent game studio. It obviously heavily de-creases the output time for very to fairly realistic body animations. On the other side, bad equipment or setup can lead to an increased work time spend on cleanup.

This mix of positives and negatives has been on our minds since we first started investigating the usage of Motion Capture in our development pipeline.

We currently have four capture types available to use, with two of them actively being used in production:

• Neuron Suit (Used in Production)
• Vive Full Body Tracking (Used in Production)
• IPhone Facial Tracking (Currently not used in Production)
• Facewear Facial Tracking (Currently not used in Production)

Neuron Suit

We currently have a low budget motion capture suit available for use. It works quite well for most motions, especially for standing characters. But the moment you try lying down flat on a bed the tracking breaks completely and the resulting animations become entirely unusable.

Vive Full Body Tracking

We were looking at even lower budget options for full body tracking and discovered a really well developed Plugin for Vive Tracker Motion Capture recording in Unreal Engine.

The overall quality of the tool is lower than the results from the Neuron suit, but we can lie down, sit up and make more “impossible” moves than the Neuron Suit currently can handle.

Release Stages

TLDR: What is the difference between an Alpha and a Beta build? How do we progress towards a full release? Release Stage allow us to define specifically what will happen when - and be available to you.

Excerpt from what we shared about this back on the Alpha 1.1.0 patch (sub-chapters got replaced by scenes):

The game has currently 12 chapters planned and 8 additional datable base characters next to Projekt Melody and Melware, each with their own character progression and separate dating storyline.

We section our planning off into Chapters and Scenes, to make things easier to plan and track - and obviously to communicate the completion rate of each section of the game.

Next to chapters and scenes, we use "Stages" to further distinguish quality levels each sub-chapter. Stages are separated into 3 Types.

Stage 1: Minimum Viable Product! This means: a scener is fun to play and interact with, but maybe lacks a bit in variety.

Stage 2: Extended Variety! This means that we add additional animation variations to scenes, to further add depth to the gameplay and also add more polish to each scene.

Stage 3: Extended Interactivity! This means that we add interactive systems to sex scenes, which will allow the player to take a pause from our very dialogue-heavy scenes and focus on the "matter" at hand wink wink.

[...]

Why do we use stages?

We want to provide you with both good gameplay AND a great story. Since we are still a fairly small team, we need to prioritize tasks efficiently, in order to get things done. This sometimes means, taking a step back from AAA and focusing on what's important to let you share our characters stories.

To continue where we left of there: The game will first be produced near to completion in a Stage 1 quality or as a "Alpha" product. The idea behind this is that worst case the game will be “fun and finished”.

The Core Team will focus on this Stage and on aggressively progressing throughout the full storyline, plus adding special dating content.

Through adding more playable content, we expect the audience to grow. We will establish a secondary support team at that point, which will start working on the Stage 2 and Stage 3 polish passes for Chapters and Scenes.

To finally relate this to Alpha versus Beta versus Full Release: Short term we will focus on getting the first chapter out in Alpha Stage, then continue pushing the next chapter in Alpha Stage. Eventually we will be pushing for polish towards Beta Pass on already completed chapters using our support team, which will then subsequently trickle into releases. Eventually every chapter will have received either Beta or Full Release pass treatment - over time.