December 2018 Development Update (Patreon)

The biggest change and the work I spent the most time on (after losing days of progress due to hitting various bugs) was the shift to behavior trees. The move away from the previous prototype scripting system means we'll have better performance (since we're not checking a bunch of unneeded conditions), less spaghetti code so it's easier to maintain, and well modularized so it's easier to expand upon. I included the image below to better illustrate why this change is beneficial.

  With this change a few adjustments to the girl's AI were made:

• She will no longer wait for you to leave before undressing. While doing this was more realistic the feedback received was that it was unfun
• Some changes to her face reactions
• Expanded on her behavior so she can now walk to the pool ladder and sit on it instead of spawning on it

Unfortunately the changes to have her try to pickup the key from the trap and her getting chained hasn't been made yet, I started working on the new area before finishing this since I wanted some visible changes.

Next was a slider added to the UI to adjust the player's field of view. The default value was also adjusted to be slightly higher.

Most exciting of all we have the addition of a completely new and custom made girl's shower and locker room! You will be able to access it from one of the pool doors.

So where's the next alpha build?

While I wanted to have something out for this month, unfortunately most of the changes were to the underlying code, which while great for development long term, it resulted in little to no benefit on top of the current alpha build.

So with that in mind, the next released build v0.0.2 is planned for the end of January. For this build I want to have the following implemented:

• Finish updating the behavior tree to include picking up the key from the trap and getting caught
• Inventory system integrated. This means creating the UI and having the key and trap as useable items instead of keybinds
• A new outfit for the girl
• New girl behaviors and animations: removing clothes, picking up clothes and storing it in a locker, putting on a swimsuit, showering, walking back to clothes if you bikelock her swimsuit but dont hold the key

Some "stretch goal" work I want to also include (but will only include in the next alpha if I can complete them before end of the month):

• Taking girl's clothes from the locker, and her reaction to having different articles of clothing missing (initial shocked reaction, covering just bottom or top half, dressing with whatever is there, etc)

Few Technical Details

While I want to be transparent, I don't want to bog this post down with too many technical details throughout so I've added some of them into this section.

To accomplish the girl sitting at the pool ladder, some changes were also made to make the pool ladder more modular. Previously, for the sake of creating the vertical slice, there were a lot of tightly coupled references between the girl and the pool ladder, but all of these were removed in order to allow a system where she can use any pool ladder. At the moment she still uses just that one ladder, but regardless, this change was necessary for future systems to work.

Some ideas of these future systems will be multiple girls will randomly doing various activities to in an area, between sitting at the pool ladder, to diving in and swimming laps, to idling around the area, etc. Adding this sort of functionality means there can't be any tight coupled.

Last of all...

Happy new year and happy holidays! I hope 2018 was a good year for everyone and I hope 2019 is even better.