Game Devlog 01 - The Beginning (Patreon)

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Hello Everyone and welcome to this new series of Devlogs that will only revolve around the game "Brawling Boyfriends" that I've started working on about a month ago.

There are going to be many small things at the beginning, so I'll devide them into smaller parts for better readability. 

Lets get started!

1. How it all started.

As you may know, I'm a big video game fan and consume a lot of games when something piques my interest. My favorite games are (among many others): Disgeae 5 Complete, Professor Layton and the Unwound future, Yoshi's Island (SNES), Mario64 and 3D Land and last but not least, Rayman Legends. I love colorful and energetic games, with a strong cartoony style, and I also love animations and to draw in general, so to combine all these, I decided to try my best and start developing a game.

Before I sat down to even open a program, I did a lot of research about which software to even use. There were a few options, like Renpy, Game Maker Studio, etc. but each of them seemed to have some kind of limitations and I didn't want to be halted by those and learn something new, if I ever decide to make something more complex, so I went with Unity. Unreal Engine was also an option, but that seemed to be a bit more complicated and have less tutorials online. 

Once I have decided on Unity, I first went through many tutorials on Youtube, to know first what's going to await me, because I have never ever written a single piece of code or had anything to do with game development, so I had to have a realistic image. 

Here I can recommend the following channels and links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwZpJzpE2lQ - Unity Basics
https://www.youtube.com/c/Brackeys - Huge but now inactive channel with many useful tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgOEwFbvGm5o8hayFB6skAfa8Z-mw4dPV - A complete tutorial on how to make a platformer game.

There are tho many many many more, that I found on the go when I needed something specific.

2. First Steps

So I opened Unity and started to create some temporary sprites for a character. I didn't know yet who or what the MC is gonna be, so he became a mix of bear/crocodile/cat. Following some basic tutorials I made my first code and made the character move and jump. The code is written in C# language and inside Visual Studio (which is also free, like Unity).

And then the MC moved. :3 I know it's kinda childish, but I was overwhelmed with joy, that I could write something that was working and that I could interact with my MC and give him commands. 

And then I added him some moves too. :3 When I first thought about the concept of the game, I was wondering what kind of elements I like. I like quick movements, precise platforming and I like wrestling/brawling a lot, so I went with the platformer/brawler idea.

For now the character has only a handful of moves, but later this will be expanded and he can interact with enemies, like throwing them in the air and then to the ground or do some flashy finisher moves on them.

I also wanted to add a visual damage system, where at full health, the enemies and the MC are fully clothed, and when hurt or dead, they get naked. Of course, it's a pervy detail, but this is a pervy game and I'm a super perv. >:3

Later I added an idle animation. I didn't know yet if I'm gonna need it, but I've been practicing coding on many small functions so that I would have a better understanding on how things work.

Then I have hit a roadblock, which I've been having around for like 2 weeks, which was the wall jump. I really wanted to add thic feature, but if the MC was standing too close to the wall and jumped at it, he was just bouncing back, without sticking to it.

3. Gotta Brawl Fast

Then one morning I sat down, looked at the code again and as if by some magical fate, my eyes were exactly at the position in the huge pile of code, where I finally saw the error. To make it short, I did the wall jump through tutorials, I even used 2 different methods and saw that even in the tutorial they had the same problem but never addressed them. Basically, when you move the character (press a direction key), he gets a speed added and when jumping at a wall, the speed should drop to 2 and the MC should stick to the wall, BUT the jumping method was inside of the running method for some reason, so when reaching the wall, the direction key is still pressed to stick to the wall, but that way, he was still having a speed from the running, which caused this weird bouncing glitch.

Then I spent like 2 hours of separating the code and rewriting/cleaning up everything and then it finally worked, even better than before. It may seem like I'm really slow, but don't forget, I've never coded anything before. :X

Look at mah boy, jumping like a true champ!♥

To summarize it, I made a small video of all the moves he finally had working.

run, jump, dash, crouch, crawl, attack, look up. This was the time I noticed that the dash was super fast and choppy, because the method it used was basically a sudden speed change without ease in.

So I redid that code too with a new method I've learned, which was the "addforce", which basically gives a virtual push to the character, either with a constant (like pushing a furniture) or with an instant force (like punching a bag). The instant one was only slightly better than the previous version, so I added a continuous force which stops after about 1 second automatically at most. This was the player can dash a little or long too for 1 second, giving a better control over the move.

4. Gimme some Sugar~♥

And THEN we finally arrived to the main feature of the game! Collecting p0rn! YES! You can build your own p0rn stash in the game by collecting the scattered images and animations. 

I also added a slight camera zoom in for a bigger effect and while the cut scene is playing, the player and the enemies cannot move (so that nothing unexpected happens while the screen is blocked by asses and dicks.

In the first version I added the images to invisible triggers, but later I added some with an icon (you saw that in the demo too), so the player has some indication that something is gonna flash up.

And with this, we have reached the end of our first Devlog! 

Thank you for joining in and see you in the next one where I'll write about some game mechanics.♥