Thanks to All of the New Supporters! (Patreon)

I just wanted to make my first "Patron Only" post and thank you guys for supporting me on this project.  It's been a little over a week since I made this Patreon page available, and I've already hit my first goal of $75.00 per month, which will allow me to buy the Professional version of Unity!

My next goal is to hit $500.00 to cover the Daz3D game licensing, so I can legally use these models in my games.

A little insight as to what I'm working on right now:

I've done a lot of revamping on the Character Engine and fished out a lot of bugs and converted some systems over to use the same base system for most actions so that a lot of things like Dialogues, Combat, Motion, etc.. all use the same base system at the core.  I know that sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo, but the end result is a smoother and faster system.  It should eradicate some of the issues some of you are having where the dialogues are going away and not  coming back, and come characters not behaving like they are supposed to in some circumstances.   Remember, the engine I'm building will be used for future games, so once I get the framework working really well, I can start rapid development on new projects.

Also the path-finding has been revamped completely, and is much more reliable.  Traditional path-finding in games has always been reliant on building an environment that's conducive to giving the characters feedback as to where they should go, and the environment itself a lot of times moves the characters along in the right direction.  This is not the direction I wanted to go because first of all,  it makes building new environments more of a challenge and increases development time.  I want to be able to freely build my environments and plop the characters down and have them just work.  I want the characters to "think" for themselves.  I think it also adds to the realism and the chance for high variability of behavior on replays.  Keeping this in mind, I built a system where the characters actually look at their surroundings and figure out how to get from point A to point B depending on where they are and what's around them.  The problematic portion of this (and what you guys are experiencing) is that when you connect rooms together it leaves a very small passageway to navigate from one place to another, and often times it takes a lot of trial and error for the characters to figure out how to get through the doors.  I've now built in a way for characters to recognize doors and know what room they are in and what room their target is in, and now they will think "Hmm, I'm in the living room, and I need to go to the bathroom, so in order to do that, I will have to pass through the kitchen and bedroom".  The character would then set "mini targets", the first being the doorway of the kitchen, and then the doorway of the bedroom, then the doorway of the bathroom, and then finally their target.  This is pretty much as complicated as it sounds, so it took some work, but I've got some great navigation going on now.  The characters are getting smarter!

I'm thinking I'll put a new build out for testing once I solidify these systems, so probably within the next week or two.  There won't be any new story, as I usually devote the first portion of going into new builds with bug fixes and game engine enhancements, and I save the story tack-ons until last.  So a few weeks after this release, we should have another public version coming out with some more story.  Of course you guys will get it first!

Last but certainly not least, I am starting work on developing the first "sex scene".  I've been getting a lot of feedback from various communities about how to go about them, and I'm going to try out a few different approaches and see what feels best to me.  Once you get a character to a point where you're alone with her, or things need to get more intimate, the game will change up the play style and load a sub-scene where the action will take place.  I want to avoid first person here as I don't really like the mechanics of X Story Player, and I don't want to build a clone of that.  I'll probably take some of the best elements of various systems that already exist, and I have a few original ideas of my own to work into the mix.  I probably won't finish this and get it out by next alpha build, but you guys will definitely get an early peek when I have something ready, maybe even as a standalone.

Again thank you guys so much for supporting me!  More to come!

Bobby