Inner Circle Update for May 20 2017! (Patreon)

For anyone curious about v0.06’s story, this update is for you 😃. 

Story Progress

I had really hoped to have the main story summary wrapped up on the 17th, but the last two chapters have needed quite a bit more attention that I had thought (hence this update being on the 20th). On the plus side, getting the details right has forced me to knock out some important dialog that would eventually need doing anyways. And no worries, it’s all coming out great (in my opinion) and I just need a few more days I think to fill in the blanks. I have a bunch of people lined up to seriously critique the summary as soon as it’s ready, all of whom are either writing/film/game professionals or have a thorough knowledge of the sources of inspiration. So, assuming no major edits are necessary after getting feedback from them, I’ll be all clear to go full steam ahead on v0.06 very soon! 

Since the story for v0.06 is almost certainly locked down at this point, I’ve decided to go ahead and post it as well as the edits for the portion of the game that you’ve seen up through v0.051. To be clear, this is the text from the main story summary, which is purposely written to be as high level as possible without overlooking any critical details. Also, all H scenes are implied instead of explicitly mentioned. Lastly, it’s written from the perspective of the player as they would see the events unfold, meaning there shouldn’t be anything to spoil events beyond v0.06. I just ask that you refrain from posting any of the v0.06 details in the comments in case people don’t want to see the spoilers 😃.

You can find it here! 

Progress Update from TK!

TK’s written up some thoughts on the stuff I brought up last week regarding Malise’s bodysuit, as well as his progress on a utility/workflow for creating wires quickly and easily for environments!

TK here!  Eromancer and I had been looking into ways we can improve the artwork workflow for the damage on Malise’s catsuit. Currently we draw it out after renders are finished, which works well enough for a few portraits here and there, but it can be difficult and time consuming. However, battle animations may or may not happen still, so it's been an ongoing conversation. Ideally we would like to automate this as much as possible, if anything but for consistency between frames. One would assume that the sane approach would be to more or less paint the damage on the 3d model, but this doesn't work, sadly. Animation-wise, the whole hip and crotch area can be tricky to animate so it deforms and moves without completely crumpling on itself in one posture or another. I'll spare the technobabble, but working with the model that we are currently using in Daz Studio makes the difficulty of fixing the distortion a step under impossible. After much deliberation and experimentation, we've decided that moving to a new base body and modeling a new suit that fits our needs is the best option.

This hasn't started yet, and will take some extra time, but will solve a lot of other problems we have. A lot of birds with one gatling gun!

Meanwhile I've been revisiting some city assets and laying down a look for the nastier parts of town. Lots of trash, lots of ramshackle buildings and piecemeal networks. First I needed a good way to lay out many, many wires and cables to connect everything. I started with some prefab power poles as a test run. It took a while but I found a pretty decent method by creating instances of little planes, randomized around the center to act as checkpoints for curves to flow through. This works really quick with a nice script I picked up years ago for finishing the wires. I can lay out hundreds of guided/random lines with ease, but I found that getting a nice artistic chaos a tough balance. Naturally I'm trying to minimize time making each wire look passable, starting with scribbles is easier than a blank page, no? It's the perfect sort of repetitive "fun" that's easy to zone out on and doodle out some neat looking effects.