Inner Circle Update for April 28 2018! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

I figured we’d squeeze one more update in before the monthly :D. 

Our newest artist, Mr. Kittyhawk, has already started helping out part time, and I’ve got him working on a small project to improve Onyx’s crop top shirt while he gets settled in. He has set up all the necessary software we use and has been working some with Uber to learn the basics of Redshift. In addition, it looks like sculpting girl will possibly be able to finish the assets for the Splicers before she leaves the country. 

Malise Lust Stage 3 Preview

I finished setting up / re-rendering all of the existing Malise poses for the new lighting system, and made a preview set of renders for her Lust stage 3 poses (uncensored). Excuse the clipping on the collar, it’ll be fixed in the final version! 

If you recall, she was all wet n’ juicy in the old version, and I still have to add that. I did some tests and determined simulation would be overkill, and that it’s probably best to use textures and simple stringy models where necessary for this. I’ll be painting that up over the next couple days and hope to have it all re-rendered by the monthly update. 

Neon Emission Test

We haven’t gotten around to updating Neon’s base scenes yet, so I don’t want to do a full re-render of Neon’s portraits until that’s done. However, I did set up and render one of Neon’s portraits with the new lighting system to make sure light emission worked (did you think I was talking about some other emission ^-^?). By that, I mean that I can manipulate emissive self-lighting on a character in the same way I can manipulate the other lights in post :D. Again, this all happens with a single render (I was thinking emission could require a second, but nope).  

Ven Outfit Preview

Today I made a rough draft for Ven’s new Genesis 3 body model so that we can show off the progress on her overhauled outfit. We're currently using Malise's skin textures, but here’s where TK and I are currently at with it (uncensored). 

I mentioned TK was finished with Ven’s armor in the last IC update, but I totally forgot about her boots :o. So, modeling those is what TK has been up to for most of this week.  We also have new gloves and shorts (texture WIP)!

I expect the materials to continue to change somewhat as we add in the other components, but it’s good progress for sure.

Coding and Translation Progress

AltairPL has been working exclusively on his double-teaming system this week. If you recall he was having some trouble with it, but we’ve partially resolved it by identifying a discrepancy with our visions for the design. He had been working on a design that would have an enemy effectively wait for another enemy to join in if it was available, but after discussing it with him we’re now looking at a system that utilizes a “window of opportunity” for additional enemies to join in. Since for most areas there will be a limited number of enemy configurations, this should present an overall better mixed bag of H-attacks.  APL already has a rough draft of the new design working and is starting on resolving issues we found during testing.

In other news, our translator has reported that he’s finished with the translations for tutorials / warnings / controls / and all other remaining text :D.

Automation Network Expansion

I spent a day expanding the automation network for the remaining base poses for Neon and Malise’s first outfits. I’m glad to say the system works, with everything updating as expected. Here’s the top level of the network, and here’s another look at it showing the control lines (purple lines are Python script controllers, green are lighting expression controllers). To give you an idea of the scale of the artwork needed for the full game, imagine 100 or so of those big blocks just for the character and H portraits.

Each image is assigned to a keyframe on a timeline, meaning for example if I want to see “Malise in her idle pose wearing her first outfit with no status effects” I’d go to frame 509. Upon realizing how much time I’d have to spend scrubbing around the timeline looking for a specific pose during editing, I decided to code a Python script that would automatically generate and (more importantly) update frame label numbers for each image.   

There’s still some additional scripting I can do to speed up future expansions, but it’s coming along nicely. 

Hard Drive Requirement Estimator

I finally took a couple days to create a spreadsheet for estimating hard drive space requirements for the full game.  This is very important for a game utilizing giant libraries of pre-rendered graphics and is something I’ve needed to do since we started looking at lighting variations. The purpose of making the sheet was to identify features that could cause exponential spikes in space usage, and to provide a test environment for finding solutions to alleviate these spikes. Another reason is that I want to try to be able to fit the game on mobile platforms, so scouting for optimization possibilities is another use for it. I’m glad I took the time to do so, as we’ve found some areas we can improve on. I’m not ready to report on a lot yet, but I can say we will absolutely need some JPG compression.   Some good news though is that the automation network will help with that, since I can keyframe greater compression onto less important graphics :D.