The Journey (Patreon)

While I told about the "Dragon Internal Cleaning Co" game idea in the previous post - it is something I might start working on with others eventually, for me it's a side-job (and it hasn't begun yet). I will be making designs, models, textures for it. I will port my existing Unreal Engine work to it as well. But the important distinction is that I'm not going to be the force pushing that game forward - I hope that others on that team will pick up that burden.

However my main goal in life (and for this Patreon) is to realize the world of Dragotheria, to turn it into a kinky indie-franchise of different products (including games, but not only) to fill different quite vacant niches. Additionally, at this stage I aim for independence, to be able to work on my ideas 100% solo. It might change later, however for now I feel that need to rely only on myself to be productive, just so I don't have to wait for anyone.

In this post I'm sharing the big undertaking that I've been going through in the past few months, but I'm not ready to announce anything spectacular in this post. The reason is that, sadly, my time of legal stay within my current country has ended, and I have to move to another country yet again! This is a long process of packing things (and leaving a lot of things behind), flying to the destination, looking for apartments in a new, unfamiliar city on a different side of the planet, then unpacking, buying furniture and appliances… It's a lot, as you can imagine.

I will still try to stay productive as much as I can during the move, but there is so much I can do before I set up my PC again, using only my phone and my 11-year old laptop - with how much plane tickets and moving cost, I don't have the money left to buy a new one...

The current prototype

That's how I make quick 1-minute sketches to help me think. In this case it depicts the position of characters rendered to the UI, next to an old-school RPG log (like in Disco Elysium), and behind them is the game-view / overworld map where gameplay takes place. I tend to never show such sketches to anyone...

First up, I still intend to put all the elements I've been developing in the past together into a cohesive game project. Only difference now is that I have to do it alone, at a smaller scope. "How will I do that?" - is what I've been figuring out.

As always, my motivations for the project are still the same:

• Different playable attractive non-human characters of all kinds and sizes.
• Simulation of kinky, lewd interactions at the forefront of the gameplay loop.
• Immersive world built around NSFW themes and fetishes of different flavors.
• Proper place for Patreon rewards (past, present and future).

However there are three major hurdles that I outlined judging from my experience, and I wanted to definitively address them in my current prototype.

Git gud at Programming:

I do know quite a lot of programming concepts by now (unlike when I was starting out). I just needed to find a specific area where I could most efficiently apply my existing skills.

I tell all about my programming journey later in the post, how I re-discovered my innate skills and, while I'm still learning, I found myself capable of using C# as the primary language for gameplay programming.

Focus on Art that matters:

Since I'm making a lewd game, the characters are the most important visual element of it, not the rocks and trees which take just as much time to make (if not more). But if they're too different, it will look ugly. I was searching how to balance it!

Remember about the past:

To not repeat the mistakes, I did lot of re-evaluating of my previous attempts. How can I use the past knowledge now? How can I re-make some of the previous game ideas, but keep it smaller in scope?

You could say that I have returned back to the drawing board - I still need to come up with good gameplay, but this time I specifically want to pick ideas that worked well in the past and had the most positive resonance with people.

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🤍 It's ok to stop reading here. 

I wrote a long, complicated post, and I don't really expect lots of people to read it. But for those who do, it should give a good summary, an overview of my past successes and failures, and how I'm finding uses for all that in the present.

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In search for the Environment style

Another very quick sketch to describe the mood i'm going for...

It's not easy to simplify the environments. Usually, a simpler art-style for the environments means simpler art-style for the characters too, otherwise the two will look completely disconnected. So for a long time I was puzzled how to decouple the two.

The environment style is also closely tied to the camera angle at which the player will experience the world, and it adds extra layers of complexity if they can rotate the camera.

Below I will make a list of examples of different things that I have tried over the years, describe their ups and downs and my decision making process.

Planes of Existence

If I did it like Planes of Existence again (like the first ever build I did), then the environment creation is significantly simpler, however the biggest problem with it is that the characters are too far away from the screen, and not a lot of lewd action could be seen with a top-down camera like that.

So, it's not sexy. Next!

Full 3D first/third-person

I was spending too much of my time of trying to make pretty visuals on Unreal Engine 4 and (then 5). And I did achieve great looking results, but at the cost of everything else. The time required for it is simply immeasurable.

Back then I hoped I could streamline the workflow, make specialized pipeline tools - but all that took even more time to develop something else rather than the actual game itself.

Was it worth it? I think so, I learned Technical Art thanks to it all. Now I can make good, carefully weighted tradeoffs between quick and beautiful - exactly the skill I need right now.

But continuing this style does not fit solo-dev (I will probably keep doing it for the team Dragon-cleaning project). One possibility would be to change it to a highly stylized or lowpoly artstyle, but that wouldn't fly in my case as I'm making a lewd game, which needs good looking detailed characters not clashing with the environments.

Metroidvania

This is why I tried making a sidescroller for the YoYo project. It made me realize that if a game involves platforming, the camera needs to be far away (look how tiny Ori is on screen). Zooming-in to see the lewd actions was still possible, but there has been lot of problems (including opinions of the public) with the gameplay a side-view implied.

It has to be a pass, I guess.

Inspired by Book of Travels

After YoYo, I tried to place the camera sideways like in Book of Travels game to reveal characters from the side (which is a great angle for lewds), yet still offer the perspective to explore the depth. However Unreal struggled with it because its cameras are physically-based, and what I wanted to achieve is borderline impossible with it. I did find a unique solution however with minimum drawbacks, except one…

The biggest drawback is that all the assets, despite looking flat and 2D, would still need to be done in 3D in order to preserve the camera perspective. If a lot of effort is spent to produce 3D models and it's wasted on something that appears 2D in the end, what's the point?

However It might be worth trying to give this idea another shot, maybe re-evaluate how the simple 2D elements could be done to look 3D? Maybe with fancy shaders or custom tools?

Isometric + Side panels (NEW)

This approach is similar to the previous, but it tries to address the problem with asset creation. It is about rendering a very simplified, mostly 2D overworld map in an orthographic (isometric-ish) projection together with detailed 3D characters placed on it. To get a better view at characters, they are duplicated on the UI in high resolution.

The map portion uses hand-drawn 2D flat sprites and textures (which are incredibly fast to produce). And it combines a render of high-quality character models on top of it. Characters on the UI can be freely rotated, panned, looked up their tails - without ever touching the flat world around them.

This is my latest experiment, and I think it achieves the tradeoff I mentioned at the beginning.

The reason why I couldn't come up with anything like that earlier - It's only possible on Unity. Unreal just can't do it at all. Well, it could sort-of do it in previous versions, but without dynamic shadows and anti-aliasing - it looked bad and took a heavy hit on performance. And Unreal Engine 5 just broke it entirely.

In search for the Character style (concluded)

Aside from environments, I also spent a lot of time finding the right character art-style that would be fast to produce. This journey took years, now it all fits into just a small list of handful of screenshots.

Thankfully I have already developed a really good art-style for characters in terms of visual the quality and amount of time needed to make them (it's at the bottom of the list).

Dino from the first project

Original style, it was decent, but hand-painting textures took a lot of time to very little gain. Same problem as in WoW: lots of talented artists spend lots of time to create amazing designs, models and textures for it, but it still looks outdated, even the latest expansions.

Hizathri Sculpted

This was the most time-consuming approach. It required a high-definition sculpture, then retopology, then baking normal maps, then painting them by hand, like in the above example, just more complex…

Also character customization wasn't really possible.

Hizathri Smoothed

An attempt was made to remedy the texture painting problem and simplify it, make it more stylized.

Hizathri Angular

Another attempt at simplifying the art process, make it even more stylized and… well, it turned out quite ugly.

YoYo

Another attempt at simplifying the art, taking it to borderline low-poly realm with simple textures - not painted, but more like colored lineart. 

The character design was good in this case, but the artstyle...
…People didn't find it sexy enough…

Flameborn Dragonkin

After my inspiration from characters in VR games, I decided to try making something similar. It was a step in the right direction as it combined the simplicity and sexiness! But still was a pain to make.

Modern Dragonkin (D.I.C.S.) - CURRENT!

And lastly, my most modern character style - it took a long time to develop, and I think I went a bit too crazy with it… Dynamic Interspecies Character System - a very versatile adjustable and fast to model pipeline. 

I still need to work more on it until it can realize its full potential however, but it's the one where I'm at right now, and I intend to keep it for future projects and Avatars.

Programming, my nemesis.

Next up, as I said already, programming is the biggest baddest skill I lacked the most when I started out. I chose Unreal Engine because it had visual scripting language (Blueprints), I thought it would make it easier to program (and it was great to get started). But over the years of experience with it, plus that I learned Python and JavaScript along the way, I realized that I could do MUCH more!

Later I realized that Blueprints limited me severely (you can't do any advanced game on just Blueprints), so I tried to get into Unreal's C++… but I couldn't handle it, it still melts my mind... And so I gave up for a while, thinking I'm too dumb for "real" programming, and just gave it up to Hopfel entirely - after all he's so good at it.

Now that I find myself in pursue self-sufficient solo-dev mentality, I need to re-explore this. If I can't do C++, what about the alternatives? So I began exploring: I tried a lot of ideas, not everything worked out, but with each I feel like I got a step closer to the answer I'm seeking.

Prototype: 3D Online Roleplay Platform

First, I explored an idea of making a game server entirely on JavaScript/Typescript - it would house all the logic and gameplay rules.

The web-based server would also keep chronological record of all actions players took, and those actions could be replayed later, as if reading a story or watching a movie! Such a game would not be in real-time, it would be play-by-post, just like what people do when they text-RP (plus it's easily lewdable).

The client would use the same graphics from my previous attempt at first, would be kept relatively simple in the future. It is just something to render the network packets coming through and to add pretty graphics, sexy characters and actually working animations that "connect" the organs as they are supposed to (unlike the only alternative, Second Life).

This way I'd program in Java/Type Script, and not C++ for the majority of the time. But after looking into it, turns out setting up the network APIs, webservers, connecting it all to the engine, also setting up the gameplay framework from scratch on plain JS - all that amounts to a ridiculous amount of programming work and web backend skills I simply don't have. It was way beyond what I could sustain in the future only by myself (even that Hopfel helped me with setting things up at first), I'd need a sizeable team of programmers…

This game idea might still be possible in the future though, but I kept exploring what I can do here and now.

Prototype: 2D Online Roleplay Platform (Exploring Godot)

I couldn’t let the idea of that RP platform go though, so I thought "Maybe I could reduce the workload by simplifying the client, say, making it in 2D?".

So I looked into Godot 4 engine, because Unreal Engine 5 just can not do 2D at all. I learned Godot's scripting language, and it surprised me how easily I picked it up, despite me doubting my programming abilities! But as soon as I started building something serious, the engine started chugging on performance. Also a lot of the important features I needed were missing, but with promises to be added in the future! But months pass by, and we're still "Waiting for Godot".

And since I'm tired of waiting, It's not the right pick for me either…

Prototype: FP Puzzle-Platformer with Tentacles (Exploring Godot)

Tentacle creature design. I love her so much, so I will still use this design in the future

At the same time as the previous prototype, I was trying Godot 4 for a 3D idea as well.

I realized that tentacles could be a good gameplay mechanic for a lewd game, so I was inspired and did the character design (you all saw and voted on her).

To test my scripting abilities, I made a first-person movement system like in Source engine… But I soon got halted with all its edge cases (e.g. getting stuck on walls, crouching, stepping up and down, slopes). It felt like it was already pushing my limits of my mathematics knowledge. Vector math and trigonometry I simply don't know - I never had a chance to study it anywhere, as I never was fortune to go to any institute or college. This is why I just couldn't figure out the math for tentacles either

After that I looked at what the project would require of me in the future, and all I saw is the unsalable wall of math for myself. It is very physics-based: swinging, grappling, slapping NPCs, ragdolls, picking and moving objects, flying…

I hope that in the future, I will have time to study math again, and maybe I will unlock the power of doing a project like that.

Prototype: Immersive Sim (Exploring Unity)

Flickth, my avatar for VRChat in Unity

So, about the same time I got disappointed in Godot engine, I got dragged into VRChat thanks to Furality. And naturally I wanted to make my own avatar, so I downloaded Unity! All this time I was reluctant to use this engine for any reason because, you know, I had the typical "Unreal good, Unity bad" mentality. But my recent experience with Godot made me a bit more pliable ("Huh, might as well see it again!"). So I dug a bit deeper than the VRChat SDK, researched how people make tools and games on it. I fully expected things to be horrible… But it wasn't!

"Isla de Experimentos", test project I did in 2015 on Unity, before even starting TGOR

I remember trying Unity before picking Unreal, before starting this Patreon, before everything. I simply couldn't do much on it back then. I looked at text-based C# programming in total horror and confusion, I looked at shaders and didn't even understand what those were for. I tried using asset store things, but it looked too expensive. Unity also lacked features that Unreal had built-in, Unreal still has a better license, etc. So, naturally, I made the decision to stick with Unreal instead.

Now, I look at it with fresh eyes and realize that it's not so bad, better than Unreal in some places even (and worse in other places). I'm not going deep into comparisons: both engines have their big ups and downs, there is no perfect engine. But suffice to say that right now I'm finding myself much more flexible with Unity's sandbox approach than with Unreal's monolithic glory. Unity does lack a lot of built-in tools that Unreal has by default, but instead it offers convenient ways to program them yourself, for your own needs. And my experience tells that I always end up having to make my own tools regardless: generic systems made for shooter games and cinematic experiences don't ever fit my project ideas.

Jet Brains Rider IDE with AI assistant

C# language also I found perfectly capable of using, now after all I've been through. Unity has a much better documentation for it (Unreal's mentality is "Just read the C++ code, lol"). Also thanks to the right IDE (I'm paying for Rider now) and the new AI assistant tools, I realized I'm picking the programming skill up much quicker than ever before. I'm still not going to get good at vector math magically, but maybe I can avoid it for now if I picked the right project.

So that's what I tried here.

I ported my Godot-Tentacles attempt at player controller inspired by Source engine, I thought of trying to male a light immersive sim (set in my kinky Dragotheria world, of course), and Inspired by the original Deus Ex and the one-of-a-kind experience Outer Wilds, wanted to do exploration the key factor of it.

Blender blockouts

So I tried doing it in a similar art-style as Outer Wilds, so I blocked out a level in Blender… But after three days of work, I realized that this approach, when I scale it up to the full game, will take too long and I wouldn't be able to iterate on it efficiently. So I began to look for alternative ways of making worlds.

CSG blade-runner-inspired, but un-textured blockout

Then I discovered the tools for blocking out levels using CSG, just like in the old days of Deus Ex, Quake and Half Life. I used to make maps for those old games, and I loved the speed and efficiency, the fact that it was made for one person to create maps relatively quickly. We don't have such tools anymore, all the industry, especially Unreal Engine, is geared for a team of people to be working on maps, not a single person.

Because, CSG produces blocky results, I thought of going with brutalist architecture like in Control game, using fancy shaders to make it more mysterious, alien, fitting for a place built by Dragons out of crystals. However I quickly realized that it requires a lot of visual work still - It could easily take me months to make a level that the player will take 15 minutes to fully explore, so it might not be the best time investment for me now.

First-person touching mechanic in action

But just to squeeze a bit more out of it, I made a mechanic for… Touching things… It sounds strange but it makes sense for my world, as I could use it for interactive screens, organic panels, orifices of various Dragon statues throughout the halls? I built and tried it, it certainly has sensual gameplay potential, but I quickly realized it's just really boring by itself, so I needed to add NPCs…

And in order to make NPCs I'd need to animate them, give them behaviors (think about Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye DLC, but lewd (no spoilers, if you know - you know)). Great idea, but will take me half a year to even look passable before I could show it on Patreon without shame. The amount of animations to do and the variety needed discouraged me once again.

But can I take that idea and simplify it further? Come up with a game idea where animations and level design, while still present, aren't such limiting factors. That is what I'm working on right now!

Legacy of old Prototypes

But before I conclude this post, there is a good opportunity to also mention the previous work that has been done, even before the current prototypes. The ones I talked about in the past, the ones we had working builds up. Collectively this giant "baggage" of experience not only responsible for who I am today, it also helps me make better decisions about the development of my game projects.

I'd like to briefly tell you what exactly I have learned from them and what went wrong with each iteration. Despite anything, It's a memory worth preserving.

Old Build: Planes of Existence

That's where it all began, but sentiments aside, the purpose of it was to "break into" game development and learn how to make basic game systems (movement, multiplayer, inventory, weapons, health). Hopfel was drawn to the project and he began programming instead of me, but he has been teaching me (and learning along the way) - and for that I'm forever grateful!

So much time has passed yet I still fondly look upon that build. It was simple, simple naïve times.

Old Build: 3D "walking sim"

The purpose of that stage was to learn and understand the requirements of advanced character controllers and animations, how make them run, jump, swim, fly, climb, slide, etc. And how to do it in multiplayer, as it adds a very complex layer on top of everything that I wasn't fully aware of.

At that stage my mind got "possessed" by pretty 3D graphics and animation, so I began to learn lots of Technical Art as a result. But I still think I went too complicated too soon, should have prioritized simplicity and speed.

Old Prototype: Late 3d Game

The purpose of that prototype was to develop an in-depth character customization and advanced gameplay systems, such as unlockable tech tree, achievement-based progression, crafting/uncrafting, revised inventory, systemic interactions between items and elements (e.g. for damage), animated actions between characters (the beginning of lewd things), NPCs AI and navigation.

All that was designed on-paper by me, but programmed in C++ by Hopfel, however due to my inability to do C++ code I still can't take that project any further by myself… At least for now - I might have the ability to revise it later after I learn more programming? We will see.

The only thing that wasn't completed were the NPCs. I won't get into details why that happened exactly, but suffice to say It entirely halted my game idea that relied on them heavily - it needed them as a bridge for all the different game systems I have designed. But since there was no such bridge, there was no gameplay.

I tried to brainstorm alternatives how to save the project, re-think it… But the following months of intense brainstorming didn't lead to any proper fun game ideas, but instead they laid an egg that later hatched into a new and unique world setting, which I refer to as Dragotheria now.

Old Build: YoYo, Metroidvania Game-Jam

The purpose of that project was to test if the existing old C++ codebase can be brought over to Unreal Engine 5 and kept relevant, and to see if a simple project can be done with it to speed development up.

Hopfel wanted to participate in a Game-Jam, and I wanted to explore if I can make a lewd metroidvania-like concept on Unreal Engine. It wasn't successful sadly - I blame that I got very ill during it (it was during the Covid times), and couldn't get much work done in due time.

After I got better, evaluating the amount of animations, programming, and level design didn't look promising. Also the inaccessible C++ code still hindered me from working on the project more later.

Conclusion

If you read all of this, truly, thank you!

I'm sorry that it was so much text, but I had a lot of information I wanted to finally tell everyone. Next up I'm moving to a new country (yet again) and I'm ready and have the strength to keep going on my game-development journey once I settle down.

I have all the ingredients now, I only need to combine them in the right way. I only humbly hope that you will help me get there - as you can see, my path hasn't been easy at all.

With lots of Dragon Love.
   - Salireths