Progress Report - October 9, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Last week, I shared with you all my pitch for the next on-stream project. The current on-stream Frozen project is quickly coming to a close, so I figured it's better to figure out what we're doing next now than to wait and then flounder at the finish line.

During last week's Progress Report, I noted I wasn't quite ready for pitching it to Twitter or my streamgoers yet, because I still had to iron a few things out. Well, it took me a better part of a week, I finally pitched it to my streamgoers on Saturday, and then pitched it to Twitter on Sunday. I put together this pitch video to sell the idea on Twitter.

If last week's post was too long for you to read through, I highly encourage you give the sub-2-minute video a look through.

During pitching the idea to my Picarto stream on Saturday, someone brought up a question that lead to some very interesting thoughts. I've mentioned before how I want to explore migrating to a new engine to work in from Source Filmmaker. During that discussion, I brought up how I was looking at game engines in particular, because I've always had a long-term goal of building games.

The golden ideal for me is an engine I can use for both game development and animation. After some research, and the recent Unity fiasco, I finally settled on Unreal Engine 5. It has a built-in animation editor that functions basically identically to Source Filmmaker's (which really is just a standard graph / curve editor, any competent 3d animation program would function similarly) that can seamlessly integrate into the game development cycle. You don't have to build your animations in an external program like Maya or Blender, as you do with many other game engines like Unity and Godot. You can just build your world directly in Unreal, plop down your characters, build the animation right then and there, and then render out a video playing back the animation you made. It's as seamless as working in Source Filmmaker is.

Well, during last Saturday's stream, someone asked how the look into new engines was going. And that just so happened to dovetail perfectly into my pitch for this on-stream project, which is a (very simple) game. My original plans for this game pitch was to build it much like the Futashep VN or my Epilogue VN: build all the animations in SFM, render them out, and then play them back as video files in an HTML game framework.

Honestly, I'm baffled it never occurred to me earlier: I can just build this on-stream game project directly in Unreal! I can use the game engine... to make a game!

As of right now, I am not 100% committed to this being the next on-stream project. But as of writing, the pitch Tweet has 384 likes and 12 comments all verbalizing interest in the project. And I'll be honest, I've been wanting to take the dive into learning a game engine for years now, having experimented briefly with getting Elizabeth into Unity some years back and immediately getting stonewalled by the animation problem. I'm a project-oriented person, and having a project that is highly public (as public as possible in fact, with the development being streamed to a live audience) is a great way to really motivate me to sit down and actually commit to it.

So unless there is some severe backlash here on Patreon, on future streams, and here on out on Twitter, I am pretty certain that building this simple game in Unreal is going to be the next on-stream project.

With that being said, I've decided I need to start looking into the basics of Unreal ahead of time, so that the first few game dev streams aren't just hours of me watching YouTube videos. I started looking into the animation side of things, and I have to say, I am already getting exciting ideas of how using Unreal can both elevate the production value of my work while also making it less stressful.

As an example, Unreal allows for saving animations made in its graph editor (what it calls the Sequencer) both as baked animations, but also as "Linked Animation Sequences", which allow the animation to be loaded at any time, but also can be edited and modified in realtime - meaning that I can seamlessly go back to animations and correct them if I need to. And that I can play them on demand through game logic. This means I can build a core animation loop - for example, some good-ole-fashioned doggystyle - and then also build unique variations of that loop - such as slapping that fat ass while going to town on it - and then write some simple logic to occasionally sprinkle in a variant among the core loops. Suddenly, infinitely non-repeating doggystyle with an occasional spank. And if I need to fix some clipping with the spank animation, I can do so without having to manually edit every single instance of it, because it's not all one big long animation, but is just two small animations that are linked together in code.

Now, throw onto that the fact that Unreal supports animation layers, meaning I can build a core animation loop and its variants, and then I can throw a separate "jitter" animation on top of it, to give the characters a little bit of natural body sway and vary the motions as the animation plays. And I can just turn off the animation layer, or edit the underlying loops, without having to redo the entire process, because - unlike in SFM - adding the jitter animation isn't destructive.

THEN throw in the idea of having dirty-talk lip-sync being separate animation layers, and I can sprinkle in randomly-chosen dirty talk throughout the animation at any time, with it all perfectly lip-synced and with proper head and body animations for emphasis.

All done in a modular way that is fast and easy to modify, and able to be strung together entirely in code and produce an organic, non-repeating result.

Overall, I am extremely excited to dive into using Unreal as an animation engine, there's a lot of cool stuff I think I can get away with using it, and doubly excited for getting knee-deep into building actual games with it. But it is going to take some time to get familiar with it, so I am glad I decided to look into it now, since we've still got 2 or 3 weeks before I think the Frozen project is more-or-less as far as I am going to take it.

With that in mind, and with that project pitch finally out of the way, I intend to split my time between Overbreed Episode 1 and fiddling with figuring out the basics of Unity.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much progress done on Overbreed Episode 1 this week. Finishing off that pitch took longer than I expected it to. And I'll be honest with you all...

Overbreed Episode 1 is a project that I find it hard to work on for extended periods of time. If you know what I mean.

Let's just say I need to take frequent breaks when working on Overbreed Episode 1.

Which actually works out rather well for learning Unreal. I can work on Overbreed Episode 1 until The Lonely Island comes along and vandalizes my jeans, and then while I am recovering from that, I can sit down and fiddle with learning Unreal a bit.

So with all of that in mind, I want to know: what do YOU all think of this project pitch?

1.) What do you think of the high-level premise of taking the lewd stories you have come to expect from me, and spicing them by letting the viewer choosing what sex scenes unfold?

2.) What do you think of the mid-level premise of this particular story idea, a Life is Strange project where Max and Chloe are bonding through stories of Rachel's debauchery, and Max is eager to prove to Chloe that she can be just as kinky as Rachel was?

3.) What do you think of the low-level premise of using this project as a springboard for me learning how to animate in and build games with Unreal Engine, as an evolution from using the Source Filmmaker as an animation-and-render engine and shitty homebrew HTML engines to awkwardly string prerendered videos together to make crude limited facsimiles of games?

I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Even if it's just a simple "I like it" or "I'm not interested." Really, any comments at all mean a lot to me. I've said it before, but engagement really brightens my day and lifts my mood. I love reading your comments, whatever they may be, and they remind me why I am doing all this in the first place.

That's all for now! I'm hoping that next week's progress report will, at the least, have some notable Overbreed progress to report, and hopefully even have some rudimentary Unreal learning updates to share!

Until next week, everyone!