Opinion Piece [Engineering Build 0.5.1] (Patreon)

Hello again cool friends.

Today's build is something that I'm calling a concept build. What this means is that I put some weird new features in and didn't really have time to fix all the fucked up stuff by the end of the month deadline that I sort of meaninglessly impose on myself. It also means that the build has what you might call opinionated design that not everyone will necessarily agree with.

What this means overall is that if you're just a simple coomer who loves to coom and is not that interested in my game development journey, you can maybe skip this build.

Opinionated design: Dude

Oh dude, you've been our faithful stand-in for all this time. With your pink shirt and metallic sphere head. We love dude don't we folks?

Well I don't. Dude sucks. I have no interest in working on dude or making dude look good, and I don't like looking at his stupid shirt and jeans and feet. His massive bulk gets in the way of the camera and adds too many constraints on potential poses and animations.

It is for this reason that I have opted in this update to make an opinionated design decision to dismember dude and retain only his disembodied dick, balls, and hands:

As a matter of personal taste I think this looks fundamentally pretty cool. I like disembodied hands and dicks. It opens up a lot of possibilities too. Multiple dicks, loads of hands. Girly hands and non-human hands and things like restraints that aren't hands but could kind of conceptually be thought of as hands. It's exciting.

I realize however that maybe some people won't like this change. If everyone hates this decision then maybe I'll reverse it, but also maybe not. We'll see.

Opinionated design: Environment

I spent hours and hours and hours this month creating, trashing, and recreating environment models, textures, etc., and I came to the realization that I'm simply not very good at or interested in it. The "capsule" concept was already a bit of a weird, opinionated compromise, but even that is starting to really weigh on me.

Sure it looks cool here, but jump through all the hoops to actually get it in game and it looks like SHIT.

So, I thought, why don't we just dump it? Just fuck the whole thing off and make environments a more conceptual idea? Environments don't have to be simulacra of real places; they can be ideas, feelings. Make environments a reflection of gameplay and not the other way around, like a rhythm game, or Rez. (In fact, I've been wondering for a while how I can take inspiration from rhythm games  to inform design decisions in Hyperdeep, but that's a blog for another day)

So that's what I tried to do a bit for this update, turn the default environment from the literal to the conceptual. I think it's a cool idea, but this one (moreso than the dude disembodiment) requires some more thought.

Fucked up

Skin/nipple/lip colors all fucked up.

Clean up

I really, REALLY, need to have a cleanup. I swear that half of the code in the game no longer does anything at all and half of the assets in my project file never actually appear in the game.

Chin up

Chin up everyone. WAGMI