Game thing (Patreon)

I've got the fluid sim for the Nyro animation baking right now and originally I was going to keep working on the deep dish thing because I figured "well, the fluid bake shouldn't take that long, should be able to get the Nyro animation done before the end of the month" but the bake times were giving me the impression that it's going to take awhile, like... more a fair amount of time more than I was anticipating... so I thought "maybe do some game dev, see what I can do something with that so I can have a nice animated thing for this month"

Tbh I wasn't going to really show much until it was ready to play since I was still unsure about what shape this would take. And there's some moments where I was lacking confidence in it... but after finally getting the main character's face rig right, I felt a lot more confident in this idea.

Here's some expression tests I made that I turned into a status icon on the status bar:

Of course they're re-sized and get a low color depth for use in-game:

(sweat and saliva string added in post!)

And here he is on the icon bar, in-game, also showing the inventory window here:

Overall, the main systems needed for a demo of this thing are pretty much complete. Inventory is working, you can do things with inventory items, the complex animation system (as I call it) is working, room to room navigation is working, pretty much all the screen transitions I'd need for an entire game like this are working...

(this gif is choppy because it's recorded at a lower frame rate and the animations are early wip ones for testing)

 You can see a smooth (but earlier WIP so only a sfw test video) of the animation system here:

https://youtu.be/xQrRmKI-Omo?si=FjBUP64jQUSFCZMW

I also was feeling more confident about this game thing when I spiced up this set piece. There's a utah teapot that's pouring green liquid and part of the puzzle is you need to drink this liquid. Originally, it was very basic, just kind of floating, pouring it out on the floor... and the character would squat down to drink it.

But then I was thinking "what if there was something holding it up, like the weird green things" and then I was thinking "where does the fluid come from, where goes it go?" and I thought "the things are pouring it in and there's a hole thing that's drinking it" So now it looks like this, which is much more interesting imo:

What are these things, why are they doing that, why is there a teapot? How does it all work? Well, we're in h0rny cyberspace made by a h0rny computer virus, that's why there's oddly lewd abstract things. This is a theme I want to keep in mind, things that just look lewd and oddly arousing but without being explicit. Things that have a NSFW aura despite being SFW.

So I made another animation for fluid drinking fmv. It's slow-ish because I'm animating in 30 fps for this project and idk what frame speed I should use for a gif for 30 fps (since the game speed is 60 fps, 30 fps will look nice and play well with the game's frame rate)

This is what it'll look like rendered:

I think this is a pretty aesthetic- like, I think there's enough old CG hints here without it looking ugly like old CG can be. Enough old CG hints to where it looks like it's supposed to look like this- it's intentionally primitive-looking. I'm still not sure if I can make it work in a lewd context as effectively as I imagined but I think this is a good sign.

Also, the fluid you see in this was made using a different add-on than I usually use for fluid. It's the FluidLab add-on (not sponsored or anything btw, I just think it's a pretty good add-on):

https://blendermarket.com/products/fluidlab

It's based on the old particle system and adds remeshing and motion blur using geometry nodes. It's a lot faster than FLIP fluids (especially for something like this that would require a fairly large domain!) but it's got all the same quirks that the old particle system has. And it's not as detailed or robust as FLIP so you don't get the same quality results. But in this case, I'm going to be rendering at 640x360. using it for splashy, watery fluid is perfect (for money shots I'm going to use FLIP though). I've attached another test I did with a Suzanne head.

I highly recommend it if you're doing stuff with watery liquids. Imo, it's perfect for WS, water fountains, shower heads, that kind of thing. Again, not as detailed as a real deal fluid sim but good enough for cases where a real fluid sim would take a very long time to simulate!

As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, the Nyro fluid bake is taking longer than I was expecting...

(So far, it's been about 52 hours of bake time with 167 hours left, according to the estimation...)

But I really want to have something animated done this month. And the way things are going for this dumb game thing, I think I can have a gameplay video ready, showing off the animation system with the final graphics for one of the lewd scenes (after you drink the fluid a few times, you enter a stroking sequence because it's h0rny water basically).