[Deviance] progress report & a poll (Patreon)

Hey friends!

I hope you are having a wonderful day!

So today I just wanted to tell you about the progress on Deviance, some of my worries and how everything is going, and also make a small poll about RNG in dungeons.

First off, Deviance!

We are progressing quite well. However, the fact that my skeleton is different from the one from Unreal has proved to be quite a nuisance. On Unity I can use almost any animation that I get with my skeleton without much issue, however on unreal I cannot use any animation that is not specifically rigged to my skeleton. This is due to a bone rotation on the basis, an issue that I have been dragging since 2019. Now this wasn’t an issue on unity, but it is a big deal on Unreal. I already tried all the new tools and things to solve this on the Unreal side, but it didn’t work (including the new 5.4 stuff). so this let me with two options:

A - “Fix” the skeleton, and basically discard all the sex animations and clothing rigging.

B - Only use animations made specifically for this skeleton.

For obvious reasons I went with B, so I’m making all animations, that includes walking, running, jumping, rolling, etc. This has proven a bigger challenge than I anticipated initially, as it requires a bigger level of animation than I do. So I'm currently making some of these animations, and I’m happy with them just working decently, but I have scheduled to do a discourse in September to improve my animation skills (and then replace the placeholder animations for better ones).

So all in all, everything takes time, and on unreal, it takes three or four times as much. I also been working with a programmer for the past few months, and I’m limiting myself to do non-programming tasks, mainly so I don’t step on his toes while he works, but also because my dream is to be a creative director, not a programmer, so I’m trying my best to limit myself at only directing others (and also do everything else that we don’t have anyone for, such as animations, UX/UI, level design, game design, and basically everything on engine that is related to visual stuff).

This however puts us way behind my initial schedule, I don’t know how soon I will be able to put up a decent playable build for Deviance. I don’t like to do “tech alphas” where nothing works or there isn’t any gameplay other than “press X for animation”, so I would rather delay it than do a shitty product (AKA a Blizzard) 

[Concept art for a noble's dress]

This as well raised some concerns and I’m thinking of possible solutions to have interesting content on patreon, as patreon is the way the game is funded mostly. I feel like Kinky Fight Club 2 still has some potential, but I don’t feel like milking it for many more months to be something I could do and feel okay with. The game is 80% done (excluding the story, which I will completely remake in July-August), so after that I would like to have something else to show. I haven’t made any decisions yet, I’m just thinking out loud here. 

RNG and dungeons

In the meanwhile, there is some stuff that I like, some stuff that I don’t and some stuff that I really don’t have any strong opinions about. One of these things are procedurally generated dungeons. To me it is the same if they are persistent or random every time I enter a dungeon. (Depending on the game of course)

So I wanted to see what your opinion on those is.

Would you like Dungeons (specifically not overworld areas, always faction-specific-closed-areas) to be procedurally generated, or would you rather them not be and always be the same?

Give me your opinion on that!

[Concept art for the male counterpart of the noble's clothing]

And that’s all I have for today, friends!

Have a wonderful day!

I’m always open to feedback, so if you like, or don't, the new models and changes it is good to know, as well as the previous post asking for ideas for enemy designs! 

(I know the new eyes may look a bit weird, I will test some possible fixes for next month update)