[Devlog] What I learned on 2022 (Patreon)

Hey friends, this devlog is mostly to take a look back at everything done in 2022.

What did I learn with Solas City Heroes during 2022.

Making a beat em up seemed like a simpler idea when I started than what it is now, honestly. But at the beginning I was using a base asset to take care of most of the stuff, and slowly but steadily I been learning more and more and right now there is only like 5% let of the initial asset I was using. I replaced almost everything with my own stuff, a lot of the things were very basic, or extremely unoptimized, or just didn’t work with my sex system.

I’m going through my notes, and the whole changelog for last year is 22 pages long. That’s quite a bit of change. But I guess the biggest change was changing to HDRP and learning to use post processing and real lighting. For those that don’t know (like me a year ago) unity default rendering doesn’t use real lighting, it calculates lighting in a much simpler way, which generates kinda weird lighting.

For reference here is how the game looked pre 0.2.2. And this is how the game looks now!

I also made the whole bondage system. Which if you take a look now it is massive. I don’t think I have seen a system that big in any other game. The system is way deeper than it looks on the surface, it takes into account several things, and restricts others. The coding part was really complex to get it going on, since there are so many possibilities and variables that could make something go wrong, but at the end of the day it works perfectly and is modular enough that I could port it to future games with minimal effort. (Considering how long it took to make everything, spending 2 weeks porting it is considered minimal for me, heh)

I would like to talk about all the upgrades I did to the sex system. Granted most of them are not visible, but you can see how today’s system is way more precise than before, and runs way more smoothly. This same thing is what allowed me to figure out a way to make threesomes, which are still being worked on. The code for the threesome part isn’t finished (because there are so few of them).

Even though I didn’t want to do it, I ended up remaking the whole AI myself. I spent a lot of time on this, and at the end of the day I’m happy with the results. It is silly thinking now that I have been trying to get the AI done since February 2022 and because of everything that happened, I ended up doing it myself at the end of the year. Crazy. Imagine all the time and effort (and money) I could have saved if I just believed in myself that I could do the AI from the beginning…

The whole talent system was a cool challenge to do. I built it myself from scratch, and it was a cool learning experience, which will definitely come in handy for future projects, as I love RPGs.

On the more mechanical part of the game development. I learned a lot about interactions between classes (in code) and ways to integrate different scripts and features. I used most of what I learned during Dungeon Coup development of physics work with a lot of smoothing features and clearer code to have a firmer grip on what happens at any point. This gives me a lot more control in general and helps me prevent issues, some of which I still cannot find, lol. (I’m talking specifically about the running animation triggering while in a sex position)

So, in general, during last year I learned a lot of coding, way more than I wanted, way more than I thought I could. And something very big for me is that I also learned to create menus and other UI elements (or game elements) that can get filled at runtime, like the preferred position system, which generates a list of positions based on your known positions and your liked/disliked positions. All of this is calculated at runtime and not premade, like I used to do in previous games. This thing is allowing me to do stuff much better and faster!

Another thing that I learned is about “juice”, something that I didn’t really know for previous games, and that is the use of secondary elements to make the game feel more alive. Stuff like visual effects, explosions, screen shakes, more sound effects, and things like that. I had some previous ideas about this, but last year I took a whole course to learn about this, and I think the game feels a lot more alive now thanks to that.

Lastly, I greatly improved my animation game and skills. Whenever I try to upgrade an old animation sometimes I feel like those were terrible,and that it would be faster to just re-do it from scratch. (And sometimes is!)

So, yeah. Looking back at it, I realized that I learned and progressed a lot. Maybe my games are still not top-tier, but I’m slowly not only improving myself, but building a team of people I love working with and that I trust.

And for that I wanna thank all of you who supported me during 2022 and I hope you like my work enough to keep supporting us in the future!

I don’t have much more news for now, I will spend the week fixing bugs that people find in the game and recording new footage for a new trailer for the game. I will come back soon with more news!

Have a great week friends!

Cheers!