Progress Update- inflation, customization, and more (Patreon)

I missed a couple posts. It feels so unproductive to spend time writing recaps instead of just coding. But it’s super important to me that people get to know what’s up. I'm sorry, I need to not slack on these >.<’

If you missed the streams, VODS are here. ('Videos' tab at the top.)

So, what’s being worked on?

Fluids and inflation

The abstract tanks from before are now wired up as body parts, which can play predetermined animations on the body to indicate their fullness (don't mind the colors).

They’re created automatically from the editable data file, and linked together in the same way.

Note that being a “tank” is just a modular thing that is switched on for some body parts.

So what does this mean? Well, for most bodies, there’s only a few “tanks”. But it means that adding fluid mechanics beyond the current mouth-to-booty and womb lines requires zero code. I can just, for example, define a bladder tank and add it, and add rules for how things may enter/exit. Or for milkable teats. This can also play into more niche inflation type fetishes, like ball inflation, breast expansion, and so on.

It’s also perfect for nonstandard bodies, like for example if I’m ever able to make my dreams come true and add a slime character, the entire body could be a single “tank” with multiple entry/exit points. Or, perhaps, a two-peened character,

It also means that body parts and mechanical tanks use exactly the same logic. I can define a toy with an attached tank in the exact same way. I can even give it its own set of tanks and pipes within it. Uses for this would be fluids collection and piping, creampie tubes on toys, and so on.

Colors

Finally, the npcs are starting to look like themselves again.

Actually, there’s a couple big differences!

First, the lines are now colored. It makes a pretty big visual difference imo.

Second, everything is now sensibly configurable. Each body part is defined in the data with the rig assets that should change color with it. They just remember the id of a piece on the color palette, which is defined for each character.

And so, complex things like multicolor hair or body patterns can be configured and colored quite easily.

And lastly, the modular nature of it allows for…

Woo! In-game color customization! Every single piece of the body, inside and out, including the line art, is customizable. This is a huge step for character customization!

The UI is ugly af, but is all working, so I’m moving on for now.

Also, HTML as UI

I’d been putting this off, but have finally sat down and figured out the interoperability problems between the game engine and regular HTML. Reason being- it takes forever to code in-game UI, and it looks and acts terrible anyway :(

I’m probably just gonna use HTML where I need in order to cut down on UI dev time. This means more jank cause it’s new, but also wayyy less jank cause I can use premade elements like the above color picker.

Body parts

This is one of the big remaining tasks. Body parts are super complex and use most of the game mechanics all at once. So, step one has been creating a tree-like system that contains all the individual body parts as part of one body. So for example, the tongue is a child of the mouth, which is the child of the head, which lives on the body.

Previously, all body parts kind of just existed, hard-coded, at the same level. Now, they branch modularly off from one another, and can be attached/removed without code.

They exist as individual game objects, with all the capabilities of any other object (meaning they can have their own animation rig, or assets, do anything a toy can, etc). They also exist as part of a ‘system’- the body.

This means, for example, you could quite easily swap out body parts, even across-species. Or you could remove them, for characters with prosthetics or other nonstandard body configurations.

This also isn’t specific to body parts. It can also work for something like a multi-part toy, which I’ve been wanting for ages. A multi-part toy could be something like, a single box that controls all vibrators attached to it, or an electrical TENs unit with shocking pads you can attach to multiple places/npcs at once. Neat!

Goals for next week:

• Attach bounding boxes data to game objects.
• Be able to touch body parts (using bounding boxes).
• Track what’s being touched on who.
• Bonus- track directional motion.

So yeah, this is just one of the next big ones. Bodies need to be touchable, and that means making use of the bounding boxes for each body part. I suspect this won’t be too painful, since the difficult parts of that were already in the game. But now, it’ll just be a trait of a game object that can be modularly switched on.

...and that’s all for now! 

Sorry for missing the last couple of posts. It’s hard to describe why simply writing a weekly post is so hard for me, but I’m trying my best not to let this get the best of me. Next time, I’ll do a Q&A for missed questions.

So I’ve been going through all sorts of personal growth during this period. The last 3 months have been a major turning point in my life in general, toward the better in most ways. This has left me fairly distant from social media and stuff, though that’s nothing new for me. I’m doing well! And getting more and more confident with drawing.

Is possible I’ll actually, finally, start art streams again at some point. Maybe?

I really can’t thank you all enough. Somehow, against all odds, this friggin game is actually gonna become playable. Thank you so much for sticking with me~

<3