Progress update- victory, and next steps (Patreon)

I am sleep deprived for reasons. Please excuse any strangeness. Also, I'm deciding to not worry about the exact day for these posts right now. It's an end-of-the-week-whenever-that-happens-to-be-for-me update post.

What's being worked on?

HFSM.

I finished the hierarchical finite state machine! It's a powerful little in-engine tool for managing overall logic flows. It's useful for anything from menu management, to animation handling, to the player's interaction with the world, to npc AI. 

It allows something (the player in this case) to have a complex set of states and substates and sub-substates that can swap between each other at any point. Each level of the hierarchy runs its own code. Each state swap (called a transition in finite state machines) can have its own code run to handle unique logic cases. It runs inside the ECS (the entity component system at the heart of the engine) but doesn't spaghetti itself to fit in.

I'm honestly very proud of the final result. It's not janky, runs super fast, and isn't over-engineered for what it needs to do. 

More hours good.

I spent more hours working on code this week and it paid off. Despite catching a cold and also facing a (intentionally vague) sleep crisis, I managed to get a lot more done than usual without driving toward burnout. 

It's nice to have this faster pace. I see the other side of big, insurmountable-feeling challenges much faster, which boosts my morale and makes me more confident that the next challenge is surmountable too. 

Next, p*netration mechanics.

The whole reason I started on this was because I was trying to prototype p*netration mechanics and realized that interactions with the player's hand were really clunky. Everything worked fine, but since it was all working separately in their own little corners, segmented off from each other, it was hard to add and test mechanics without digging deep into the engine for every little thing.

So then I unified the top-level systems of the game to make it simpler. Then I realized that the player's logic was more complex than it looked like on the surface. Making new interactions with the player would have to wait until there was a system that could handle the complexity. Enter the hierarchical state machine arc.

And now we're here!

It's time to blitz through prototyping p*netration interactions and UI. I've been thinking about them and expanding my ideas in the meantime. It's time to play around and make the fun parts of the game.

Followup on the pony/furry question.

So last week I asked about the potential of a shift away from the pony IP. As I said in that post, I don't intend to suddenly remove or sideline the pony content from SHF3. This game will be completely unaffected in the short term, and in the long term it'd be an expansion of characters/character creation content, not a removal of the current content. I'm sure my core group of supporters is primarily pony fans so I'm not gonna take a hard left turn into anthro furry content or anything. Standard anthro furry doesn't appeal to me as much anyway.

I think it's important to talk about this stuff early and be open about my intentions though. 

The (still upcoming) Project Maple has an anthro-ish kobold as its main character. I'm excited about it, but it's not representative of where my own art and style is headed. That's a collab with PussPuss cause we both think kobolds are neat.

My mainline stuff would ideally fit into the pony style and charm. Quadrupeds, chonky limbs, and big sparkly eyes that fit into the pony design language. There'd be horses and unicorns and whatnot, but also other creatures that fit into a world with them, like dragons, deer, goo critters, etc. 

It's hard to talk about visual stuff without examples, so I'll share sketches and things whenever I can. I'm open to input and feedback since this affects everyone! 

... and that's all for now!

You people rock. Over the next few weeks I hope to impress y'all with the progress being made. For now, all I can say is thank you for being here and supporting the project to such a ridiculous extent. We're makin this happen baby~