Surprise! (Patreon)

This took far longer than we first had anticipated. One bump after another kept showing up. But here it finally is - our surprise...

Herms & futas!

From now on we're making a major change in our female authoring process. Ilinír the dragoness is the first one to get this herm & futa treatment, but she specifically is not so much the surprise as our new female authoring process is.

During these last couple of weeks weeks, we have tested different ways of implementing herms and futas while also trying to minimize duplication of work (to maximize asset reuse). Now we have a method we feel comfortable with and that works well.

So what does this mean? It means that all future females will come in 3 different variations - default female, herm, and futa! So every time we add a new female, she will come in 3 different variations!* 3 in 1, basically. :)

(And by setting breast inflation to 0 you can basically get a femboy too.)

(* They might not all be added at the same time, but most likely in the same cycle at least.)

Pictures

Tease (herm different colors)

https://gyazo.com/b86481093fd77f8345c8b11117d2d3e6

https://gyazo.com/bc909b235e5bdbe95183e1e11e817dbe

https://gyazo.com/2713210a2ec0689629faa5d2851ce1b7

https://gyazo.com/313146f9df1b59e98b99f42cf4807975

Close up of herm organ

https://gyazo.com/6fb03464b9c0e38e2c82054a5093edd2

Lying tease

https://gyazo.com/44dc50b3a8fe94c5a31d624384d5f081

We wish we had more to show, but time hasn't allowed us! We figured you guys would rather see a build than recordings so we prioritized that.

Explanation for delay

Some might object that implementing herms & futas shouldn't have takens this long. After all, it's basically just a male character, for which we already have all the systems in place to implement. This is true. But that's not the problem we've been trying to solve.

In game development (and development in general), it's all about streamlining your work and trying to keep away from repeating yourself as much as possible. If something can be defined once, it should only be defined once. So here we hit a problem. How do we implement a female character, with herm and futa variations, without having to redefine and tweak shared behavior several times for each variation of that character?

Furthermore, since each variation requires specific texturing work (around organ area), how can we reuse as much of the original texturing as possible without having to repeat shared areas several times? This is important from multiple viewpoints. If we, for example, find an issue in a texture, it wouldn't be good if we have to fix it several times for each variation of that texture. Rather, only one instance of that texture should exist, and if fixed, it should propagate to all variations.

In addition to this, it's in our interest to minimize redefining shared areas in textures, since textures are absolutely huge in terms of how much physical space they occupy (about 5 MB per texture). In a build of a game, textures make up about 90% of all the space. So if we simply just made variations of textures tailored for herms and futas, that would basically mean we would have to add another 5 MB * 5 = 25 MB (albedo, normal map 1, normal map 2, occlusion, metal/rough) per skin and variation. For dragoness, with 3 variations and 4 skins, this would mean 3 * 4 * 25 = 300 MB, just for her! Obviously, this would be a total disaster that would quickly get out of hand. The app would keep expanding in size rapidly as we add more female characters with their variations.

Coming up with a solution to solve all these problems is what has taken so long. And while we managed to solve them in theory quite quickly, it's another matter to implement and try them out in practice. During the implementation of our original theory we discovered it simply put too many restrictions on our creative process that texturing became too cumbersome to a point where it was impossible to get something we were happy with. So we had to think of something different. As a matter of fact, we ditched our original approach just a couple days ago in favor for a new one. (Luckily not all was lost in that process of course.) So you might imagine the pressure we felt when we discovered we couldn't execute our original idea and had to come up with something new if we were to make it before the end of the month. :)

Now we have something that allows a lot of creative freedom in our texture authoring while also hardly increasing the size at all. The additional texture space required to define a variation is only around 200 KB per skin (rather than 25 MB). A big and necessary improvement!

Herm and futa versions of Ilinír will be available in 0.6.2 which is released very soon (unless we run into some serious issue). Stay tuned!