Erokin Report June 22nd, 2023 (Patreon)

Fine eve to you all from the Anduo team. Hope our news find you well and if not, that it brightens up your day!

As per our lewduty, we would like to update you with what we have been up to:

.less.:

this week and last week was me working on this character and doing her hair in blender

PMPerfect:
For the upcoming update we are focusing on exploring Alda's place inside Serpent Guild, how it may look, what it can tell us about her and where it will be located. To begin with we figure out the placement and first hint of layout with concepts, next stage block it out with simple cubes to make sure the scale is appropriate and we have enough room in said room :) Next in order is a fun part is to concept a proper props and explore what kind of elements and details will be in the room of our mercenary :) Cya later with more design passes on the way :)

Bear:
I did a toooonnn of work on general UI cleanup. There was a lot of work required to replace the placeholder logic. The end result is pretty much invisible from a player point of view, programmers life in a nutshell, lol. Now however, there's a hierarchy to menus. When you open a new menu, the system keeps track of the previous menu, so that if you close the new menu, it shows the previous one again automagically. This streamlines the workflow of adding UI a lot! :) Also, there's a pause menu now!

I've gotten into contact with an UI Artist who is going to take a stab at making a UI Prototype for Erokin. I'm excited to see what comes of that! Here's a little preview of that:

Besides that, I also implemented Saving. It works pretty much exactly like in Third Crisis. There's a load and a Save menu, Auto-saves are hidden by default. What's new is that I take a screenshot to display next to the save for convenience. Interestingly, this also required the masturbation scene to be almost entirely redone. The old version was made in the Animator state machine, which does not play well with save states. So I redid the sequence in the "new" timeline way of doing sex scenes. There's virtually no difference from a player perspective, but it works with saving now, hooray! :D

Next I'd like to mention that the graphics menu has received some upgrades: Field of View, Brightness, Contrast and disabling Shadows are now options. The Disabling Shadows Setting is really only meant when playing on hardware that needs every inch of performance it can get.

Marcus is now in the engine! He doesn't have any animations yet but there's already a bit of dialogue written and we've got a voice actor for him in mind! There's still a bit of work left to do on the furry bit on his neck, it doesn't look perfect yet.

The Photomode also has some improvements compared to the 0.1 release version now! Besides some minor UI usability improvements, there's an Autofocus button that will make depth of field effects a breeze!

Next, I did a fun little excursion into the shader world! Pixie had the amazing idea to add sparkles to the makeup she's working on and I had to jump onto that immediately! :D Making graphic effects like this is super fun!

Lastly, I managed to find a way to improve performance in the Market area drastically! There's a super minor change in how the lighting looks, but I'm confident that nobody will even notice that anything changed at all. And instead of running at 40-50 fps, it now runs on >140 fps on the machines we tested on! The load-in lag when entering the market has also improved, tho it is not quite fully gone yet. The first time you enter the market is the worst currently. I'll look into it further. At least it is much better than before though! :)

Nerada:
Greetings my fair dear friend, my name's Nerada, I bid thee a most gracious and joyous good time of day which now is in your location. I spent this week putting effort into works I'd like you to admire. Most of it was moves of one hot-tempered armored female cat, the other was a drunkard.

Oww, and... Marcus learnt how to lean depressively against the bar counter.

Pixie:

Hello! I'm Pixie, a voice actress of nearly a decade and casting director! In between casting and performing VO myself, I've had a ton of opportunities to start learning Blender and have just picked up Substance Painter. As you can see, I've just given some shine and finish for one of the characters faces, even going so far as to adding makeup on Fiona to make her nervous eyes pop with the help of Bear (sparkle magic!). With blender I've been focusing on making some poses for Alda for a potential pose option in photo-mode that has been so much fun!

Pking:

Hello my name is Pking, and for what I am up to for the week is making some prop works and later on some character improvements for now like texturing n' such

JuggerDown:

JuggerDown makes the beautiful statues that you see in Erokin! The one you see in our Patreon banner as well as the ones you can find in game are made by him. On top of that he also does their textures!

Thank you for being here and we hope to see you in the next report! ♡