Progress Update - Pragma Into (Patreon)

Hello Lovelies,

I am so, so, so excited to finally be bringing The Divine Engine Pragma to life! It has been a long road of getting to this character and I know so many fans are dying to interact with her!!

As promised in our last post, pulling things together for Pragma's Intro is one of the short-term tasks we wanted to get going, so you this post is to share with you more about the different elements we are pulling together!

Draft Intro Story Completed

All of our stories are written in the Ink Narrative Scripting Language. 

This tool is fantastic for us, because it lets us create various branches within the scene to give you lots of variety as a player each time you replay the scene and also because it so conveniently runs the game as it integrates with Unity.

This means that we don't just write the dialogue in Ink, but we also use it to trigger animations, send commands to Unity, look for player answers and poses, and load scenes and music, plus so much more. 

Deviant Dev has created such a great interface between Ink and Unity, that he is such a good boy at making my job easier!

For Pragma, we have completed the first draft of her Intro scene in Ink, including:

• Loading the environment and 3D model
• Establishing all the base core code to run the scene 
• Story dialogue (dialogue for single scene)
• Generic dialogue (dialogue used in many scenes)
• Triggers for players to answer questions and take poses
• First pass of possible Mistress animations
• First pass of possible Mistress emotions

You can play through the draft story here: https://deviant-dev.github.io/dominatrix-simulator-ink/

New Animations and Computerized Text-to-Speech Research

As most of you know, we are a tiny team of two designers (full-time Devilish Domina, part-time Deviant Dev), with some awesome contract helpers (Artist Just Jeff, Composer Fflewddur Fflam, Scene Fluffer Headphone Taco, and Marketer TeeTohr), trying to find all the ways to create content and get things done. This means we often run into situations where we don't have the skills, time or resources to complete everything we'd like to.

That's when we get creative!

For Pragma, we knew we'd need some new animations and a totally unique voice (more below) to fit her particular style, so Headphone Taco set off to discover animations while Deviant Dev geeked out over computerized text-to-speech programs. Good boys!!

New Animations

Headphone Taco did us proud and discovered a batch of over 3k mocap animations to investigate!!

Don't worry... we won't dig ourselves into too deep a whole going through them, but a quick pass has already revealed dozens of cool new animations worth playing around with.

I plan to share a fun character animation tool you can play around with next week! Keep your eyes open and your fingers ready! You'll love cycling through the various animations.

Computerized Text-to-Speech Program

We agree with all our fans who've been saying they want hints of GLaDOS when they finally hear Pragma's voice for the first time. She will be testing her new specimen, after all.

To make this happen, Deviant Dev has been doing some research on what programs might help us acheive this.

Of course, I could act and we could synthesize and modulate my voice, but text-to-speech seems so much more fun!!

Microsoft: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/#features 

Google: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech 

Check out the current two programs we're playing around with. Let us know what you think and please, please share if you've got your own favorite program you want us to check out!

Mine truly,