Purple Dream : First Look At CGs, NPC Interactions, More on Clothing Styles, and a Bigger Peek at Gameplay

Sorry for delays! Here's the biggest post and look at Purple Dream so far!

I uploaded the video for it on X/Twitter.

Link to the video: Link

There's a lot to unpack here, but before that, I'll start with some small last minute things that delayed things a bit. The second screenshot of the post is literally how Aika looked 3 hours ago. Had to do a small adjustment to her, and with any change to her rig, everything related to her 3D model such as her clothing and other things completely implodes and becomes unusable. When that happens, everything needs to be reimported. A very straightforward but not very fun process that takes a good couple of hours. Also took a moment to implement a cursor feature since my mouse wasn't visible in prior recordings, that way it'll be a bit more clear where my mouse is and what I'm clicking.

Friendly reminder that this is all very early, and the priority is to get everything functioning. It's full of placeholders, missing assets, unfinished animations, etc. The visual polish and all of those bells and whistles will come later in development.

Now let's get to the big things.

Let's start with the NPC interactions. Only a couple were shown, and not all of the different outcomes were shown. This is one of those features that it's easier to explain. The interaction itself is very simple, when you are near an NPC, this pencil skirt as well as the turtleneck top can be lifted, which enables the "lift" clothing style branch. That's the basic gist of it, but there's a lot more going on. I added to the system the possibility for the different interactions to only be available when Aika/Shizumi is facing a certain direction. In this case, this interaction is not possible while Aika is turned towards the NPC, she needs to be looking away for this to happen. Then, there's various different outcomes for an interaction. For this one in particular, there's 5 different outcomes that can happen. 1, success. It simply means that the NPC is able to lift the garment. 2, failure. The NPC is not guaranteed to succeed at lifting the garment, and when failing, he can try again, but after failure there is always a chance that the NPC will give up. 3, interruption. You can press the interaction key to slap the NPC's hand away and interrupt the interaction. 4, forced interruption. This one was seen in the video. If Aika/Shizumi are being pushed too much and you are taking care of them, they will forcefully interrupt interactions even if you as the player don't interrupt it yourself. The thing with the forced interruptions is that they have a really bad impact on their stats, as such, you never want them to get to the point where Aika/Shizumi will forcefully interrupt things. 5, instant success. Similar to how under certain circumstances Aika/Shizumi will forcefully interrupt something, under certain circumstances the NPCs will be riled up enough to where you can't even interrupt the interaction.

NPC interactions. Not something massive, but it surprisingly has a lot going on and it has a lot of gameplay implications.

I was going to show the NPC interactions with the other shirt Aika has been seen with, but I would've had to reimport those shirts because of the issue I mentioned earlier... and... Well, more content for a future post!

Now let's talk about the CG. So, the CG and event seen on the video. A lot to unpack here. This is a sort of event that is part of the bigger "class" activity for Aika. There's various different events that will happen during the class activity, but that as a whole is more of a subject for a future post. For now, this event is one that has a focus on calming Aika and serving as a place for her to take a breather. Really important, but again, the details and in-depth look at activities is for another post. This event is an event that is tied to her desk. This event gives a peek to how some events can be laid out. Some events will be tied to NPCs, some will be tied to certain objects on the scene, some will be tied to a certain spot, etc.

Here Aika goes to her desk, turns around, and blocks out everything that is going on as she takes a nice breather. The main purpose of that desk event is for her to recompose herself, by doing things such as fixing her clothes, which could be seen in the video.

There's so much more that can be said about it, but right now in this first look I want to really talk about the technical side of it. As you could see in the video, Aika entered the event multiple times, and with different appearances due to all the variations and possibilities that the different garments offer, but also all of the different clothing styles that each of those garments can have. The system has been made to be able to read and adapt to her appearance entirely, taking into account clothing, clothing style, and various other things that are yet to be revealed. Developing those capabilities has been a really big hurdle for me. What makes it even better, is that these things are not hard-coded. You can always hard-code these kinds of things and take the scrappy approach, but it's the kind of thing that is unsustainable and will lead to scripts that are tens of thousands of lines of code, when they could've been just couple thousand lines. Not really in the realm of possibility. The CG system here for Purple Dream has been made in a way where its kind of smart and with just a couple of lines of code the system already knows the whole list of things that it needs to do.

There really is a lot going on with that system, and it's really powerful, but most importantly, it's incredibly easy and fast to work with.

As of now, I consider the CG system at its core to be complete. It's been an important internal milestone. The development of Purple Dream so far has been mostly focused on making for myself a really good set of tools that I can make the game with. After the not so pretty development of Blooming Flower, I could not make another game in that same kind of scrappy manner and without proper systems and tools in place.

A bunch of systems, the CG system included, have been going through countless reworks and optimizations, all in favor of making the proper content creation stage of development easier. In the CG system for example, the simple functions for those buttons seen in the video by themselves at first had a script that was almost at 600 lines of code, but after optimizations, it went down to 400, then after another round of optimizations, it went down to 200, and now it's sitting at around 150 lines, which is what I consider to be the most I can realistically improve the system. The beauty of this is that by the end of development, the full code for that desk event with all of the buttons in place and all of its routines and dialogue stuff might be around 2000 lines of code, and not the 10000 lines that it would've been without the optimizations. Much more manageable. There were even a couple of "improvements" and "optimizations" made to the system that were there for the sake of improving performance, but they had a tradeoff that made coding the events take longer. Ultimately, the negligible performance gains don't really matter much when compared to the dev time being saved by not having them. The game is fairly light and runs very well as it is. It's been a long journey. There's still some important systems that need more polish and work done, but for something as big as the CG system to finally feel complete is a huge step internally. There's many things that have been kept off-engine precisely so I would be able to rework and do destructive changes to the system, but with it in this state, I can finally start bringing more things into the engine.

Development has been very exciting as of late on the technical side of things.

Thank you for supporting the development of Purple Dream and Hana Exposure!