Going Public

I'm working on making my art known in the public once again through various methods.

While attending various VR meetups, I met several people who told me "Oh, you're Salireths! You used to make art, I remember favoriting it!". The focus here is on "used to" - despite that I create more than ever now, people in general think that I stopped?

I suppose that comes down that I don't upload much of anything to Furaffinity and Twitter anymore, so it's something I need to fix.

But while I could just dump all the art I've made to the online galleries, and maybe it would even bring some new people into the community - I think it would not be the smartest thing to do now! There are a lot of things that have become outdated over the years: Discord, Patreon, even my abandoned YouTube channel - all of that needs a thorough overhaul before I get to go forward.

So this is what I've been doing - spending a lot of time to plan, write, draw and model for those overhauls. It's a long overdue task to refresh my public presentation, to clearly define what I do nowadays, and offer new exciting opportunities and rewards to people who wishes to support my endeavors.

Discord

The Discord overhaul is still in the preparation stage. I was waiting until Discord team fixes a bug that prevented everyone from using a certain feature of the Community servers, the feature that I need to use the server as a database for information about Dragotheria! I hope they fixed it by now (it's been 3 weeks), and with very little time I have from other projects, I just need to find a couple days to finish it.

Community Events

Once Discord server is overhauled, I plan on starting some community activity together! I will start small, with just occasional VRChat hangouts and/or discussions & brainstorming about the sensual and kinky lore of Dragotheria universe! Our community lacks connection between each other - so I'd like to find something in common to do together! I've got more ideas that we could try eventually, but we will see how it goes first.

Patreon

Overhauling Patreon page is also long overdue. They've changed the design requirements since multiple times, and I just didn't have time to update. But the design is as important as updating the description of what the Patreon is about, making a few public posts describing Dragotheria to new people, and of course, work on the support tiers.

Commissions

I'm still taking some commissions for VRChat avatars - retextures, remodels, outfits, adding kink-related and/or nsfw features. It takes a lot of my time, but it's something I need to do to survive for now. It has been only between friends for me to get started, but I need to expand and advertise it broadly soon.

So if you wanted to commission me make something for you, now would be the perfect time for it!

Avatars 

Little by little, I continue to work on my own avatar bases for VR - I just have to make a very appealing model from the start. I need to make sure the product will look as appealing as I possibly can produce, before I'd spend weeks modeling and polishing them. This is why I've been drawing more concept art to refine my models. Here are the two Dragonkin races which I'm working on now.

Like everything I do from now on, those aren't just one-off models. They are all part of the greater whole, races which you will see and meet again in different Dragotheria-related creations!

Also on the topic of avatars, I need to find time to update my old Kobolds - I plan to completely remaster them once again.

Game

Some people might have thought that I stopped working on the game after what happened to it. And I did, for a time, to re-evaluate everything I've done right and wrong. Ultimately, I realized that I simply can't be without the game - there is so much I want to show and tell, and it's the only format that it can be done! Very few people read books nowadays, I could personally never get into comics, and I wouldn't be able to produce animated series alone with no budget. So games is the only way for me, and thankfully I have all the skills needed for this kind of work now.

I'm reconsidering and re-combining a lot of elements from my previous attempts. Reusing some of the old successful pieces, while rethinking what couldn't work. And this time forward I'm making sure that I will rely only on myself to produce it.

I simplified the graphics, it's a bit old-school now (early 2000s in particular, a bit of nostalgia here too) - It makes it easier and much faster to make worlds for me. But I think it still looks quite appealing. I decided to drop mod-support and multiplayer (for now), just to focus on actual game that matters. I'm also considering on making the project open-source eventually (but I won't have the skills and time to maintain an open source project community - no pull requests for it!).

I used the same design for the character as I made for the avatar for now, except it's made lowpoly for the game. It will be much more high-resolution for VR.

I'm not a programmer however - writing any code is the most stressful and difficult part of it all. A lot of my gamedev friends suggest me to just quickly put together some prototype code, to see how it plays, if it's "fun"… But after repeatedly trying and failing that, I realized this approach just might not be for me. I easily lose the vision of what I'm even attempting to create as a whole while coding even a smallest little piece of it, wasting time in the process.

I'm much more confident with concept art and designing things "on paper". I can visualize the game before switching to programming: it's like writing a movie script before filming the actors. Programming for me is that expensive "production" stage where filmmakers don't have the budget to mess around too much.

I understand how a lot of popular game genres don't work with the approach of a "static design doc" - some things you just need to "feel" to know if it's good. For my case however, I believe the game can be more cerebral, as my goal was always to immerse the player into a unique sexual world through its worldbuilding, rather than making some jumps or humps "feel" in any particular way.

So this is what I'm doing. A lot of drawing and modeling just to see how the game will look and play like. With this pre-visualization being done, I can show you what it's all about before bunkering down into programming for a few months. And because of that plan, I will remember what I'm working on, even when my thoughts are fully corrupted by math to make something like a player camera system.

This screenshot combines a sketch of the UI. I started with graphics and UI because it's something I'm most comfortable with, and it helps me to visually define what players can do in the game.

From there, I will create user-stories: those are small presentations of what players might be doing in order to get a particular desired outcome. Like what buttons and actions they perform in order to do something lewd with an NPC, as that part of the core gameplay, not just flavor.

Ultimately, it boils down on me working on an RPG system where each skill, instead of combat abilities, represents a sensual action that can be targeted onto any bodypart of any character in the game. Think of Fallout's VATS system, but instead of shooting or stabbing, it's something nice and desired. To achieve that I "only" need to discard the violent mechanics (which all began in the 70s thanks to D&D), and build my own, with black Dragons and hookers! This is why I need your support so much so I can just keep thinking and designing all of this.

YouTube and secret animations

And last, I'm also thinking about how I could return to YouTube, where I can once again share my thoughts and progress with viewers. Dragotheria has a lot of lore I can talk about, and even more for me create in the future. Some of it, I believe, I could make YouTube-friendly (sfw) enough, but I'm also thinking about making a secret, Patreon-only source to release the "expanded" versions. Besides time, the biggest problem is that I have is that there is nowhere to host such videos, as all the private video hosts are just too expensive. Maybe I could integrate those as animation/audio logs into the game builds instead?

I also built my own slime-VR trackers to look more pretty in VR and for those videos (going V-tuber all the way). It can also help me make animations for the game, a cheap motion capture solution of sorts. But I haven't tried using it for that yet.

Conclusion

There is a lot on my plate, so much work outlined ahead. But there is nothing I desire more than my Dragotheria succeeding and bringing happiness to creatures around the world. Actually, no, I desire to live with Dragons more of course, but making this world/universe/franchise happen is the best possible alternative.

This is why I share my plan with all of you, so you can help me along the way. When fellow creatures are showing interest in what I make, it fills me with motivation to proceed to do the hard work. It is my responsibility to bring Dragotheria from the abstract void of imagination into the light of reality, but I can't do it entirely alone. I truly thank you for being with me all this time, and there is so much more to come!

With lots of Dragon love,
   - SalirethS.