Poses, gravity, and more licking

Its time to share what we've been working on! We expanded upon the interactions by introducing base emote poses, which give the player control over their character's body in the intuitive way, and we also brought some cool gravity systems into the game :}

Rolling around

Like how it's done in other games that feature emotes, player can open a menu and be presented with a selection of various animations... However! They are not just one-off animations, if they were, it would turn into a giant unintuitive list, and we try to keep UI to the minimum and experience to the maximum. 

In the example above, the emote pose is called "relax", and it starts with character sitting down, then, upon moving to specific direction you can intuitively roll around and assume different laying positions!

After that, other emotes will be dependent on these poses as well: the same emote, while preserving its theme and context, will have different animations depending on what pose it was started at, making character do different things depending if they're laying on the belly, back, sides, and if they are sitting or standing. All that without cluttering the emote selection menu with more buttons, following the same pattern of intuitive controls we have with the interaction system (previous post)

We'll make sure to include various sexual teases and self-pleasures, as well as general cute things to do, like sleeping in strange poses.

Initially we wanted to include handstands into the "relax" pose set (however it proved to be very difficult to animate various transitions to) so we just made the characters do some yoga instead :} Handstand can still be made as a separate pose later.

Belly slides! It is important to note that "rolling around" is not just a static "emote", it is a separate movement mode, like walking or swimming - by changing the poses the character changes location as well.

Little planets

As I'm an uneducated artist, I know little of physics to explain the topic nicely, so I'll leave the more technical explanation to Hopfel in the future posts. 

For now however, I wanted to quickly show one of the new additions, the ability for us to mess around with gravity as we please! And not just the gravity strength, direction too!

We can make planetoid gravity, or the inverse of it (like hollow earth), cylinders, walkways... Anything really, it only requires to put a formula in. 

Point is - this is very useful for creating interesting, alien and mindbending locations and puzzles, just like we always wanted to do, it opens so much level design possibilities! And of course it is possible thanks to the custom movement system, by default Unreal Engine does not support custom gravity like that.

Physics is accurately simulated - technically you could enter an orbit of this little planet, however because there is air in this world, it creates drag - which will decrease your velocity and make you fall to the surface quicker. If there was no air/drag, which easy to change, you could enter a stationary orbit, not that there is really any reason to do that aside from showing off some physics!

If your character is standing on a fast moving platform and it immediately changes its moving direction, because of acceleration, from the character's perspective it feels like as if the gravity was shifted, perhaps, if the change sudden, resulting in character tumbling and ragdolling. Basically, acceleration and gravity do the things that they normally do (told you I'm not good with physics xD )

The camera also automatically re-orients itself - we don't have a concept of "up" anymore, therefore it just aligns itself to the acceleration forces that are affecting your character, where the dominant force is usually the gravity.

And also somehow it looks funny when you walk towards the camera on a small planetoid :}

The NSFW bit

Going back to the topic I'm more proficient at, lets talk more about sexual and roleplay capabilities we're developing.

As I said in the previous post, we're making various interactions between characters be procedurally animated, as opposed to "hardcoding" character pairings. This enables us to dynamically adjust animations for various characters, ones that we might even not know about, such as if they were modded in, and enables simultaneous multi-character interactions. 

In the example above, one Hizathri is licking another Hizathri's cloaca, a typical activity for this species. Let's break it down how it works in game:

• Right player sat on the ground and then switched their posture to relax on their back.
• Player on the Left aimed at the Right one's cloaca and chose to lick it, the character approached it and started to do just that.
• Lastly, what you see on the GIF, the Right player decided to wiggle their character around, while Left's character is automatically adjusting to reach the "tasty spot" designated before.

This is the base of the interaction system - now, by using the "lick" example we can add other types of actions, appealing to different fetishes and game mechanic needs, and by using the "relax" as the start points we can also add more specific animations, such teasing or reaching climax.

The procedural system is made out of many hand-made poses and an automatically adjusting body IK system, all working together. With that we're able to make characters reach and connect with the target. And when the target goes away too far, the animation cancels.

Conclusion

We're hard at work making this game systemic in every way, giving the creativity of interactions into player's hands, be it with the environment or with characters of other players. Animations might be rough as things occasionally float, clip and slide - but that's beside the point, as polish will come in time. The foundation of the gameplay is being laid out, which is a very exciting time indeed!

Hope you enjoy the progress! Stay tuned for the next updates :}