New scene reveal and big progress update

Hello people!

I wanted to hold off posting updates about what I've been up to until I was very confident about the release of my new scene, Net Cafe. That time has arrived and now I realise I have so much to tell you about I hardly know where to begin! So strap yourself in, it's going to be a long post.

So what has been going on in Spacedog world? Well Net Cafe is nearly finished and will be released to Early Access very soon, it is just going through final testing and tweaks now. It is a big story driven scene set in a tiny Japanese Internet Cafe room and featuring 2 new characters, Lia and Tetsuo. This is the first of 2 major scenes I’ve been building in parallel. Why two scenes? Well the reason for this will become apparent when you play Net Cafe!

The astute among you will note a distinct lack of Space Force in the screenshots, what gives? Space Force will be my magnum opus and I want to make it the best that it can be. I have big plans for entire story arcs in the Space Force universe, exploring new levels of sexiness the likes of which you’ve never seen before. While the first two episodes were about as good as I could make them for the time, they suffered from basic limitations like clunky UI and constant loading.

I was never happy with this and it has been my mission ever since to find ways to improve the situation and avoid having to rebuild Space Force with every new development, as I've already done once with the episode 1 conversion to Timeline. In fact I’ve done countless partial rebuilds prior to the first episode release, you wouldn't believe how long it took to make. There was nothing else for it, I would have to build the perfect speech and scene logic system to serve as a solid foundation for my future scenes.

This process started with my last scene Mirage, and its successful introduction of seamless loading. This was a good start but the Animation Pattern based scene logic had some basic limitations that meant it wouldn't scale nicely. As VAM technology progressed my attention was drawn ever more to the powerful Timeline plugin, perhaps it could be used for more than just animating?

After lots of experimenting and countless failed attempts I hit on a neat method of leveraging Timeline to run a speech system. It not only worked nicely from a user perspective, it also fit all of my criteria for being portable across scenes, logical and quick to build scenes with. It uses a single Timeline animation for each scene that contains all speech and logic, keeping it all neatly tucked away in the Timeline UI. This means it scales really nicely. While the old system I used for Space Force could handle 22 dialogues per scene at a stretch, this new one can handle unlimited dialogues and unlimited scenes.

With some help from Acidbubbles to iron out some bugs I managed to build an entire system for scene logic, dialogue and scene transitions. This is the purpose of Net Cafe, I needed a scene to test my ideas on and it fit the bill perfectly. It helped that the room itself was tiny and I wanted to use that to help avoid a classic UI design mistake, all too often you’d make a UI you think is the right size but then you get to an intimate scene and it is far too big and unwieldy. With Net Cafe I was forced to make it neat and compact from the start, so it should work in all circumstances.

I have named the new system SuperSpeech, and after months of development and countless iterations I am confident that it is about the best speech system that can be made for VAM with current technology.

Here’s some quick stats on my development of Net Cafe:

Number of game atoms: 117

Number of Timeline animations: 186

Number of dialogue lines: 210 approx

Number of backups created: 319 (Yeah, I don’t take chances with scenes!)

Alongside the 2 big scenes I’ve been building in parallel I’ve also built a SFW promo scene to show off SuperSpeech, the video of which will be released alongside the early access version of Net Cafe. If there is a big enough demand it will also serve as the tutorial scene for a SuperSpeech template and tutorial for the community to use.

Net Cafe will be released to Early Access very soon, maybe in the coming day or so.

Phew! I think that about wraps it up for now, thanks for reading!

Spacedog