[Horny Dungeon] Devlog #004 - The graphics, the physics, and the others (SFW Edition)

A new devlop here! But please hold on, if your already a subscriber of this Patreon, just read the NSFW version. This public post is the SFW version for people who literally read Patreon at work :p

(This post contains several .gif files. Please be patient and wait them to load if the Patreon server isn't blazingly fast at the moment.)

The Graphics

In the past month(s) the graphics has being finalized. Most notably, the highlight is not directly painted on the textures any more. As a result, the boobs and stockings looks *much* better when the camera is moving (see above gif).

The same comparison with clothes:

But what took so long wasn't this highlight upgrade. It was the optimization. I have been developed this game on a PC with 3060 card and it always run smoothly, but we're not an AAA title and I'd like to make it playable on even a laptop without a standalone graphics card.

Well, it turns out it's possible. It took me an unholy amount of time to figure it out, but here we go:

I've add a "Graphics Quality" option. As you can see, the "Great" quality looks almost as nice as the "Best" one, but runs at more than twice FPS!

Actually, I got a Vivobook 15 (MSRP <$400) and the "Great" quality runs at about 50FPS on it. I'll say it's reasonably optimized now. Of course if you have anything above GTX 970, it's still recommended to play at "Best" quality to get a little more anti-aliasing.

(As a fallback, there is an "Ok" quality that squeezes a few more FPS, but it doesn't look as good as above so I don't bother to show it.)

The Physics

I've also added hair physics to Horny Dungeon:

Of course hair isn't the only body part where physics simulation applies. What's the other part that got bouncy physics? The question is left for the readers :)

The Mods

In a previous update, I said that this game is going to use Ink as the scripting language. However, the more Ink I wrote, the less I liked it. Plus, as far as I can tell, practically no other game adopts Ink for modding support, and it means an extra thing to learn for people who want to mod Horny Dungeon.

So I've made another overhaul -- now it's all Lua! With a bit of functional programming fuckery, one can write a character's lines with a very succinct syntax:

Actually, the built-in dialogues are implemented as a mod called "_default_", which means the modder can just take a look at my source code and see copy & modify it. It also made community localization mods possible.

That being said, while the dialogue are 100% moddable already, full modding support remains a big challenge. One issue is that I haven't studied how Steam Workshop works, so the data structure/file organization might need to be changed in the future.

Another thing is that the non-text assets, like 3D models and textures, rely on Unity's asset pipeline. It's possible to decouple them and make everything truly moddable, but it's not trivial and it won't be ready for the first demo version.

Speaking of Unity...

The Ugly

As you probably heard about, Unity is in the middle of a crisis. The leadership announced a new notorious pricing plan and it got big backlashes from the developers.

To be frank, I really want to get rid of Unity as well. But I can't just say "now Horny Dungeon is based on open source engine X! Boom!". The whole customized rendering is based on Unity's SRP, and the physics is based on a third party package, which is, you guessed it, based on Unity too.

Switching to another engine means all the efforts I've put in this game in the past several months are gone with a pooh.

So the plan is to keep developing it with Unity until the first demo is ready. After that, I'll appraise whether Unity is still worth the cost or not, and how long it will take to migrate away from it.

The Schedule

So when the demo will come out? Surprisingly, someone made a deadline for me:

I can't promise that we're 100% going to make it, but it seems to be a reasonable target, and I'm doing my best to catch it up.

I've made a weekly progress report table to track how far the demo is from being ready.

The Conclusion

Again, sorry for not updating devlogs for so long. I've got a bit writing anxiety, and some progress (like optimization) isn't easy to present visually. But I vow to at least keep posting the progress report every week from now on.

Thank you for supporting the development of Horny Dungeon! And in case you missed it, this post has a NSFW version!