Sorry for not updating, huge blog post incoming.
Added 2018-07-11 13:10:49 +0000 UTCI didn't stop working on this at all, in fact quite the opposite.
While working on some new animations and the drow girl it became more and more obvious to me that by just continuing the way I'm doing it right now I won't be able to produce animations and introduce new characters as fast as I want and especially regarding animations I'm also not reaching the quality I want.
DIY Motion Capture
So I'm currently building my own setup for motion capture, involving some goPros and whatever other reasonable cameras I can find (I wish I had like 20k just lying around and could simply buy a professional mocap solution, but thats not going happening anytime soon).
From my experiments that should speed up my animation process considerably, I should at least be able to get a solid base from that for my animations.
IK rig system/procedural animation
But with this I won't be able to solve one of my core problems and that is that all of the characters in my game vary wildly in size and proportions (not even to speak of something like a Lamia, Mermaid or other non humanoid characters). If you look at most other games you will notice that most characters are of the same height and proportions and not every character with completly individual proportions, to add to that sex animations require complex interaction between the different characters. For example if I have an animation for the player to kiss the witch, now I'll obviously need a different one to kiss the goblin since she is much smaller, next comes the drow girl another animation since she is a bit taller than the witch girl at some point I'll be adding an orc girl who is much taller that the player himself, well that's another new animation.
But it doesn't stop there, because the girls should also be able to kiss eachother so now I will need 3 more animations for each girl coming down to a total of 16 animations (once I add a fifth girl I'd need 25 animations, a sixth girl 36...). As you can see this would quickly become unreasonable.
For this reason I will implement a system similar to what has been presented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjTU0yKS00
This will probably take quite a bit of time until it's ready, though once this system is in place it will open the doors to a lot of different things which would have been almost impossible before, like entirely costumizable player character and NPCs for example.
Releasing my Rig
Second I do have a lot of experience when it comes to writing code and I think I'm also a reasonable artist, but I do have very little experience when it comes to animation and rigging. For this reason I have decided that I will release the rig I'm using to the public and hopefully get some input on how to improve it and maybe even some animations I could use in the game.
The base version of this rig containing a dummy mesh and the core I use for all my humanoid animations will be released later today to public.
During the next week I will release Asa the Witch, the Goblin and the Player character with their full rigs (with muscles and face) and LOD 1 meshes for all 5$ and above patrons. (LOD 0 is the mesh at full detail, LOD 1 is one level below that which is what I'm using to animate myself in blender because LOD 0 runs super slow inside blender.)
Prototype 1
Other than that I've updated the current prototype with two alternate standing animations which have Asa use the magic "plant" dick, pseudo futa thing and there is an alternate version for the player fucking Asa on the bed where that "plant" is visible (though it's still lacking proper animation in that pose).
Next Prototype
Despite all this I should still be able to release the new gameplay prototype in roughly two weeks.
Apologies
I'm really sorry about not updating in such a long time, again, but I'm seriously putting all the time I can find into this, it's just that I prefer working on the game than making posts. I will try though to at least post small signs of live once a week even if I go into full dev mode from now on (especially when it means that I'll miss an announced date for a new version). Also I'll try to better schedule my time so that I'll be actually able to create the concept art for the polls for the new characters in time.