Lanky Ass [not a build]

Development

It's been a while hey?

Development of Hyperdeep is still underway and we are very close to another major release. I decided however that I absolutely had to stop releasing half-baked builds with glaring problems/oversights, for my sake and yours. There will not be another 0.5.99999 before 0.6.0.

As such, this post does not contain a new build for you, but simply an assurance that one will eventually arrive. I am infinitely grateful as always for your support and patience, and I am striving every day to make sure your faith in me is not misplaced.

In the meantime, how about a mini essay about the peculiarities of erotic game development?

Ero-Microscopy

Most video games operate on a similar scale. The player character exists in some kind of world, and they inhabit that world by running and jumping around it. The character takes up some small amount of screen real estate, and they perform big, broad actions that communicate what is going on to the player. These movements may look visually appealing, but that isn't exactly their purpose; their purpose is to tell the player what is happening and what they should do next.

Hyperdeep, along with many other erotic games, is different. HD-chan exists in a "world" that consists of almost nothing, and her movements are small and subtle. In terms of travelling from place to place, HD-chan doesn't move at all.

The purpose of these movements is intrinsic. They exist to be. They are to is. For a player to miss a movement they would have to be focusing their attention not on the game at all but on something entirely unrelated. The movement is the game.

To those of you who have already worked out where I'm going with this: you're right; I am going to claim that making porn games is harder than making any other type of game.

All the way up

HD-chan is a marble statue that I have been ever-so-slowly chipping away at over the past few years. When I started carving her I had absolutely no idea what I was doing: I had zero experience rigging characters, I had no critical eye for 3D models, I had no clear idea of the goals and constraints the game would put on her design.

When I first started looking for inspiration and reference, I mainly looked at other vaguely stylized games with a sexy lady component. I spent hours studying models from Genshin Impact, Atelier Ryza, Overwatch, Nier Automata, Bayonetta, etc., trying to work out what makes a waifu-worthy character out of vertices and bones.

The answer? Really long legs.

You can make the legs of a female character basically as long as you want, and it only starts to look weird when you reach utterly insane levels of disproportion. Long legs are aesthetically pleasing, elegant, sexy. Armed with this knowledge I continued carving. I made HD-chan's legs real long and sexy. "Genius!" I thought.

Not so; for when it came time to actually pose HD-chan, the feeling that I had all too much leg and nowhere for it to go started to creep over me. I tried a few test poses: I had her hug her knees, I had her sit cross-legged, every time her knees would end up half the world away and maneuvering her feet into position felt like operating a crane.

"Well what do those other games do in this situation?" I thought, idiotically, and brought this story full-circle.

Not fair

Those other games aren't in this situation.

When you play Overwatch, you see Tracer from a distance, sprinting and flying around the map amongst a handful of other characters and obscured by colorful particle effects. She doesn't sit on the ground while the camera hovers, stationary, a foot away from her. Even if she does have a sitting animation, and even if the camera does happen to move in close while she does it (I honestly don't know, I've never played Overwatch), the moment likely only lasts a second or two, and the player likely isn't paying that much attention, and she isn't nude, and so all the inevitable weird body deformations get covered up by clothing.

Tracer does have really really long legs, but it's ok. If an animation looks a bit weird in a "normal" game, it doesn't really matter.

3DPD

"Ok then so what about 2D art? People stare at still images of sexy anime ladies giving sexy anime blowjobs for minutes on end! No hiding those long legs there!" I hear you braying.

Despite years of gradual improvement in 3D technology, 2D images are still by far the more visually appealing medium for coomers and coom-ducers. The reason for this is that 2D illustrators possess an extremely potent artistic license: the ability to break the laws of physics.

Inspect any drawing of a girl contorting herself into the latest viral tantric arrangement (Jack-O pose, etc.) and you will invariably come to the realization that not all is at it seems: arms of different lengths, spines a mile long, limitlessly flexible joints; there are no rules.

You guys have seen that pose where they draw a girl covering her pussy with her hand from the back, right? That isn't an easy position to assume and I can assure you it is not an easy pose to recreate in 3D.

Learning to flex

The answer to this problem, then, is to learn from both directions: acknowledge what it is that we need to worry about that others needn't: creating poses that look good under scrutiny, and what we might learn from the 2D realm: fuck da rules.

Although it isn't generally acknowledged in most game-centric rigging/animation spheres, we can actually say "fuck the laws of physics" and mostly get away with it. We can make HD-chan's legs different lengths in different poses if that ends up looking better than making them "physically accurate". We can disconnect her hand from her wrist and shift it around a bit if that helps her grab her own pussy from the back. If it was 2021 we could make her Jack-O pose.

We can do these things because I finally worked out how bone scaling works in UE4 after working with it every day for four years, and once you learn how something works, you can learn to abuse it.