ANBW Development Blog Summer 2025

Heyhey Scientists!

Helltaker here :3

(Audio Version is attached at the bottom!)

This end of the month I can only present you with a DevBlog and while this one is gonna be massive in length obviously I need to eat my foot a bit because I boasted so positively that we´d have a build ready by the end of July.

So nomnomnom, time to dig into the cheese factory xD

So what happened? Why is there no build release today?

Team Health

A few things. Lets just start off with some challenges we had over the past month specifically related to team health. As a few of you might have seen on discord or on the weeklies, I had a wisdom tooth removal and was out cold for about 1.5 weeks. Others in the team had it not much better. One operation here and another “kids are at home because of summer holidays” there and a few things just naturally got a bit delayed. We often face crazy challenges with just “generally life happening” in our team, floods, earthquakes, electricity issues, rockets …

We've seen pretty much every crazy thing you could think of, working with a fully remote team that's cumming together from countries all across the planet. While that's not always the best for production speed, I think everyone kinda gets roughly what I mean so I'm not too worried about sharing this with you <3

All in all: We´re fine though!

So feel free to send us some nice comments below. I always share them with the team to give them something back for the sheer amount of willpower everyone is putting into their work.

Engine Version Update 5.6

Outside of that, Epic Games AMBUSHED us with a ENGINE UPDATE. And that usually brings with it about 1-2 weeks of work to stabilize the game in the new engine version.

One might ask now: Why even update the engine version when it can take that long to fix issues afterwards? 

To keep it simple, Unreal Engine 5 is not “finished” with development and every new Engine Version brings massive improvements to tool-chains, editor performance, runtime performance and so much more. For us it's very beneficial to upgrade with each version and every upgrade brought us closer to our final form. A good example and something you can read about later is the new MUTABLE character modularization toolkit. Take a look below and you´ll quickly understand why I get slightly wet just because of that update alone!

Final UI & UX Update

We also recently started work on a MASSIVE UI update that overhauls the entirety of the games UI. You can see some hints of these updates in our feedback channel, where our game QA helpers, the TASTE TESTERS, share issues they found in PRE RELEASE versions of the game. PRE RELEASE means, builds that we do weekly that have tons and tons of bugs, that we have to find, test, replicate and fix before we can do one of our PRE ALPHA, ALPHA or BETA stage build releases. If you want to help and become active as a helper / QA helper, we have a, I think, pretty cool rewards program that you can learn about when you ping Helltaker (me) on the public game discord!

Production Workflow Mini Update

Now one major cool new thing I happily share is that compared to previous production processes, delays like the current one do not stagnate the internal development speed as much as previously. Our split between Story, Cinematic, Combat, Intimate and Exploration Gameplay Content, allows our Designer and Animators (Moose, Rock, Turtle) to continue production on subchapters, which simply enlarges the next builds overall content scope. My current estimate is that we will have most of Chapter 2 playable to a large degree with the next release, even though some of its elements like Cinematics, will stay in blockout so we can continue pushing more story related content overall. I´ll dive a bit deeper into this topic in a separate blog in the future!

Now, aside from everything being crazy on this week's internet, I hope we can bring you some joy, seeing more ANBW´s development progress below!

We´re starting off with a small introduction of Andy, one of our new character artists. The rest of the Blogpost is written in collaboration with a lot of our team members, since nowadays, even though I love doing these posts, they just know how things are done way better than I could ever describe it!

Hi!

I’m Andy! Character artist for the games industry for the last 10 years.
I currently have the pleasure of working as an outfit artist in this project and right now I’m in charge of getting the girls all their undies and swimsuits models! Life goals right! 

I’m sharing how the development works for one of the outfits, in this case, undies for our witch Leora.

After a briefing and meeting with the team we decide the route we want for her undies. We talk about her personality and the things she likes. With that as our starting point we make a reference board starting with her concept art.
Usually pinterest is the place to go searching. With the references I try to cover the look and feel for the outfit and the materials.

This is what her reference board looks like.

After that I head to blender (my 3d software of choice) to start a block out of the outfit. Here are some screen caps of different moments into the process of modeling the outfit from the very basic shape to the full model.

Once the model is completed, a higher resolution one is made using the model as base. This is what is called the high poly model. It contains some more rich details that later will be baked into the game model.

Before that process can continue we have to open up the model and turn it into a 2d cutout. Kind of like the patterns real cloth is made, we cut and make the seams to make it easier to paint. This process is called UVs. This is how it looks in 2d and 3d.

Then I take both the game model and the hi poly one into my texturing software where I'm gonna transfer the detail from the high poly model into the game model. That process is called texture baking.

Once I have the bakes completed, I can finally start texturing which will add another layer of detail and colour to our outfit. Here you can see the game model with the baked normals and the finalized textures.

And after this process is completed i export the model as an FBX file for the team to implement into the engine, so later you guys can enjoy it up close in the game ^^

Mutable is a new engine feature for customizable characters (among other things!) that first made public in Unreal Engine 5.5, and we’re now readjusting our workflow to support Mutable.

Compared to the old workflow of using precombined skeletal meshes, Mutable allows us to have multiple combinations of outfit by assembling loose parts together, but without the cost of having multiple skeletal mesh components running, which caused performance issues in-game that made us switch to pre-combined mesh workflow prior to Mutable. In addition to that, Mutable also allows us to modify the mesh to minimize clipping issues without having to make “shrinkage” blend shapes for new outfits, and non-destructively cutting portions of meshes that won’t be visible underneath clothing pieces, reducing round trip time and optimizing character meshes more.

This works by making a Mutable graph for the whole nude body itself, then followed by making smaller graphs for each parts of the outfits.

The graph for the nude body may seem huge, and it is… But to put it simply, it’s putting together a bunch of skeletal meshes and their sections into one mesh that gets piped into the skeletal mesh component in the character class.

This is leaps better, because Mutable unlocks the ability to create combinations of outfits that otherwise would be time consuming to do with the old workflow. Not only that, it also allows us to cut more time applying changes to rigging/skinning on the characters, without having to propagate it to multiple FBX files and making sure those FBX files have the right combinations, and so on. It was painful to do until Mutable came into the rescue! While Mutable shows its strength with the character creator for the player, we also applied Mutable across major characters, so you can dress them however you want in the Sandbox mode!

When it comes to implement mutable, we got a very smooth pipeline, where only a few nodes are needed for it to work.

Well, that’s not “a few”, but most of it are things that we need to take into account on top of the mutable, but not directly involved on making mutable to build the meshes.

Our game relays very much in physics, so one of our main concerns during the process of adopting mutable, was if we could keep what we already had and that was relevant for physics. The answer was much better than yes, it was “bool bEnablePhysicsAssetMerge”.

And this not only solves the problem that supposes the fact that, different body parts that conforms a character might have different physical definition, but also allows us to add layers of physics setups 

However, mutable is not perfect; The way it merges the physics assets, while it iterates fairly deep in the physics data, it doesn’t take into account all of it, so very precise collision adjustments we’ve been making to our physics assets are being ignored. 

(Notice how after the bra is set, the hands close slightly)

Since mutable wraps into its functionalities everything we needed, and what we expected to need for the character creator rework, we have been able to also base our character creator on mutable in what it’s been a very fast transition.

What resulted in a faster, better, and more powerful character creator. In a re-factorization of our logic, making it more organized smaller, and more reliable.

Mutable has been made in a way that easily allow altering the parameters, it allows for generating UI elements, and keep the relevant data for them to modify each single property respectively.

Since the previous post about the Skill Grid, the combat design has been finalized. Over the past month we have started on the animations for the various attacks of each weapon.

The skillsets of the weapons have been consolidated into 4 actions:

• A regular attack. Certain weapons will have regular attack chains.

• A charged attack, used by holding down the regular attack button.

• A special, weapon-specific move.

• An ultimate.

They each have their own use cases. The regular attacks are the go-to for each weapon, while the charged attacks are good for dealing high damage at the cost of being more vulnerable during the charge up. The weapon specific moves offer utility options that can help the player out in sticky situations, or set up the normal & charge attacks to deal even more damage. Finally, the ultimate is an action that can only be performed when certain conditions are met. They’re very strong attacks that deal a lot of damage, or enable the player to do a lot of damage.

Staff 4-hit regular attack chain

Rifle Ultimate

The examples above are still in blockout, or stepped mode. Over the next months, they will be put out of blockout and polished. Once fully polished, the animations will look like this:

Pistol Charge Attack

After all the animations have been taken out of blockout, the next step is adding in all the Audio and Visual Effects for these attacks to really make them pop.

Besides player animations, we have also started on the enemies. For now, it’s only the slime enemies, but the enemy roster will be expanded later on.

Alrighty! 

With this we have reached the end of this development blog. As usual:

Thanks a lot for your support, your passion and compliments, your critique and feedback and in general for making it possible for us to work on this absolute next level hentai game!