After a difficult month, I’m finally back at full capacity. My workflow has stabilized and progress is happening! Voice chats are no longer a thing during streams, so they’re a lot more focused now. If you’re interested in seeing how I work, tune in for the weekly Thursday streams (okay not this Thursday, cause Thanksgiving) or check out the VODs.
If you missed the streams, VODS are here. ('Videos' tab at ...
2021-11-24 06:37:15 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, so I've hired some help to write these posts, cause I'm terrible at keeping up with them. This should help me get them out weekly, instead of putting them off cause they take too long.
Starting with personal stuff: Oof. Stress.
My work routine has been in tatters lately, and focusing has been difficult. To get things done, I keep turning to old habits of working late at night and stressing out. As a result, I ended up not taking very good care of my...
2021-10-29 06:13:54 +0000 UTC View PostSo this last week had a lot of IRL stress, which made work screech to a halt for a bit. I tried powering through but realized pretty fast that I’d just burn out and slow things down more. Instead, I’ve been putting in the amount of work I can while remaining healthy. Today, I’m back on track and feel good, so here’s a (late) progress update! >.<
If you missed the streams, VODS are here. (They won't let me l...
2021-10-10 00:47:49 +0000 UTC View PostIt turns out, the Entity Component System pattern clears a path to finishing this update once and for all. This post is pretty technical, but I think it should be readable for non-programmers. I kept the technobabble to a minimum this time.
Oh, and also, I heard the WIP for Project Maple's background music during yesterday's stream, and it's coming along great! SkySprinter is a great (and co...
2021-09-25 05:45:14 +0000 UTC View PostIf you’re interested in seeing early animation rigging on Project Maple, or watching me descend into a pit of madness with SHF3, check out the VODs of the last two streams! (They won't let me link to the actual vods page. It's the 'videos' tab at the top.)
I’ve been trying to learn to lean on PussPuss and my other artists more for help with assets. Hopefully I’ll be able to show off everyone’s hard work ...
2021-09-15 07:51:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Project Maple has been quietly progressing! See more pics on PussPuss’s post!
Thanks to the hard work of PussPuss, both the main character Maple and the pov player character (masc version) are now ready to be rigged! The above pictures are cut up into individual body parts and layers. Now we n...
2021-08-30 21:10:21 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, this post is late. I'm sorry about that! This first bit is somewhat personal, so feel free to skip ahead to the game stuff. I just want to be open about what’s going on and why. Don’t panic though, everything’s still being worked on!
So, I’ve been struggling this past week or two with focusing. Those who have followed for a while have heard me talk at length about building up my work/life routine to a point where I can be productive...
2021-08-30 20:08:51 +0000 UTC View PostHoooo boy. This time it's alllll code.
I think I made a bad call this week. I spent the whole week on refactoring. It's important stuff, but like... it always is.
Basically, the toy code/data is unnecessarily complicated, since it was some of the first code I wrote for the game. That complexity keeps mucking up my process. It's kind of a headache to figure out what data is going where. Fixing that isn't too hard now that I have a better ...
2021-08-15 05:48:34 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, here we go!
I've been ADHD-writing this post for a few days. That is, I go "oh crap I didn't finish that post", then start working on it, and then... well I'm not sure what happens but apparently I don't finish it. Gonna make an effort to do a little daily summary of my tasks after work from now on. That way I'll already have most of the weekly post written up. Since it's not integrated into my normal routine right now, it gets lost like everything else >.<'
Meet the Maple the kobold, the focus of a small project between myself and PussPuss. For now we're calling it Project Maple. It'll be released for free when it's ready! Some concept art is above. If you wanna see more, PussPuss will be posting concept art and asset work on their Patreon during development.
We're going with an original non-pony...
2021-08-01 02:08:12 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, quick text post this time to recap the week, since I'm kind of exhausted by the last few days >.<'
Toy stuff
I'm doing cleanup on toys code/data. Double-checking every possible interaction of every type of item. The updating process is thankfully complete, at least until after this release. I cannot wait to finish up all the toy automation stuff I started, but for now I'm holding back on that in favor of getting this ver...
2021-07-31 06:36:51 +0000 UTC View PostA couple days late on this. Gotta remember to post these directly after the streams >.<
Spine updates
I finished the animation code! Woo!
Okay, technically, inverse kinematic restraints are a little bugged, but I'll fix that some other time. But yay! This means I can use all the fanciest improvements in the Spine editor. It gives me a whole new animation workflow, which is a big change. Now that I'm grasping how to...
2021-07-24 21:04:04 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys, kind of a short, pictureless, technical post this time >.<'
First up- Work with SkySprinter on the music is going well! They've been streaming their progress in my Discord server, if you want sneak peeks :3
Oof, so here's the deal. I've been doing animation code again.
Spine, my animation software, just dropped a ton of QoL improvements in the exact areas I've been hoping for. My intuition said I should update my code in ...
2021-07-16 08:10:55 +0000 UTC View PostThis one's light on pics. I'm gonna have to start recording gifs for these updates since there's so much animated stuff.
Music! SkySprinter has been making music for my old game Love Collector. I'm super excited to start addressing the lack of decent sound in my games. We're s...
2021-07-09 07:29:34 +0000 UTC View PostIt's friggin July. I live on the west coast of the US, and the heat wave melted me a little. Anyway...
Been talking to musician SkySprinter about game music/sound design, something my projects have seriously been lacking. I have some ideas about experimenting with adaptive background music in SHF3, and how to utilize music in the potential side projects I've m...
2021-07-02 08:27:06 +0000 UTC View PostQuick talk and FAQ catchup!
Today I kept working on rigging and the asset creation stuff I mentioned yesterday. All the hind legs are now meshed and skinned, and the arms are ready to do the final grouping. Here's what the vector/grouping part of the process looks like on the legs.
The colored boxes are the mesh sizes. Anything that fits into the same...
2021-06-25 07:50:10 +0000 UTC View PostOof, forgot to post updates for a bit. Well, forgot and kinda pushed it out of my mind. This is a hard thing to make a habit out of for me. I prefer to hide and code.
So. The past few months have been very similar in terms of what I've been doing. It feels like I'm going in endless circles. This cycle looks like this: Oh no, the animation rig is messed up! Is it because of code? Yep. Fix the code. Wait, that messed up the rig even more. Fix the rig. Okay, but the rig's messed up in a ne...
2021-06-24 08:47:46 +0000 UTC View PostQuick post this time, since there's not a lot to dig into.
This week, I encountered some sneaky problems with the new animation code. It was bound to happen given the huge amount of changes, but it's kind of a kick in the balls to have them this late into the update cycle.
Since the game is now working from a custom version of the Spine animation library, I've fully separated the animation code off from the rest of the game engine and am...
2021-06-01 06:57:56 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, I'm back! Sorry for the lapse in communication. So I was sick, then got my final vaccine shot, which wiped me out all over again. That was the initial problem, but the rest... well...
>.<'
In the past year or so, I've managed to become quite productive and well-balanced despite being ADHD and a total social hermit. It has come down to developing a strict daily routine that keeps me focused without burning me out. It's been great, and I've ...
2021-05-22 21:00:51 +0000 UTC View PostI'm sick and am just gonna sleep for a while. Will post a real update when I can!
<3
It's probably not the 'rona >.>
2021-05-09 05:28:41 +0000 UTC View PostRig and toy structure
This is the main thing I've been doing for a while- simplifying the entire pipeline for creating content for the game. Reorganizing and renaming the bones, animations, and assets for things to be consistent and easily referenced. This is stuff that wasn't a problem back when there weren't many characters/toys, but got more complex as things were added.
I now have the entire pipeline for toys mapped out, but not...
2021-05-01 06:22:15 +0000 UTC View PostHere we gooooo-
Rig testing
I mentioned last week that I'd be testing the new rig stuff this week, since that was the main barrier to getting a playable version together. Given the amount of changes to animation code and the rigs themselves, I was expecting a lot of pain. It turns out, there were some minor (user) errors, but it just kind of works, I guess? So, um, yay!
I'll be doing some further testing on the more advanced a...
2021-04-24 05:37:39 +0000 UTC View PostWhoops, forgot to make a post after yesterday's stream! Here's what I got-
Simplifying bones, assets
Removing a hundred-ish bones on the rigs means re-assembling them in a new way, which has been a pretty grueling process. I thought re-weighting body parts to follow the new bone structure would be really difficult, but the rig improvements and prior experience have actually made that go easily, and I'm not too worried abo...
2021-04-17 04:52:19 +0000 UTC View PostQuick rundown this time, since the 'stuff' is all pretty contained in one topic.
Last week, I thought I'd found the ideal rigging workflow. The method I talked about technically works, but it's using some brand-new features in the animation software that aren't well-implemented yet. It was way too fiddly, and was going to slow work down wayyy too much.
So I went to my fallback plan, which actually worked way better: create anchor points ...
2021-04-09 06:46:16 +0000 UTC View PostFirst weekly update! It's actually only been a day, but there's still stuff to talk about!
I've been trying to sort out a decent workflow for the differently-sized skeletons. Basically, I need to store a bunch of different initial positions for a single skeleton in order to have the bones placed correctly on bigger/smaller characters. Usually you'd only have one initial position, so it's weird to need a bunch. It was harder than I thought, and so I spent ...
2021-04-02 03:57:46 +0000 UTC View PostHey everyone! <3
I don't have an estimate for when the next playable build will be ready yet >.<'
But also- I'm going to start making weekly progress updates here on Patreon. They'll happen on Thursday nights after the development stream finishes. The updates will cover whatever I'm working on, plus any juicy questions brought up during the stream. Hopefully this helps the lack of communication, which is something I've always struggled wi...
2021-04-01 03:09:35 +0000 UTC View PostNothing to post yet. Last I posted, I said there were no 'big' things left to do code-wise. Since then, I've been working on a big code thing. So... yeah. I promise it's worth it in the long run. But... yeah >.<'
So basically, it's been getting harder and harder to manage working in Spine - the animation and rigging software used for the game. It's gotten to the point where the rigs are so unwieldy that making changes can result in hours upon hours of wasted time if I end up needi...
2021-03-01 01:34:51 +0000 UTC View PostNot the full build yet >.<'
This massive update is so frustratingly close to done, but there's still some bugfixing and rigging to do before the major features are really ready. But the game technically compiles and runs, so I'm posting it. This is an in-development version and is guaranteed to be janky.
It pains me to post anything in this state. I'd rather hold on to it until the end result is representative of how much work went into it, but it's been way...
2021-02-01 07:33:00 +0000 UTC View Posttldr: Lots of progress on SHF3. Not quite done yet.
Now for the dangerous part: I'm actually pretty confident this'll be ready in ~2 weeks. So, mid-January. It scares me to even say it out loud but it might actually be true.
What's left to do:
Well, everything is "working". From a developer's perspective.
It works, but some of it is still just spitting text out into the dev console. Or it works, but it needs to be severely buffed/nerfed to be playable....
2020-12-31 19:58:12 +0000 UTC View PostOh fuck it's the end of November. I was supposed to make regular progress updates >.<'
No release yet, so I'll talk a bit about what got done this month.
A major time sink in the last few weeks has been unifying the way all the statistics in the game are tracked and processed. It's a bit technical, but basically, all the many numbers/meters tracked in the game (orgasm progress, breathing intensity, fear, blush levels, focus, etc) were kind of haphazardly scattered arou...
2020-12-01 00:13:49 +0000 UTC View Post