Fall Update: Pro-gress?

Next Game Release Date:  "Soon" in the relative sense of a blog that only updates once every three months.  Probably not this year, but maybe spring or summer.


I don't think I've ever mentioned how I backup my work.  Every day when I sit down to work, I save the whole file under a new name.  So day one was Lotto_001, day two was Lotto_002, and so on.  Today I hit Lotto_365, which implies I've been working on the game for a full year.  So, Happy Birthday Lotto!

Of course, that doesn't translate into a full year of work.  Typically I only manage to cram in maybe an hour before going to the day job.  So instead of 365 days, think of it more like 365 hours, or about 9 weeks of full time work.

Gee, I've managed to stretch 9 weeks into over 4 years.  Doesn't sound so great when I say it that way.  Talk about being stuck in development hell.  hah!

Although I haven't been posting much, work is progressing slowly behind the scenes.  The male naga animations are almost done.  I'm kicking myself on this one for being so stupid.  After finishing the first act, I swore I wouldn't do anything else with tentacles.  Partially because I wanted to cover other fetishes, but mainly because they take MUCH too long to animate well.  Turns out that drawing naga tails suffers from the exact same problem.  How I didn't catch this earlier I have no idea.  

Since I post so often, let me fill some space by explaining why tentacles & tails are such a pain.  With the heros, each body part is a solid piece.  I can rotate it around pretty quickly & place it where it needs to be for the animations.  Some folks refer to this as the "paper doll" method.  I'll agree it doesn't always create the smoothest animations, but it gets the job done.  In Flash CS3, this is called a motion tween.

With anything that's flexible though, that method doesn't work.  If this was old school animation, you'd draw every single frame one at a time.  Flash isn't quite that bad, it will let you smear simple shapes from one form to another.  In Flash CS3 this is called a shape tween.  (Both tween names have changed in modern versions of Flash. I'm not even sure they make this distinction anymore).

The limitation to shape tweeing is that the shapes have to be simple.  For example, with the tail above I'm splitting it into 12 different sub-pieces.  3 the tail sections, each with top/bottom outline pieces & a shadow layer.  (The tail isn't supposed to be dark blue by the way, I miscolored it on purpose to help track where I am with the editing / animating.)  This step of breaking each flexible body part up into multiple simple shapes and then changing each shape slightly so that the tween does what I want takes forever.  Good thing I promised myself I'll never do tentacles again.  *sigh*

On the upside, I think the final result looks much better.  So although I enjoy bitching about it, I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out.  It's just slow.  And I've got plenty of slow already.

I was really proud of this background, but y'all will never get to see it.  Now that it's done, I realize I fucked up pretty bad & need to redo it all over again.  There's a command in Flash that flags a movieclip as a simple picture.  This allows it to be drawn much faster, as Flash doesn't have to worry about scaling it anymore.  I've been using it on all my backgrounds, and the game is much faster for it.  Except of course for the times when I force it to scale a background anyway, such as when the game zooms/un-zooms during the grapple animations.  Trade-offs, meh.

Anyway, normally this works really well, but it looks like I went way overboard here.  Each of those trees is a separate sprite.  There's only maybe 6 unique trees, but there's probably a couple of hundred copies in total.  Although this should all be combined into a single "picture", Flash is still having trouble keeping the framerate smooth when I just walk around.  Since this particular map was intended for the boss battle, having it lag is a real problem.  I'll need to redraw at some point & pull a lot of the detail out.  Hello bottom of the to-do list.  :)

In case anyone was wondering, the command in AS2 is:
this.cacheAsBitmap = true


Around the Interwebs:

I honestly haven't been playing much in the way of porn games.  When I play, I'm still playing a lot of Sexrim (Skyrim using sex mods).  There's something about a good game that also has sex being way hotter than a pure sex game.  I find it amusing how often I'll play for hours, never hit a single sex scene, and it won't even bother me.  Yet, when I play Skyrim without sex mods, it really, really irks me to hit a scene where adult content should be there & isn't.  Or even when I strip all the gear off a body & they still have their rated PG undies on.  Call it immersion breaking I guess, but it's about as close to a ragequit as I get.  A dragon can cheese me for an hour & it won't bother me as much as the "we can't show tits" wall.

Regardless, We could really use more games that are good and also happen to have sex.  I can't see any AAA game studios attacking this problem though, as actually selling an adult rated games would hurt sales way too much.  Best I could imagine would be releasing a normal game, then offering DLC to introduce sex as an option.  That would be.... unlikely though, as even the riskier big game companies don't want the backlash from the moral majority.  Or their lawyers anyway.

So until that day, hooray for modders!  Making good games even better.

On the not-Skyrim front, I wanted to give a quick bump to Azurezero.  I happened to stumble across his grapple game, thought the demo was kinda neat & decided to buy it.  The game is solid, but too short to normally mention here.  But he recognized my name in the payment list, and immediately shot me a note wanting to know why my game wasn't done.  So, guess I'm internet famous?  Famous for being slow anyway.  Wheeee!

Thats all for now.
DirtyC101

Spring/Sumer Update

The post where "I was not killed in a hilarious elevator accident".

Quote was from TFK Pokesmoke.  Reminded me that although I don't have anything new to say, maybe I should say something anyway.  It's been far too many months since my last post, just wanted to admit that I'm fine.  Minimal work on the game, but I'm a bit optimistic that will change soon.

That does NOT mean I have a release date in mind, simply that I think I'll have time to work on the game again.  I do miss coding.  /sigh



Around the Interwebs
I had not been playing much either.  But I did find a few games I think are worth mentioning:

Xenotake is a side scrolling platform game.  Run around as the heroine, shoot aliens, don't get raped.  Very solid all around.  The rape defense mechanic is just smash one button, that could use some work (oddly that's the topic on his page right now for his next game).  The second half of the game is frustratingly sex-light, but winning opens up a gallery, so it's worth pushing through.

Normally I dislike gallery mode, but it works here.  Probably should try to figure out why at some point.  I suspect it has to do with letting the grapple finish is a straight path to game over, so there's no way to enjoy the sex without a gallery.  Bummer that.

Sacred Eyes is a standard RPG for one of the RPG Maker/Ace/RTP engines.  Sorry, couldn't tell ya which, I just install them all & don't worry about it.  Walk around in top down view, bump into monsters, beat them up, take their stuff & gain levels.  Losing health also removes your clothing.  Get below ~25% health & the monsters can grapple / rape you.  Now there's plenty of these type of games out there, but I liked this one for several reasons.  The art is fairly good and the text is in English.  Not a high bar to jump over, but it does weed out a lot of games from this genre.

The real push over the top was simply that it's mildly hard.  I ended up losing several times early on, really having to pace my healing potions & supplies.  Losing just sends you back to town, so really it's just a time loss, but I still found myself trying not to lose & still having difficulty.  Of course, part of the problem was I didn't find the self-healing spell until MUCH later in the game.  That was my fault.  Still, it made the game far more interesting.

I'll note that I can't find the original link for this game.  This should be the link for the game with English text, but double check before you buy.  I see "TRANSLATED BY TATUAST!!" in the readme files, so I wonder if perhaps I stumbled into a fan translation purely by accident?

-DirtyC101

January February Winter Post

Next release date: Unknown, but it's still far away.


 In an attempt to push out a monthly update, I'm going to try writing little posts every time I work, and then try to publish it all at the end of the month.  No promise this stuff is interesting, but hopefully it's better than silence.  Even with this plan, I've managed to already miss the Jan update, so this appears to be working great so far!

Gnome shopkeeper - He's coming along well enough.  It amazes me all the little things I struggle on that I "should" have been solved by now.  For example I only now realized that you can't have hair in front of the eye, as the eye is on a higher layer.  Wasn't a big deal for this guy, it was more of an accident really.  His eyes are bigger than normal, which made the problem more obvious.  I could add another layer just for hair if I really wanted, but he doesn't even have anything special going on with his hair.

Actually, pretty sure I did exactly this for the heros, come to think of it.

Also experimenting with hairy arms & legs.  Not sure if I like the hair matching his arm color or his head-hair color.  Hairy feet possibly incoming.  Originally he was going to be wearing bunny slippers, but not sure that gives the same vibe when he's in a village full of bunnykin.  Would it be weird to see human slippers in real life?

And I still don't have pants quite right either.  I may save that bitching for another post though.  Borderline nit-picking.

First actual monster finally added for real.

Holy cow, I had put off working on this guy because I didn't like how he looked, and also because I REALLY did not want to animate the tail for his slither animation.  Okay, I also didn't want to do an image search for snake dicks.  So many good reasons really.  Anyway, started working on him this month too.  He's actually in the game right now as a valid monster.  Yay milestone!  Okay, all he does is slide forward, and if he grabs you it switches to the bunnygirl sex animation because I haven't drawn one for him yet, but still he's there!  Totally counts.  ^_^

So many of you spoke up in favor of the double snake dong that it might as well be canon for snake monsters from now on.  I'm also thinking I will completely ignore "real" anatomy on this one & just draw what I feel like.  Nice thing about fantasy work, there's a LARGE grey area for "right" when it comes to snake, and I don't think too many folks will challenge me if I get it wonky.  So yay for that.

Also, those of you with sharp eyes will note that the hitbox for the snake actually follows his tail.  For some reason I think this won't actually work, but because he flips around so fast to face you, I don't think it will ever be an issue either.  I know it depends on which type of hit test I use, but it has been so long since I programmed that part I don't remember.  Fairly sure I used the 'good' one that would pick up on this.  I'm at least 40% sure of it.  =D



Around the Interwebs:

I'm late to the party on this one, but if for some reason you missed it, go check out the demo for Mogi Origins.  Developer's page is here, and offbeatr link to pledge money is here.  Demo looks really good, action seems solid, art is spot on, and I even liked the humor.  Sex may be a bit lacking, but I'm willing to be optimistic there.  Looks like there's plans to add several new girls, here's hoping it all comes together.

What have I been doing you ask?  I've been playing Skyrim with a mod called Sexrim.  You may remember I both loved & hated the sexmods available for Fallout3, mainly because Sexout didn't work & I was forced coble together outdated mods instead.  Well, it looks like that team gave Skyrim the same treatment, and the results are surprisingly good.  They do a fantastic job with some of the tougher details like alignment & facial expressions.  It's not perfect by a long long way, but the improvement over the other sex mods I've tried is just astonishing.  If you're sitting around waiting for TESO to come out, go fire all this up & give it a try.  The path to getting all of it working is long & poorly documented, but it is worth the effort.

DirtyC101