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