Background's background.

Let's fire this one off by saying thank you to everyone who commented on the previous post.  I am well aware that many of you have to make additional accounts just to post here.  So, thanks for taking the time to do so.  I've read through the comments at least a dozen times already over the last weeks, and will likely do so again before I'm done.

Game is progressing along well enough, but I'm kinda at the 'boring' part - I'm drawing backgrounds.  Now, I rather like this part, as this is also when I code the movement between all the different rooms.  So when I'm done, I've suddenly gone from a blank canvas to a world where I can walk around.  For lack of a better term, the game becomes an actual game.  But this part doesn't make for great blog material, as it doesn't generate any news.  There's no new programming tricks I need to try & learn, and the art isn't so hot to be worth really showing off either.  It's just part of the game making process that ya have to get through. 

In fairness, there is actually A LOT to learn just about drawing backgrounds.  It just isn't nearly as interesting as drawing boobs.  ;)

So rather than talk about backgrounds, let me mention something else that's been on my mind:

(As always, ignore the pink boxes & most of the text.  Just there for testing)

There's a lot more gear available now.  So you'll be able to pick the weapon class you want to swing & which armor you want to wear.  But this creates a new problem.  None of the items were drawn with the intention of being mixed & matched.... so the characters can end up looking just ridiculous.  Amoung my friends we'd say the character has been warcrafted, as this happens all the time in WoW.  In the picture above the collar & the gloves are both black, so it's not terrible, but you can imagine how bad this looks with a bright blue hat.  Not sexy at all.

Then again, a mop isn't exactly sexy either, so it's not like I can preach too much here.  But I'm seeing some really terrible visual combinations on items players could use together.  In an MMO, you just shrug & move on.  In a sex game, it strikes me as a much bigger problem.

That's all for now
DirtyC101

Double Post: Elves! + Name your favorite postions

And the last race that will inhabit Act 2 is: Elves.  Woo!

I tried some new stuff here, and I'm really happy with how both of these turned out.  The hairstyles were both deviations from my normal.  The guy's in particular was completely new.  Fortunately, there's tons of 'anime hair' out there if you search, and even a few tutorials on how to draw it.  I do think it's pretty funny - when I was drawing it I thought it looked like shit, but was maybe passable.  Now that I'm seeing it again today, I think it looks pretty good honestly.

The girl's hands aren't quite right, but when I draw the gloves over them, I think it comes out pretty close to what I want.  I might try another pass, but honestly that's can be like an entire day's worth of work, & not sure there'd be enough of an improvement to justify the time.

The only thing that's jumping out to me as wrong is their relative head sizes.  The girl's head is a bigger than the dude's, and their neck lengths are off.  I think I'll probably change the dude's to match, although either would work imo.   It's only when you put them side by side that it looks strange.

So that's what I see.  Really not many changes planned for these two.   If you have any comments or artist feedback, get it in now before I start animating.  =)


That's kind of a short post, so let's move on a bit more.  Here's a picture of all 6 'monsters' together:

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I'd consider requests for sex positions.  Well now's your chance. A few rules before we start though:

1. Your pose must have 4 variations of the same position, and they need to include at least one phase where the hero is dominant and one phase where the monster is dominant.  For example, I could do something with doggy style like:   Phase 1: Hero reaches under legs & gives handjob, Phase 2: Monster grinds cock on ass, Phase 3, Doggy style penetration, Phase 4, Doggy style, anal penetration.  Your suggestions don't have to use the same position for all four phases, but remember that there's no animation between the different phases, so keeping the poses similar is important.  Having them teleport from say a missionary position to a standing one looks wierd (imo).
2. Try to limit vaginal/anal penetration phases.  Single monsters should only have one, and double team attacks can have one or two.  (My doggy style example above fails this rule, which is why I haven't used it yet).
3. All the monsters are drawn from the side.  Try to keep the requests to something I could realistically show from this view.  I'm not completely opposed to drawing the heros at new angles, but I'm not in favor of it either. 

I think that about wraps it up.  If you have a pose suggestion that you think would work best with only one type of monster, feel free to justify why.  For example, I could see the doggy style attack I mentioned with the male bunny more than the human, simply because doggy is closer to how bunnies fuck IRL. 

Oh, & lastly,  please don't be disappointed if I don't use your suggestions, or if I do something similar but not what you had in mind.  I'm a big believer that too many chefs will spoil the stew, so anything said here will get my spin on it.  Should help keep the game coherent, or failing that, at least maintain a thread of commonality.

Thanks
DirtyC101

October Update

Important stuff first: Still no date on the next beta. 

Okay, with that out of the way, my goal hasn't changed since last month.  I'll post something before the end of the year.  I want to get as much done as possible before I put out my next release.  Ideally I'd like to post a nearly completed game for final bug checking, but more realistically I'll be happy if I have Act 2 finished by then. 

So most of this month has been spent drawing.  And that's fun enough I guess, but I get sick of it after a bit.  When I get fed up & have to do something else, I go work on splicing the story into the actual game.  So let's talk about cut scenes.  Originally I wanted to do like a comic book, where there would be maybe a few pages & the screen would slide from panel to panel.  But it's so much easier in flash to just completely refresh the screen, so what I have now is more like a mini-slide show.

Don't worry, there's not that much.  My goal here is to keep them light enough that folks will skim them at least once.   Which is actually the point of today's post really.  K. Fox & Leilei's intro story are both pretty quick, but Farah's seems like it's too long.  So as soon as I remember how to attach flash files, I'll post her intro below.  Take a look, and let me know what you think.  Is this too much intro/dialogue for a porn game?  And yes, I know I'm using stick figures at the moment.  Like I said, this was something to do when I did NOT want to draw more.  It'll get fixed.

The only other bit I've been working on is flipping between the acts.  It might not sound like a big deal, but the main game is set up for combat, with bars & zooming & all that good stuff.  Trying to turn all that off so I can post scene transitions is proving to be much harder than it should be.  heh. 

DirtyC101

Farah's Intro:
You can also download it directly here.


EDIT: This flash didn't fit well in the old layout.  To fix this, I've increased the main column width for the blog.  Seems like something I'll need to do eventually, as I'll likely post full games here at some point.

Manna by Marshal Brain

This post contains nothing about porn at all.  It's simply a post I found that was so interesting, I felt the need to link it.  As an apology, here are two porn blogs you may not know: 
hnyarly.blogspot.com is by another amateur coder like myself, and he even posts here occasionally. 
theknightshinesbright.blogspot.com is 3D picture/movie related, but I really dig his art style.


Today I read a series of posts simply named "Manna".  It's near future science fiction, which I usually dislike.  Or to be more precise, the writer usually fails to get past my bullshit filter.  They will make some 'funny' assumptions in order to get their alternate future world in motion, and my mind immediately rejects everything from that point forward.  Manna's assumptions are so simple though that I really can't contradict them:

1. Corporations are greedy.
2. A computer program with some wireless headsets is a cheaper way to manage minimum wage employees.

From there it snowballs in the usual SF manner, and gets pretty damn bleak.  He 'saves' it with a utopia around the 5th post, but he's got too many assumptions in his dream world for me to accept it.  If you have similar feelings, you may want to stop around the 4th page or so. 

This really got me thinking.  In a world where we no longer have minimum wage jobs, and only a sliver of middle class jobs, what is one supposed to do to earn a living?  I don't have an answer of course, but my mind is still spinning, and probably will be all night.

I actually took a course on Science Fiction once.  One of the points I remember is that Science Fiction isn't really about spaceships or aliens, but rather it's about getting us to think about how our present actions could affect the future.  Marshal Brain totally nailed that today.

DirtyC101

Humans!

Hm... okay, maybe not quite as exciting as bunnies. heh.  Here's the human 'monsters' I expect to use in Act 2.  Like before, these drawings aren't finalized yet, so if you have some feedback now would be the time.  I plan to go back & touch them up in a few weeks, once I've got all the opponents drawn.

Look at the waist level for the two characters.  The dude is several inches taller, but his hips are lower.  Unlike the bunnies, this time around I think I made the girl's thigh & calf too long, rather than making the dude's torso too long (although there's some of that too).  I also find it interesting that I naturally put some sheen on the girl's skin, but didn't think twice about it on the guy. 

Not really happy with the girl's breasts either.  They're smaller than the hero's, but something about them looks either too large or out of place.  Again, could be the torso being too short, I'll play with that & find out. 

I will not speak about the guy's hand, other than that took almost as much time as the rest of him combined.  Wouldn't be so bad if I felt like I was either making progress or learning something, but at the moment it's pretty much delete & start over, repeat until I get something passable.  Don't be shocked if he ends up with mitten hands in the next release.  ;P

On the up side, I feel like I really nailed both faces.  The dude has a fantastic blank stare that really says 'Duuuuu', and the girl's hair came out pretty damn well (personal opinion).  Despite the complaints above, I'm really pretty happy with how both of these turned out.  Here's hoping that trend continues.

Oh, & before I forget again, Thank you's to Mr. Jester for the link to posemaniacs.  Used it quite a bit when drawing the dude, and will almost certainly hit it again in the future.

DirtyC101

Bunnies!

This week I've been working on the Act 2 monsters.  I decided to start with the residents of HoppyKin Village.  I think the girl turned out pretty well, although I may tweak her hip/waist ratio a little.  Girl's seriously got too much junk in the trunk.

The dude however was a bit more of an experiment for me.  I wanted to try & make a tall, thin character.  In some spots I think I did well, but the relative sizes of each body part are off.  Like I think the calfs are too short, while the torso is too long, and the thighs came out really really thin.  His hands are also too small, but if I enlarge them, the back hand goes from 'off'' to 'WTF'. 

So, more work to do here, but honestly pretty happy with them so far.  I'll come back & touch them up in a few weeks, once the rest of the badguys are drawn.  If y'all have been just dying to give me some artist feedback, now's your chance. 

DirtyC101

MoreWithTheBugHunting

(Another long-ish post about code.  FYI).


In the beta, there's a bug where if you die & restart while being double teamed, both monsters will become invisible.  I believe I have that fixed.  I thought I was pretty clever & used the state variable (in my case, _root.held) to track how you die as well.  That variable used to only tell if you were held or not, but it has since grown to pretty much capture any state - moving, attacking, grappled, etc.  So having it also track death & death type wasn't really a stretch.  So now when you hit continue, the game knows if there were any grapplers & what to do with them.  But this change brought along new 'interesting' bug.  Being killed by a grapple caused the 'game over' screen to play twice. 

Now, this is not a game breaking bug, so I put it on the back burner as a 'huh, wierd' issue to be resolved later.  I was the mood to do some puzzle solving last weekend, so I picked this one up as a challenge. 

Those of you who are thinking that having one variable track so much is a mistake are on the right track.  Turns out that late in the 'death' code this variable was getting reset as part of a pose change, which was causing the whole thing to reload.  So I reckon the lesson here is watch what your variables are doing.  I'da never found it if I hadn't been tracking the held variable & just watched the hero get killed over & over.  Which made for an interesting night BTW.  ;P

The other bug I found this week was even more subtle, but it's been in the game for a while & man has it irked me.  If you managed to completely shift the grapple in your favor, the whole bar is supposed to shift to your color & the arrow game is supposed to end.  However, half the time the arrow game would continue after the bar changed color.  Now, this was a frustrating bug to track, because honestly I don't peg the grapple meter all that often.  So I'd see the bug, look for it for a few minutes, get distracted, and then not notice it again for a week.

The problem all stems from how I named these variables.  In this case I was looking for a variable called grapplebararrowcheck, which gets set to false if the the bar gets maxed.  The problem ended up being I mistyped the variable in some places as grapplebarrowcheck.  See the difference?  Yeah, I didn't either.  What if I type it as GrappleBarArrowCheck and GrappleBArrowCheck?  More obvious now? 

Up til now I had been purposely using all lowercase letters in my variable names, to avoid any problems with case.  Now that I've made this mistake though, I think I'm going to move to capitalizing the first letter in each word.  Flash already does something very similar with it's commands - it capitalizes every word past the first.  I'm told this is known as camel case.  Yet another smart idea I wish I'da picked up on sooner.  Ah well, now I'm all learned & ready for the next bug.

And believe me, there's going to be more bugs in the next release.  So far I'm only talking about the ones I've actually fixed.  There's a bizarre one at the moment where trying to save the bunnygirl will occasionally spit everyone out into the engine room & lock the game.  I still haven't puzzled out exactly what triggers it, so I'll have 'fun' hunting that one.  Maybe I'll draw some more first.  hahaha

DirtyC101