[UE4] Feign - An Adult Fantasy RPG [In Development]

[AttritionofContrition]

13 hours ago, slaen said:

What makes you say the character shouldn't move during melee actions?  Is it for the gameplay feel?  or a difficulty thing?

Probably both. Though I find it kind of odd that he said a minecraft style combat would be fine only to contradict that by saying all characters should be locked in place while attacking which is the opposite of minecraft. Me? I prefer a combat system of risk vs reward (think dark souls or monster hunter; you're locked into place depending on the weapon where only a dodge can get you out of a bind mid-swing) but I don't think it would be a good fit for the kind of game you want to make considering that you're using skyrim for reference, most people dislike difficult sex-focused games. In my opinion I think you should stick to the skyrim-style, it would appeal to more people and be less of a balancing hassle.

13 hours ago, slaen said:

I'm not sure that I understand.  Would the system you're talking about be like an armor slot over the characters crotch that would prevent sex scenes?  Something like those chastity belts from the last Mad Max film?  Or are you thinking more like full body suits and stuff that would need custom animations?  Is there a Skyrim mod that does something similar already as an example?  I'm not sure I'm picturing the right sort of thing.

There was/is a mod that did something like that but I can't think of the name. What GTKHLK1st is suggesting is pretty deep in niche fetish territory that should probably only be considered after you've completed everything else. Think of it as a kind of "cursed armor/clothing" that disallows one from performing certain actions, it's a denial fetish thing that can be found in many erotic text based games but that's about all I know about it. I don't think you could really do that fetish justice unless you shifted the theme of the project over to that particular kink as it requires a lot of build up and suspense to pull off, you couldn't just slap on some armor that disallows sex or orgasm or whatever and call it a day, you'd need to write specific dialogue and encounters for it.

That's my take, anyway. Looking forward to whatever you make.

[alcurad90]

20 hours ago, slaen said:

What makes you say the character shouldn't move during melee actions?  Is it for the gameplay feel?  or a difficulty thing?

Quote

One of the other things I did try was making each swing move the character forward a step or two similar to something like Dark Souls.  It would lock the player's control once the swing started and give it back after the swing ended.  It looked really cool in third person view and was starting to feel really good.  Then I test the same thing in the first person view and it felt terrible.  There isn't nearly as much visual feedback in the first person view to let the player know that they are winding up for a swing or recovering from one so it just feels like the camera is lagging or your character is acting on their own.  I know Skyrim does lock the player's control on power attacks but during common melee swings the player still has full control.  Maybe I just need to dig through other first person melee games, I have been meaning to grab Vermintide at some point and see how they handled things but I think they might be first person only?  Are there any examples of games that have good melee combat where you can switch between first person and third person? 

You've answered by yourself.

 

Basically for a melee action, the "force" comes from the "ground". You step forward, twist your waist, then swing your sword. The stronger you attacked the more power you should borrow from your legs and waists, which made you move not so freely.

 

look at the legs of the character from Monster Hunter

 

 

For the 1st person view.... Nobody had made a good melee combat game with 1st person view. Just forbidden the 1st person view would be the best.

[alcurad90]

7 hours ago, AttritionofContrition said:

Probably both. Though I find it kind of odd that he said a minecraft style combat would be fine only to contradict that by saying all characters should be locked in place while attacking which is the opposite of minecraft. Me? I prefer a combat system of risk vs reward (think dark souls or monster hunter; you're locked into place depending on the weapon where only a dodge can get you out of a bind mid-swing) but I don't think it would be a good fit for the kind of game you want to make considering that you're using skyrim for reference, most people dislike difficult sex-focused games. In my opinion I think you should stick to the skyrim-style, it would appeal to more people and be less of a balancing hassle. 

 

Because the minecraft sytle is easier to understand and make for thouse developers who want to make "1st person view melee combat game". As for DS or MH, the attack direction is determined by the face of the character (not the camera), which make it impossible to change in to a FPS view.

 

And force the characters standing for a while will let others hit them more easily. For an rpg it'll make amor more important.

[slaen]

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I'll keep playing around with the combat and see what works.  Getting that first person and third person switch might be limiting but I really want to have a first person view in the game.  I just always feel more like I'm the one playing the game when there's a first person view.  It's cool being able to see your character but in games like the Witcher it doesn't feel like I'm in the game it feels like I'm watching Geralt doing stuff and there's a sense of disconnect for me. 

 

Reworked the inventory system this week.  I was using a data table that would have held the information for every single item in the game.  There would be a static mesh actor that you would pick up in the world that would have an ID number that would reference a set of rows and columns on the master data table.  Creating items also required entering the ID numbers into a couple different places and of course if that number is off then the wrong item would spawn.  I also started thinking about moving forward with the game.  It seems that by necessity I'll have to build things out organically.  It would be great if I had 6 months to a year of pre-production and could map out exactly what I would need for items for the entire game.  Then if I knew how many weapons I would have in the final game I could set out ID slots 242 - 403 and for helmets I could map out 567 - 655.  But I don't know any of that.  I have a rough idea of where I want the game to go but that's pretty much it.  Factor in that eventually I'd like to get it released onto Patreon and then I have no idea what to expect when that happens.  And what if at some point I wanted to open the game up to support mods? (which would be super far in the future if it ever happened but it would be awesome).  Then do I just expect any modder to try and dig through my database of items?  And what if those mods then conflict with new updated items that I'm adding into the game?

 

Hah, so with all of that in mind I rewrote inventory items to be an object class with a default set of values.  Creating an inventory item now requires roughly 3 files - the static mesh pick up actor which is the representation in the game world, the inventory object reference which is just the data that is held in the character's inventory, and then the equipped item reference (for things like armor and weapons).  All of these files can just be loose files in the editor - I just keep them in the local folders with the meshes, textures, and materials for now.  In theory this takes away the restrictions of planning things out but at the cost of not having one centralized chunk of data to keep things organized. 

 

It's still a decent amount of setup and pointing one file type to another but at least there's no digging through spreadsheets or worrying about item ID numbers.  

I was also looking into using more of an actor system - so the pick-up in world mesh actor would also be the thing that sits in the character's inventory.  But from my limited understanding it would just be a matter of having the mesh always spawned in the world but just hidden as soon as it was added to the characters' inventory.  

 

I dunno, does anyone else have experience with this sort of thing?  I'd be curious how other people handle it.  This is my first time writing an inventory system that is this in depth.  

 

Oh, and as a break from the coding I sculpted up an imp.  He might change a bit still once I see how he looks in game.  

 

[Just Checking]

I'm enjoying seeing your models, they look really good.  Those alone are pretty cool to see in your updates.

 

As for managing your first person to third person, I did remember something what with Vampire: The Maquerade: Bloodlines 2 getting announced (a game that not only has three titles in it's title, but now a number as well).  Like Alcurad has pointed out, melee systems in first person can be... not great.  Most games that play fairly smoothly and have first person melee are generally also pretty simplistic.  Elder Scrolls, Minecraft, Mount and Blade, all those are simple press the button and let it go, and see what damage gets done.  They tend not to be hugely dynamic because high mobility or mechanical intensity is much harder to read with the restricted view, and anyone who's played Mirror's Edge knows that trying to move that fast in first person is positively migraine inducing.  So Bloodlines.  I'm going to preface with point by saying Bloodlines was not mechanically impressive, it wasn't very dynamic, hell half the time it didn't even function, but that's just because of what a mess the game itself was.  It did, however, move between first and third person, because it had a variety or both ranged and melee weapons, which were respectively much easier to use in first and third person.  Bloodlines perspective could be toggled at will, but when a melee weapon was drawn you were forced to third person.  Ranged weapons could be used in either perspective, but choosing to use them third person (or at all without mods, let's be real) was basically punishing yourself in the worst possible way.  The point is you could solve the melee in first person problem by just forcing third person if you wanted to try to make combat more complex than Elder Scrolls tends to be.  It wouldn't do anything for the point you mentioned of things feeling impersonal in third person, but it would probably make animating melee a bit easier, and balancing it since you wouldn't have to worry about accounting for not being able to see around your guy.

 

Also while I have no idea how to help with inventory issues, I did want to ask a question about your weapons and stuff, specifically how you plan to handle stats and progression and all that.  Did you want to go with something a bit more static like in Skyrim or Witcher where you can apply maybe a couple upgrades to them but they're essentially still the same piece of equipment?  I feel like that's gonna be the easiest way, but I remembered something kind of fun while you were talking about meshes and item IDs.  Now this is probably a terrible idea that would require way more work than it's worth, especially for one person, but Fable 3 had those fun evolving weapons, and Borderlands games manage theirs by building the guns on generation out of a number of "components", each one giving the gun a slightly different quality, as well as appearance.  That idea, taken a bit more minimally than Borderlands does it, might be useful for keeping weapons dynamic and interesting if it doesn't seem like too much pointless bloat.  I don't know how hard it would be to have each sword be made of... let's say three randomly thrown together pieces for like the handle, guard and blade or something.  That would probably require another rewrite of all that work you just did, I'd bet, but it could also mean you can get away with making several pieces, and then the combinations of those pieces and their materials might be able to do some of the work for you in varying the weapons.  I don't know, as I type this out I've slowly convinced myself it's horrible, but I figured I'd put it out there anyway, just because it might be something you may want to look into one day.

[alcurad90]

21 hours ago, slaen said:

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I'll keep playing around with the combat and see what works.  Getting that first person and third person switch might be limiting but I really want to have a first person view in the game.  I just always feel more like I'm the one playing the game when there's a first person view.  It's cool being able to see your character but in games like the Witcher it doesn't feel like I'm in the game it feels like I'm watching Geralt doing stuff and there's a sense of disconnect for me. 

 

Another Idea is to just let the player choose which view to use. As what the Skyrim did. Though It's very important to allow the chatacter attack to all the direction in 3rd view

 

Fot the ID number, I think you can use a long number like the skyrim style. For example: A sword's ID is 00 0F 1A (hex, of course). 00 is the mod ID (as 00 means the main game), 0F means the item is a sword, and 1A means it's "the" sword.

 

For the mesh, Skyrim use a gnd mesh for item in enviroment and a mesh for equiped, Though I think is not really important, you can just use 1  gnd mesh for a type of items

 

[slaen]

I think the new Mount and Blade is going to do something with weapon customization and having a modular system for  their weapons.  It might be kind of cool but seems like a ton of work this early on.  I've also tried to figure out if I should include a crafting system in the game and how that would function.  It seems difficult to make a crafting system that is meaningful and enjoyable rather than just a system to gate off content or to satisfy investors.  Something to think about in the future though.  There's more fundamental systems that I want to get into the game first. 

 

As for the camera style and switching and how that plays into combat.  At least for the time being I'm going to stick close to Skyrim as a template.  I might experiment some more with it but I still feel like Skyrim is a good baseline to shoot for with most of the features I want.  I'll have to go and poke through their item system too at some point and see how they organized things. 

 

Worked on some back end stuff for the character customization system.  Now in the editor it's possible to change values on each character instance, save those values, and load them.  It makes creating different looking NPC's a lot easier. 

 

Got in some hair practice too.

 

 

Did a quick texture cleanup pass on the human's textures.  Just some little polish stuff to add some color variation into the skin and to clean up some seams.  

 

Did a rigging pass on the human skeleton and the goblin skeleton.  Added in facial joints for the tongue, jaw, eyes and some misc joints around the waist and back.  Now I need to test out some facial setups and animations.  Hopefully that plays well with the character customization stuff that I already have in the game.  But it's necessary so that the characters aren't so blank faced all the time. 

 

 

[alcurad90]

1 hour ago, slaen said:

I think the new Mount and Blade is going to do something with weapon customization and having a modular system for  their weapons.  It might be kind of cool but seems like a ton of work this early on.  I've also tried to figure out if I should include a crafting system in the game and how that would function.  It seems difficult to make a crafting system that is meaningful and enjoyable rather than just a system to gate off content or to satisfy investors.  Something to think about in the future though.  There's more fundamental systems that I want to get into the game first. 

 

 

 

 

FO4 had a just well enough item crafting system for me, And the skyrim style is just piece of shit

 

I my opinion the most important thing is just ensure that the character could only get the BEST item by combat and loot, while she can get some very useful and necessary item through quest.

 

And ... something more, I think it's the time for add some sexual elements to the gameplay, Like human milk as potion, dancers buff friends with pole dance, or witches bondage themselves to get magic power.

[Just Checking]

5 hours ago, alcurad90 said:

And ... something more, I think it's the time for add some sexual elements to the gameplay, Like human milk as potion, dancers buff friends with pole dance, or witches bondage themselves to get magic power.

While I feel like this kind of stuff is best left until later in the game's development, what you said about the bondage for extra power did remind me of something I never bothered to mention back on the creatorslab thread when it was alive.  Back when they were taking suggestions from anyone with a keyboard I was wondering if they were going to do different playable races, and an idea I had sort of matches up to your one there, a little bit.  My thought was a race that gets debuffed when not bound in some way, and can temporarily become more powerful by destroying their bondage gear.  I was sort of inspired by the idea of falmer in skyrim, how they were kept as slaves and magically altered.  The idea was a race that was changed to feel they needed their bindings by their masters to try to keep them in line, and after they'd thrown off the enslaving race they still wore collars, shackles and even actual bondage gear because that's just how they've been forced to be.  Then in a pinch you can trade off a sudden burst of power (revolutionary emancipation symbolism) for the debuffs of not having your gear once it wears off (can't escape the curse).  It was kinda lame, but I also thought it might be kind of a fun way to incorporate bondage into actual gameplay in a meaningful way, and give it more lore than just characters being debauched or being part of some kind of... bondage cult or something.  I'm not actually into bondage myself, but I know enough folks around here are that I figured it'd be fun to try to come up with a way that bondage could be both prevalent in a game for the bondage lovers, and also meaningful to the gameplay for people like me who aren't turned on by it, so everyone can be happy.

 

That little anecdote isn't important to this thread, I just remembered I never shared it and didn't want to waste the brain cells I've apparently devoted to storing the idea.

 

7 hours ago, slaen said:

I'll have to go and poke through their item system too at some point and see how they organized things. 

Just keep in mind Bethesda are legendary grandmasters at making systems that only barely work, so if the inventory system in Skyrim doesn't do it for you, might be easier to look elsewhere.  I myself am not a programmer, but I know of Bethesda's infamously unstable code writing.  Have you considered Diablo style inventory, with slots instead of a hard number limit or weight?  An old system to be sure, but it could work, since then you can just set each item archetype to take a certain amount of space and then leave it to players to sort how much crap they're carrying.

[alcurad90]

On 4/3/2019 at 6:28 AM, Just Checking said:

I'm not actually into bondage myself, but I know enough folks around here are that I figured it'd be fun to try to come up with a way that bondage could be both prevalent in a game for the bondage lovers, and also meaningful to the gameplay for people like me who aren't turned on by it, so everyone can be happy.

 

Hahaha. For me I think the people here are all some kind of hentai, so it's not necessary to feel shame for that

 

In addition as I said before, killing moves and things like devil arm from DMC5 would be quite inportant for a hentai Action RPG, And some MUSOU skill is necessary too.

 

On 4/3/2019 at 6:28 AM, Just Checking said:

I know of Bethesda's infamously unstable code writing.  Have you considered Diablo style inventory, with slots instead of a hard number limit or weight?  An old system to be sure, but it could work, since then you can just set each item archetype to take a certain amount of space and then leave it to players to sort how much crap they're carrying.

 

Actually the Beth's design type is quite  moderate. Problem is that the game engine itself is not stable

 

Design of bag limit was used to force the player focus on there bags and react with merchant. For a small scale game the Minecraft style bags would be enough

Diablo's style works mostly for something focus on battle

[slaen]

 

Started playing around with landscape stuff a bit. 

 

For the Inventory stuff - I was looking into making a grid based inventory system at first.  Something like Diablo where each item has a shape and the player can drag and drop between windows to equip things.  The thing though is that the Skyrim inventory system, even though it isn't fancy, it works for what it is and it cuts down on a ton of work.  It's pretty much all text based, so there's no need for making 2d icons. There's no click drag and drop logic to worry about with the mouse.  There's no logic to set up for each item as to what inventory slots it would take up or how many or in what configuration.  It's really just reading an item name and amount and then printing that to a list.  And probably the biggest reason is that working on a fancy inventory system doesn't seem like that much fun to me.  Maybe if it becomes a limiting factor in the game design I would go back and look into changing it but if I can make it fully functional and stable I'll be happy.    

 

On 4/2/2019 at 12:43 PM, alcurad90 said:

And ... something more, I think it's the time for add some sexual elements to the gameplay, Like human milk as potion, dancers buff friends with pole dance, or witches bondage themselves to get magic power.

Hah, believe my I can't wait until I can get to working on content stuff.  But I've got to get the foundations done before going into fine details like this.

 

But I am slowly working on the basic sex systems right now.  There's a lot of pieces to fit together.  There needs to be some basic AI to know what state the player is in, as well as what state the npc is in.  Then there's the animations to go along with those states and also the transitions into those animations.  I understand why most games just have a camera cut instead of having the characters position themselves.  There's the lust stat.  There's a new damage type that I still need to write to do lust damage instead of health damage.  And I'm still trying to figure out almost universal poses for sex to work for any gender.  For instance:

 

 

Before and after being defeated.  For a character with a penis it's pretty simple to have an animation for them kneel down behind the goblin and having sex with her.  Roughly 3 animations - kneeling down, thrusting animation, finishing and standing up.  

 

But what about if the player doesn't have a penis?  In Corruption of Champions when a female character defeats a goblin they tie up the goblin, drug her with her own potions, spank her a bit, then finally get oral from her.  I would love to be able to do something like that at some point but damn, that is a lot of animation.  What I'm currently thinking is just doing the oral bit for females which is where the problem comes in.  Since the current pose I'm testing with the goblin is face down it would be sort of strange to have her kneel back up when approached by the player. Finding a pose when the goblin is defeated that will easily flow into whatever animation for whatever gender is sort of where I'm at right now.  I guess the easiest would just be have the goblin fall onto her knees and then it's oral sex for everybody?  That would solve the issue for now but then is that just what every single character in the game does when they are defeated in combat?  Fall to their knees and pop open their mouth?  I think that would work for one or two characters but get really boring after that. 

 

Eventually it would be great to have branching sex scenes.  Give the player control over something like the Corruption of Champions scene almost like a choose your own adventure have branching points that give the player 3 options for what to do next and have everything flow logically that way.  The downside is that is a ton of work for every new character introduced into the game. 

 

 

 

[alcurad90]

2 hours ago, slaen said:

But what about if the player doesn't have a penis? 

Why the player could have no penis? The female character could also has a penis, no matter it is real or fake toys

For me I would only set 2 kinds of genders:  futa with huge breasts and futa with flat chest. ?

 

For the gameplay level I think you can just treat combat sex as a QTE or devil bringer from DMC5

You can change the characters' poses with gorgeous effect, like this

 

 

 

[Just Checking]

If you're inclined to animate it, female victors could flip the goblin over or lift her chin and drag her up a bit or something.  Alternatively you could redo the pose so she lands on her back, then with penis can go to town that way and without can facesit her or something?  I see your dilemma here is what you want is something that flows better than loverslab systems tend to.  Those don't have to worry about it because they just call an animation and everybody snaps into place for it.

 

Of course there is also an option for much later, when you're done with other more important stuff.  Multiple defeated poses for different creatures that give access to their own small range of options, possibly even depending on how they were beaten.  Gob is is struck by something "low impact", like a light weapon or something, falls face down.  Heavier impact knocks onto back and lust damage makes her fall to her knees.  Of course would still have the same problem of what to easily do in certain poses, and the whole idea is absolutely making a lot more work for yourself, so unless you bring some help on board and delegate some of that, it would end up being a very time consuming process just for a feature that wold largely go unnoticed by players who favour a certain playstyle or weapon type.

 

For the sake of ease, I'd say just do the defeat poses to be more in the direction of falling on back or side for now until you know what you want to do with the rest of it.

[slaen]

I started working on the basic flow of menus in the game - moving from main menu, to options, to character creation, and then into the actual game.  I had forgotten that Unreal doesn't save certain pieces of information when you load a new level and since the character creation scene is a self contained level which then loads the actual game level, I would lose all of the character customization whenever I clicked the finish button.  I have most of that situation fixed at this point by storing data in the game instance but there's still a few bugs I need to track down.

 

The options menu is also going to take a bit more time to track down how and where to set all of the options.  But I really would like to have at least a bare bones set of options for the first release.  I haven't even looked into key rebinding for players yet.  No idea how complicated that will be but that would also be a really nice thing to have. 

 

I also started the basic systems for "grapples" in the game.  Right now it works by the character getting stunned or knocked down and their opponent initiating the grapple.  The grapple has a variable amount of levels that will increase over time.  The grappled character can break the grapple or fight against it but will need to break each level of the grapple that they are currently in.  It needs a lot of testing and experimentation still to find what works best.    I haven't had time to make any test animations for the system yet (it's all just log printouts right now) but Metal Gear Solid 4 has a sort of similar system with characters like Laughing Octopus. 

 

 

 

 

On 4/9/2019 at 12:31 PM, alcurad90 said:

Why the player could have no penis? The female character could also has a penis, no matter it is real or fake toys

For me I would only set 2 kinds of genders:  futa with huge breasts and futa with flat chest.

Hah, that would certainly make the animation process a whole lot easier.  And the changing the character pose using FX is a really good idea I didn't think of.  Those examples are great for anything fast paced and I really like how they added a bit of camera shake.

 

On 4/9/2019 at 5:06 PM, Just Checking said:

For the sake of ease, I'd say just do the defeat poses to be more in the direction of falling on back or side for now until you know what you want to do with the rest of it.

I agree.  I think this is going to be another one of those systems where I'll need to make a solid and simple foundation at first with the intentions of coming back and expanding things when I can.  Also the idea of having a character fall into different poses based upon what or how they were knocked down is awesome. Just one more feature that hopefully I can get to eventually. 

 

 

 

[Megumin.]

I've always wanted a skyrim-styled sex game without the hassle of installing hundreds of mods. What will the sex be like? I'm hoping for something like the skyrim defeat mod, but that's just me. Also is there going to be multiple playable race?

[Just Checking]

Grappling definitely sounds interesting.  Would open up a whole variety of options for interacting with a target that LL frameworks have never really used before.  Other than the obvious sex initiation, it could also be a good way to incapacitate enemies without killing them for players that want to play a "clean hands" character.  If you want to expand grappling to work in more situations than being crowd controlled, it could also be a way to sneak up and quickly grab an unaware enemy and drag them out of sight so you can knock them out, knock them up or knock them dead, as it were.  Folks that like LL's variety of slaver/slavery mods will probably get a kick out of it too since it adds something to the capture process that has until now been covered by "beat them to within an inch of their life and cast a spell/activate them".  Hell you could even use a grabbed enemy as a human shield against ranged attacks assuming hitboxes still apply while grappled.

[alcurad90]

On 4/16/2019 at 11:26 PM, slaen said:

I really like how they added a bit of camera shake. 

Actural you can change the camera and poses in ONE frame then the player will not found out the change of poses so easilly.

 

Some of the killing move mod do so for skyrim

[slaen]

Still working on technical stuff this week.  The options menu is functional but needs a pass to organize things and make them a bit more user friendly.  There's also a few extra options that I haven't tracked down how to set in UE4 like having an option for depth of field, gamma adjustment, and an audio volume control.  I also haven't started doing hotkey rebinding yet.  That shouldn't be difficult just time consuming. 

 

The initial save system is also in the game.  I have it working for the player character and inventory.  It currently breaks how I was handling AI with behavior trees and blackboards though.  This is the first piece of the project that I'm not writing myself and there's a bit of a learning curve.  I've grabbed Rama's Save System from the UE4 marketplace - https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/rama-save-system

 

So far it's been great and saved me a ton of time but the downside is that I don't know all of the ins and outs of what Rama has built and there isn't extensive documentation.  I ran into one issue when I was loading the character customization presets.  The values for those presets would load but then wouldn't show up on the character in game.  What I finally figured out was that the character was being loaded and initialized right before the preset values were being loaded in.  Once I understood that I needed a way of setting those preset values at the correct time or at least a bit later - the brute force way I started out testing was just to have a 1 second delay and then reinitialize the character.  But then I started digging through Rama's plugin.  I knew I had seen an "actor fully loaded" node or something similar in one of his screenshots or videos.  I just had to find it.  Which once I did solved the issue nicely. 

 

Hah, "very exciting" story, I know.  But my point is that buying stock systems from the marketplace can be a great way of saving time but it can also cause headaches if you need to hook other systems into them.  Any system that I've written myself I will know where everything is and how to use it.  Any system that someone else has written will take me time to read through and figure out. 

 

The last big piece to hook up is the dialogue system.    Sitting down and writing a fully functional dialogue system doesn't sound like that much fun to me so I grabbed something else from the UE4 marketplace.  I'm a bit worried though, since I want dialogue to tie into things like skill checks, a reputation system, and quest stages and I have no idea how tough any of that will be to get hooked up.

 

One piece at a time...  once the dialogue system is in game, I'll set up a basic bartering system, and that should be the entire foundation of the game finished.  There will still be other systems that I'll add over time, like the stealth system should be fun, but I should be at a point where I can start focusing on the game content.  Which will be mostly animations, and the starting town environment. 

 

 

On 4/16/2019 at 10:55 PM, Megumin. said:

I've always wanted a skyrim-styled sex game without the hassle of installing hundreds of mods. What will the sex be like? I'm hoping for something like the skyrim defeat mod, but that's just me. Also is there going to be multiple playable race?

Looking over Skryim Defeat it looks like what I'm working on will have similarities.  The current system has a stunned state for the player when they're still on their feet and have health remaining, and there's also a knocked down state that a character automatically enters when they reach low health.  The plan is to be able to initiate sex scenes from either one of these states.  Is that what you were looking for or was it something more specific? 

 

Multiple races would be awesome to have in the game.  The downside is that is also a ton of work if each race supports character customization, full facial animation, and environment interactions.  It's something I would like to do but there's a long list of features and content that would come before it.

 

On 4/17/2019 at 5:54 AM, Just Checking said:

sneak up and quickly grab an unaware enemy and drag them out of sight so you can knock them out, knock them up or knock them dead, as it were.

I like that.  I hadn't thought about grabbing and pulling the character someplace or using them as a human shield.  If I can get some extra time I'll try playing around with it.  I'm not sure how tough it will be to set the location and animations of each character to line up correctly. 

 

On 4/17/2019 at 8:49 PM, alcurad90 said:

Actural you can change the camera and poses in ONE frame then the player will not found out the change of poses so easilly.

 

Some of the killing move mod do so for skyrim

I was looking at the Skyrim kill moves the other day.  The camera cut works pretty well for certain moves but I think it has to take control of the player and their camera for the duration of the scene in order to work.  I'm really hesitant to lock the player camera at this point.  I need to run some tests once I get some animations done and see what works best though.  But I totally agree, doing a camera cut and changing poses in one frame would solve many of my issues. 

 

[Megumin.]

5 hours ago, slaen said:

Looking over Skryim Defeat it looks like what I'm working on will have similarities.  The current system has a stunned state for the player when they're still on their feet and have health remaining, and there's also a knocked down state that a character automatically enters when they reach low health.  The plan is to be able to initiate sex scenes from either one of these states.  Is that what you were looking for or was it something more specific? 

 

Multiple races would be awesome to have in the game.  The downside is that is also a ton of work if each race supports character customization, full facial animation, and environment interactions.  It's something I would like to do but there's a long list of features and content that would come before it.

 

Yeah, something like that. 

 

For the multiple race thing, I was talking about more like Elf, Orcs. Humanoids that don't have an extreme body difference. Something that would only require tiny details like ears, hair, skin tones so that it doesn't affect animations. Don't worry I've heard many MANY time with devs with how that adds a ton of extra work. Has much as I would like to be a something crazy like a tiny Rogue goblin, or a big muscled Barbarian ogre, I know that would take years to make without a team.  It's just a dream haha    Good luck with that project. I am looking forward to it.

[slaen]

 

 

Finally got all of this working and into the game.  My rigging skills are a bit rusty and this is the first time I've dropped new constraints and controls on top of the UE4 rig (ARTv1).  It's been a learning experience at least.  This is a quick test to check that facial expressions will play nicely with character customization.  The final head in the video I just turned all the sliders to full and even though it isn't pretty it isn't completely broken with the animations.  There still needs to be a polish pass on some of the blendshapes but I think this is a decent foundation to build on.  And now that I know how to build the controls and how they react with the rig export the next character I do should go a lot faster.  

 

Now I can actually get a start on sex animations.  All of the old test animations I was doing were super creepy with the characters completely blank faced. 

 

On 4/23/2019 at 6:09 PM, Megumin. said:

For the multiple race thing, I was talking about more like Elf, Orcs. Humanoids that don't have an extreme body difference.

Oh I see what you're saying.  Uhm, Maybe?  I was leaning more towards making the races really different.   Like all orcs would be giant bodybuilders and elves would all be lean tall slender types.  Stuff that would require all new skeletons and animations.  But that all increases the workload of armor sets and body morphs exponentially if I let all playable races wear the same armor types.  It's all up in the air at this point really.  First priority is getting a proof of concept build out and tested. 

 

 

 

[Just Checking]

Damn those look really good.  I was reading you predicament with races, and would you consider a temporary, time saving solution that would let you sort of put them in as a general "here's the idea" type deal that you can come back to later when you have the time?  I'm reminded of the weight slider from Skyrim and body scale chart from Fallout 4.  If you have a sort of "bulk slider" that just inflates and deflates muscle, you've got something to satisfy most folks that aren't too fussed if the different races have unique body shapes.  Bethesda games use the same skeleton for all playable races, as we well know, and it's sliders that decide what sits where.  Morrowind handled racial scale by applying a weight and height to each race that doesn't get touched by anything else in game, maybe you could borrow that idea and merge it a bit with the others.  Races have a locked bulk range that the player or character generation can move along but not exceed.  Orcs are locked to the higher end so they're always at least fairly muscular, elves are locked on the lower end so you always have the slim look and humans sit somewhere in the middle but can't hit the same extremes as the others?  It won't give the unique look and feel of each that you're going for but it might be a usable bandaid on the problem if such a thing is easily doable.  I'm just throwing this out here mostly as an easy way to show off what you'd like the general appearance to be in terms of facial structure and stuff, and you can just tack them onto a placeholder, one size fits all body.

 

Out of curiosity, though, what are you aiming toward with different skeletons?  Elves traditionally match up to humans pretty well, but Orcs are a bit of a wildcard depending on who you ask.  Are you thinking of the taller, hunched WoW style?  Cuz that would certainly be a different one to see in a game like this, not a lot of devs use that kind of thing.  Probably for this exact reason, the added work of making it all function nicely.  Also do you have plans for anything more than... should we call them the standard races?  Humans, elves, dwarves and orcs?  Character and race building is a favourite part of the creative process for me, so I'm just interested to see where you want to take it.

[slaen]

 

Took a bit of a break from technical stuff this week and started to block out the tavern in the first town.  Still hammering out overall shape and feel of the interior and the lighting is really placeholder.  Trying to find that balance between having enough space to walk through easily for NPC's while making the place not feel empty. 

 

On 5/1/2019 at 5:39 PM, Just Checking said:

Out of curiosity, though, what are you aiming toward with different skeletons?  Elves traditionally match up to humans pretty well, but Orcs are a bit of a wildcard depending on who you ask.  Are you thinking of the taller, hunched WoW style?  Cuz that would certainly be a different one to see in a game like this, not a lot of devs use that kind of thing.  Probably for this exact reason, the added work of making it all function nicely.  Also do you have plans for anything more than... should we call them the standard races?  Humans, elves, dwarves and orcs?  Character and race building is a favourite part of the creative process for me, so I'm just interested to see where you want to take it.

 

The different skeletons would really just be for fun and because I want to be able to do something correctly.  Most jobs I've had there were always tons of restrictions on how far you could push a character's proportions or limitations on how much time could be allotted to new animations.  Generally the results weren't that great and just felt sort of cheap. It would be nice to really take the time and craft each race well from the start even though it means more work. 

 

Elves might be added at some point but there are other races and things that seem like they would be more fun to work on.  Like adding in the options for characters to have wings, horns, and tails.  That would open the door for a lot of different bits and pieces to customize.  Sort of like a light version of Corruption of Champions transformations system.

 

But yeah, you pretty much nailed the idea I have for orcs.  Not exactly the WoW orcs themselves but something that is muscular and big and clearly different from human.  Which the current base human mesh can't support the proportions and shapes I'm thinking of.  The current base human, if someone turns all the weight sliders up, will already start to break at the extremes.  The textures start to stretch and the geometry starts to be noticeably jagged.  

 

As for future races I've got a bunch of ideas that I'd like to eventually get to.  The Imps and goblins I've already shown off.  None of this is set in stone but currently, given enough time and resources - Were-creatures: werewolves, werebears, wererats, werelions? maybe?.  Minotaurs, mindflayers, mimics, spider people, vampires, slimes, demons, bee people, catgirls, lamia / snakewomen, bee people, alruanes / plant girls.  It would also be really cool to make the more "human" of those races into playable races.  I think the limitation would come down to if the race was "functional" inside the world.  Like could it logically move through doors and use gameplay related items and not constantly be clipping through everything in sight or just looking wrong. 

 

But I'm not entirely sure how much people would want to play the more exotic races I mentioned.  Do people want to play as an imp or a goblin or whatever?  Or will most people click through the race options and then end up playing a human character anyway? 

 

[Just Checking]

6 hours ago, slaen said:

The different skeletons would really just be for fun and because I want to be able to do something correctly.  Most jobs I've had there were always tons of restrictions on how far you could push a character's proportions or limitations on how much time could be allotted to new animations.  Generally the results weren't that great and just felt sort of cheap. It would be nice to really take the time and craft each race well from the start even though it means more work. 

I can respect wanting to take time to fully realise your vision to the quality you're happy with.

 

6 hours ago, slaen said:

But I'm not entirely sure how much people would want to play the more exotic races I mentioned.  Do people want to play as an imp or a goblin or whatever?  Or will most people click through the race options and then end up playing a human character anyway? 

I can only speak for myself here, but I'd be interested in a few more races than our typical fantasy setup.  Your example was goblins.  I'd be down to play goblin myself, I think shortstacks are kinda funny and if there's a go to fantasy race the internet has turned into the quintessential shortstack it's goblins.  As for some of the others, like you said as long as they are functional in the world on the player side of things and don't break stuff when taken out of their typical environment I can guarantee someone will want to play as them.  Spiders and snakes would be super interesting if you could get those working on the player side, but of literally every potential race you mentioned I think those two would be the hardest to make play nice with everything.

 

On the other point of this little update, the tavern looks really good.  I can't see if there's a gap in the bar for people to get through, though.  Beyond simply being an explanation for how the bartender gets over there, it might not hurt to have something the player can get through in case some clever idiot jumps or clips from the stools over the bar and gets stuck back there.

[Chiisai]

I gotta ask, while this might be more of an advanced thing to work on, but will it be possible to prevent certain genders from showing up? Such as making it to where males won't show up at all?

[slaen]

Something I've been struggling with is how to have some content that people really want but is a complete turn off to other people.  I'm currently thinking that the general overall world would have relatively vanilla content everywhere.  But then specific subjects or interactions that some people might not enjoy would be in localized to a specific area.  Like, as an example, if there was a dungeon of just tentacle monsters.  If the player doesn't enjoy tentacle monsters then they don't ever have to go there.  

 

Is that enough that the player could know where to go for the content that they want but the world could still be populated with things that they didn't want?  Or is it too much of a turn off just knowing that specific content is in the game and ruins the experience of the content that the player does enjoy?

 

The only limitations this puts on the game design is that any "main quests" would need to only interact with the vanilla content.  Or else give an option to only interact with vanilla content.  Maybe giving an option of going to tentacle monster dungeon or vanilla dungeon.  Both would result in the quest being completed and it would be up to the player's choice as to which content they interacted with.  It would be a bit more work but if it made people enjoy the game more it would probably be worth it.  

Which brings me to:

On 5/8/2019 at 4:53 AM, Chiisai said:

I gotta ask, while this might be more of an advanced thing to work on, but will it be possible to prevent certain genders from showing up? Such as making it to where males won't show up at all?

Maybe but probably not.  I guess it also would depend on how in depth that feature would need to be.  

Here's my current thoughts on the subject -
In the rough ideas I have for quests and campaign stuff I have plans for male and female characters.  I also have plans for some races to be one gender or the other.  

 

Possible ways to handle the issue:

Make no male characters spawn at all
- Quest design would get more complicated trying to keep track of if this specific character would spawn in a specific game.
- Effectively cutting out half of the characters in a town and also half of the possible game content

 

Spawn all male characters as female characters
- Pronouns would get funky in dialogue.
- If there is ever voice over work done that could also get kind of strange or would mean recording every line twice.
- There could also be bugs if a specific sex scene was hard coded for a specific gender

 

What if there was a specific area of the map, like an amazon village, that right around that village all of the enemies happen to be female or gender neutral?  

 

Or is it a matter of genitals only?  Currently every human character, male and female, shares the same base body.  There is a version that has no genitals of any kind, sort of like a plastic doll.  It could be possible to just set any of the undesired gender / genitals to have doll anatomy by default.  Would that sort of be what you're looking for?

 

I guess I'm not entirely sure what you're looking for as far as a gaming experience.

 

On 5/7/2019 at 7:57 PM, Just Checking said:

On the other point of this little update, the tavern looks really good.  I can't see if there's a gap in the bar for people to get through, though.  Beyond simply being an explanation for how the bartender gets over there, it might not hurt to have something the player can get through in case some clever idiot jumps or clips from the stools over the bar and gets stuck back there.

Hah, good call.  It's hidden by the camera angle but there is an opening at the far end of the bar right now.  I might try to add in one of those like bar gate things where a section of the bar swings up and out of the way.  Not sure how worth the effort is.  But yeah, once the bar gets further along I'll try to post a quick flythrough or something. I realize just a single screenshot is kind of limiting.