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

[AttritionofContrition]

2 hours ago, slaen said:

But what do people think of this general direction? So the player would drop into their own almost museum gallery lined with different "statues" that could be interacted with to then bring up the scenes associated with that statue.  and there would be a number of empty pedestals for more statues that the player hadn't found in the world yet.

I like it. A system like that could give further incentive to explore, complete quests, defeat bosses, or however you intend to dole them out. Any gallery system is appreciated but especially those that go out of their way to be more than just a scene viewer.

[Just Checking]

I agree with Attrition, I like the idea of collectables that are more than just a large number of an arbitrary item to have to find.  Of course, I also really like loot and randomly finding crap, so the notion that you can unlock more stuff for your gallery just by playing and exploring is kinda cool.

[xaraaji]

 

23 hours ago, slaen said:

But they're good ideas.  I just only have 2 hands and no budget and I'm trying to keep my scope limited to something that I can get out into the world in a reasonable amount of time. 

 

Thank you. Was just trowing an idea out there not expecting the entire thing to stick. One idea might trigger another and the final result might be something entirely different.

 

Here is a question for you. Does it make sense to spend time implementing a gallery system? A gallery system seems to me more like a bonus thing rather than a vital game component. Or is the gallery system the mini sex game system?

 

Also, are you trying to get this game out soonish, learn from it and then start another game or are you thinking of releasing this game  with the minimum necessary features and update it over several years until it become something much larger?

 

I have been tracking a guy called Steve Adeptus or Stefan Ehrenhaus for years now, a character modeler, rigger and animator. I found out about him when I was researching breast physics, 7 years ago, for my own character.

These are reference that you might find useful in the future. Nsfw videos

Spoiler

 

A version of a sex animation video he did. Shows the rigging issues you were mentioning.

https://twitter.com/AdeptusSteve/status/1113374336994480129

 

Stefan Ehrenhaus YouTube channel. He mainly talks about rigging and shows his progress on the game he is working on.

https://www.youtube.com/user/AdeptusSteve/videos

 

 

 

[alcurad90]

On 6/4/2019 at 11:56 PM, slaen said:

Ok, I started putting some more thought into the gallery systems.  There's two Skyrim mods I was looking at that might sort of work but would take a decent chunk of development time.  Legacy of the Dragonborn  and Familiar Faces 

Basically you'd better treat it as a qasmoke cell of the skrim

 

which mostly used by developers

[slaen]

 

Did some work on the tavern keeper outfit.  Haven't had a chance to do body morphs yet but the textures are almost done.  Didn't realize how dark the pants were in this lighting. 

 

Also worked on the starting town a bit more.  Getting a feel for what I think the environment should be like.  Then I noticed that my framerates were starting to dip once I had a bunch of trees on screen.  I've never built an open world game before and was worried that I couldn't have wide open areas with tons of foliage so I started doing some LOD tests

 

 

There's still a few tweaks to make and the trees aren't final yet but in this shot I'm getting mid 80s for a framerate.  Before adding the LODs it was dipping into the 40s and 30s.  and that's running on the nvidia gtx 970 card in this machine so anyone with beefier hardware should be fine. 

 

On 6/4/2019 at 2:36 PM, AttritionofContrition said:

Any gallery system is appreciated but especially those that go out of their way to be more than just a scene viewer.

On 6/4/2019 at 11:48 PM, Just Checking said:

I agree with Attrition, I like the idea of collectables that are more than just a large number of an arbitrary item to have to find

Cool, it's on the todo list.  It won't be in there early on but when I can get some extra time I'll see what I can put together.  Also it would be kind of strange making it too early - like imagine a giant hallway with only one statue in it.

 

On 6/6/2019 at 8:26 AM, alcurad90 said:

Basically you'd better treat it as a qasmoke cell of the skrim

That's pretty much what I'm thinking for the initial test version of gallery.  Nothing fancy just a hallway with NPC's the player can click on and interact with and polish it up over time. 

 

On 6/5/2019 at 1:56 PM, xaraaji said:

Thank you. Was just trowing an idea out there not expecting the entire thing to stick. One idea might trigger another and the final result might be something entirely different.

 

Here is a question for you. Does it make sense to spend time implementing a gallery system? A gallery system seems to me more like a bonus thing rather than a vital game component. Or is the gallery system the mini sex game system?

Hah, no worries.  If you can't tell I'm really paranoid about giving people the wrong impression of what I'm working on.  I just don't want to sell anyone on false promises and hype.   I really just want to make a good fun game and avoid the smoke and mirrors and marketing tactics that some game companies do, especially after seeing the stuff coming out of E3 this year.  But yeah, so ideas, thoughts, brainstorming are awesome and totally appreciated as long as at the end of the day there is the realization that I have certain limitations as to what and how much I can accomplish.  

 

As for the gallery system I agree with you completely that it's a bonus thing and sort of extraneous.  But it seems like it's a feature that people will ask for regardless.  I think it also fills the demand for anyone that doesn't want to play a game but just wants to see the porn.  And I don't think it'll take too long to put together.  All the models and animations will already be finished and in game so it ends up being a matter of creating some sex scene trigger logic and having a couple flags in game for if that scene has been encountered or not yet.  It also isn't something that I'll have time to get to for a while.

 

Uhm, the general plan for release and the game...
1. Get the proof of concept build out the door.  It'll have a ton of rough edges but will have the entire foundation of the game completed.
2. Launch a patreon and see if people like the game.  Then figure out a general budget going forward.
3. Put out consistent content updates.  Probably once a month release at least something.  Early content updates would be focused on filling in the details of the starting town, adding more npc's, getting some low level mobs into the game, armor and weapon sets.  Then once the town has at least a basic level of content I'd start on something like the surrounding forest, hills, and dungeons.  
4. Slowly fill the landmass with content in a similar fashion.  Create a central location, town, dungeon, point of interest, and fill in the map around it.

 

Each step assumes that the previous step went well, that people like the game, and that I can afford to keep going with development and not have to get another job to support myself.  The hope is that I would be able to keep things going and keep developing the game and making it better indefinitely, sort of like how the Dwarf Fortress guys just keep adding new systems and content to their game.  I have a rough idea of where I want the game to go and the world I want to build but, being totally honest, I don't have a final 1.0 version of the game in that plan.  Also if the first in-game continent gets saturated with content there's no reason not to make another continent or a different plane of existence or something along those lines.  But all of that is way in the future and there's a lot that needs to fall into place for any of that to happen.  

 

Thanks for the reference links.  Oh yeah, Adeptus Steve and the Wild Life crew.  They're doing really well these days.  I'm not doing anything nearly that fancy for my rigs.  I'm using the ARTv1 tools that Epic put out a while back.  The new ones came out recently too and I really should bite the bullet and upgrade my rigs.  http://jeremyernst.com/artv2

but yeah I definitely have an eye on what Wild Life is doing and how they're handling things. 

 

 

[TheShadowVixen]

Have been watching this thread closely for the past month or so, and I have to say I am very excited for what is to come. Keep up the amazing work! ^.^

[slaen]

The backend stuff for the sex system is almost there.  Right now the player can knock down an AI walk up to them, press a hotkey, and initiate a sex scene.  The sex scene will play an intro then go into a looping animation, at which point the player can let it loop, press a hotkey to advance to the next loop, or cancel out of the sex scene entirely.  The game also keeps track of which gender parts and pieces the player and the AI possess, as well as which character is the top and which is the bottom.  The top will be the character that initiates the scene if the player wants to be the bottom they will currently need to lose in combat. 

 

Also I have 2 animations finished of the 4 combinations I want to have initially.  For the male top female bottom there's basic missionary, the female top male bottom is cowgirl.  I think the female top female bottom will be like a face riding?  and the male top male bottom I guess just a bj?  I left these last two because it's content that I'm not super familiar with.  If anyone does have positions for those two combos they feel strongly about please chime in.  The only real requirement is that there aren't any props involved for these initial animations like nothing propping up either character - beds, chairs, etc.   

 

Still need to make a basic ui in case the player wants to use the mouse instead of keyboard to control things as well as a system of choosing which "available" animation the player wants to see.  Pretty much just give the player a bit more control than the goto next type system that is there now.  

 

I've found out that a bunch of stuff I thought would work just doesn't.  I really thought that there would be more overlap or reuse of animation between different genders.  So far there hasn't been any really.  I also thought I could make things work without the characters changing positions between scenes and just play a full animation for them to rearrange and get into position.  This turned out to be a super difficult thing to animate and also boring to sit and watch a minute of nothing happening other than two people changing position.  

 

Patreon Thoughts & Questions -

 

Finally I've been putting a lot of thought into how the Patreon thing will work.  My default plan is to release this proof of concept build for free to everyone, then set up the Patreon and have new builds set as early access to patrons as a $10 tier and public free builds either one or two months behind.  The public builds would be the same exact content just an older build.  The price point I came to by looking at other adult games on Patreon and similar games in terms of style and complexity.  It seems like most visual novels end up around the $5 point and Unreal or Unity games start climbing up to $10 and higher.

 

But I'm really curious to everyone else's experiences and thoughts concerning Patreon.  Is that $10 price tag reasonable?  Too high or too low?  Do people like having different tiers and rewards?  or overall  goals?  and how about the patron only posts?  Those frustrate me at least.  It seems like those dev posts would be a selling point but on so many Patreons they're gated behind the $1 tier and so if I'm browsing other projects all I see are locked posts and no information about the project. 

 

 

On 6/11/2019 at 7:48 PM, Dreamlucid said:

Have been watching this thread closely for the past month or so, and I have to say I am very excited for what is to come. Keep up the amazing work! ^.^

Thank you, that's really awesome and amazing that people are actually following my work.  There's still a long way to go but I'm going to do my best to live up to expectations.

 

[AttritionofContrition]

On 6/18/2019 at 7:19 AM, slaen said:

Patreon Thoughts & Questions -

 

Finally I've been putting a lot of thought into how the Patreon thing will work.  My default plan is to release this proof of concept build for free to everyone, then set up the Patreon and have new builds set as early access to patrons as a $10 tier and public free builds either one or two months behind.  The public builds would be the same exact content just an older build.  The price point I came to by looking at other adult games on Patreon and similar games in terms of style and complexity.  It seems like most visual novels end up around the $5 point and Unreal or Unity games start climbing up to $10 and higher.

 

But I'm really curious to everyone else's experiences and thoughts concerning Patreon.  Is that $10 price tag reasonable?  Too high or too low?  Do people like having different tiers and rewards?  or overall  goals?  and how about the patron only posts?  Those frustrate me at least.  It seems like those dev posts would be a selling point but on so many Patreons they're gated behind the $1 tier and so if I'm browsing other projects all I see are locked posts and no information about the project.

It really does vary, I've seen many projects that were 2d use the same pricing model as a full blown 3d unreal engine game. Depends on the scope but you probably know all of this already. 10$ sounds pretty standard, some people do different releases for their tiers, the highest getting the game earliest while the one below it getting it a week later. Goals are nice and can give people further incentive to invest but starting out you probably want to keep it realistic like "If I reach x amount of money I can dedicate more time to the project" stuff like that, then when/if your patreon picks up speed you could add more interactive goals like "If I make x$ you can vote on a new enemy/feature". How many tiers do you plan on having? 1/5/10 is pretty modest and approachable in my opinion and if it turns out to be a great success you could always add higher tiers with greater rewards. Only thing is what do you give for the 5$ tier?

[Just Checking]

Having no experience with patreon at all, I can't really say I know what a good pricing model for your tiers would be, however I'd say $10 for your early access tier sounds pretty reasonable.  If you feel it's low balling it too much, or if you want to get this project to a place where you can live of the patreon donation (or at least have a noticeable supplement to your income), a higher tier is always an option, but it doesn't hurt to give people some smaller options for if they want to donate but don't make much.  As for low tier rewards, you could just stagger the releases to correspond with donation tiers.  $10 gets new builds immediately, $5 gets it after two weeks and everyone else gets the build after a month.  Or something like that.  Might get annoying remembering to organize all the releases, but it'd be a practical place to start before you set up more complex reward tiers like votes for content or something.

[slaen]

I completely understand wanting to try games before you put any money into them.  Especially since the quality in adult games seems to vary even more than AAA titles on average.  But at the same time being able to grab the latest versions of games there defeats the entire point of having different tiers or staggered release tiers on Patreon.  Why wait a month or two for the higher tier Patreon build when you can grab it the day of release from over there?  Even when a developer puts a password on their latest build that gets posted to the game's thread the same day.  I have seen other developers add DRM or authentication into their games.  Personally I don't want to do that.  For starters I have no idea how to code something like that and would rather put that development time into content for the game.  I also really don't like when single player games require an internet connection or install a bunch of stuff on top of the game I want to play. 

 

So, the only thing I really have against it is if someone isn't aware of it and then subscribes to a higher tier on Patreon to get the latest builds.  In some ways it makes it like the game developer is screwing that person over.  It's like saying "on this site you have to pay for something that everyone else on this other site can just get for free". 

 

I guess the best, and most idealistic scenario, would be if someone sees a game, downloads it for free, plays it, then if they like it they contribute something reasonable to that developer's Patreon.  But I have no idea how realistic that is and how many people actually do that.  There's such a limited pool of examples with other games in this market that some are runaway hits and others flop hard and there's too many variables that I don't know about that go into those successes and failures for me to really base any decisions on.  It's also scary when I'm hoping to generate enough income from this game so I don't have to go back and pick up contract work or a studio job again. 

 

But yeah, so I'm pretty conflicted on how to approach it. 

 

On 6/18/2019 at 3:03 PM, Just Checking said:

Might get annoying remembering to organize all the releases

This is sort of why I want to keep things simple.  I've never liked using version control and then trying to juggle multiple builds seems like a huge headache for very little gain.  I'm leaning towards staggering the builds out per month.  Doing a 2 week build cycle would burn me out and each release would feel pretty small I think.  I'm thinking $10 latest release, $5 last month's release, and free builds the release from 2 months ago.

 

 

 

[AttritionofContrition]

On 6/21/2019 at 4:00 PM, slaen said:

I completely understand wanting to try games before you put any money into them.  Especially since the quality in adult games seems to vary even more than AAA titles on average.  But at the same time being able to grab the latest versions of games there defeats the entire point of having different tiers or staggered release tiers on Patreon.  Why wait a month or two for the higher tier Patreon build when you can grab it the day of release from over there?  Even when a developer puts a password on their latest build that gets posted to the game's thread the same day.  I have seen other developers add DRM or authentication into their games.  Personally I don't want to do that.  For starters I have no idea how to code something like that and would rather put that development time into content for the game.  I also really don't like when single player games require an internet connection or install a bunch of stuff on top of the game I want to play. 

 

So, the only thing I really have against it is if someone isn't aware of it and then subscribes to a higher tier on Patreon to get the latest builds.  In some ways it makes it like the game developer is screwing that person over.  It's like saying "on this site you have to pay for something that everyone else on this other site can just get for free". 

 

I guess the best, and most idealistic scenario, would be if someone sees a game, downloads it for free, plays it, then if they like it they contribute something reasonable to that developer's Patreon.  But I have no idea how realistic that is and how many people actually do that.  There's such a limited pool of examples with other games in this market that some are runaway hits and others flop hard and there's too many variables that I don't know about that go into those successes and failures for me to really base any decisions on.  It's also scary when I'm hoping to generate enough income from this game so I don't have to go back and pick up contract work or a studio job again. 

 

But yeah, so I'm pretty conflicted on how to approach it.

I agree, when I see devs actively posting there and openly stating that they're okay with their game being shared there it kind of baffles me yet they still seem to retain and even gain backers. At the very least the place will generate exposure to your game which is always good. I can't really blame you, posting there while you have people actively giving you money seems disrespectful to their investment but you catch more flies with honey and patreon has never been a very honest place. I've been rooting for your game ever since you opened this thread but I really hope you succeed, this game looks like it has more soul and thought put into it than many games that have been in development for years.

[Just Checking]

What you could do alternatively is offer perks not entirely related to game releases.  You're never going to stop pirates no matter what measures you take, they're adaptive, determined, coordinated and fear no law.  That's why they still exist now, on computers circulating video games and tv shows, all the way from their humble beginnings on ships, circulating liberated sugar shipments and syphilis.

 

Something that can't just be downloaded with everything else would be ideal as that way other people can't just upload it elsewhere so people in the know get it for free while others who don't know or feel it's improper to do circumvent the patreon get left out in the cold, footing the bill for all the others for no technical benefit.  Unfortunately, it's a matter of figuring out what that would be.  Maybe just have one or two reward tiers, at higher than $10, but where the donator gets something more than just the game release.  Maybe they get to design a character to be included in the game as an NPC or something?  That being a one off thing probably won't really incentivize anyone to stay on that tier though.  I can see where the difficulty lies here.  What you could do I suppose is donators over a certain threshold can get into a backers discord or something, if nothing else it's be a good place to hear ideas and feedback from people who aren't the same... 5 of us on LL who keep posting in this thread.  Getting more opinions can't hurt, and there's probably plenty of people that would be interested in the project that will never see it otherwise just because Loverslab has the reputation for hosting some extreme content.  That alone surely puts people off when they're deciding whether to join.

 

Nice thing about having a discord for backers is a bigger pool of people to brainstorm tier rewards with.  It'll be like crowdsourcing your crowdfunding ideas.

[slaen]

 

Still in a rough state and I'm using the same couple assets everywhere and there's so much polish left to do.  But I think it's starting to get the general feel I'm going for with the environment work.  I left the framerate counter on during the video too.  That's with the editor running in the background and I haven't optimized any of the building assets yet but at the same time now I need to get NPCs and a ton more props into the scene but I'm alright with it running at 75 fps on a geforce 970. 

 

Blocking is roughly implemented but it needs animations and sounds and the logic/design for things like how much damage is blocked, how blocks are broken, if there is a stun when a block is hit.  Stuff like that. Currently if the player has a weapon readied and they press and hold the right mouse button they will be in a blocking state but there's no animation.  If they are hit by a melee weapon it will end the block but it will break the attacker's swing cycle and stun them for a second.   

 

Beds are in the game.  They will refill the player's health, and stamina and advance time by 4 hours.  At some point I'll add the UI to select how long the player rests for similar to Skyrim.  

 

NPC characters also have an inventory that can be accessed by the player.  This is the foundation for looting and pickpocketing.  It's pretty rough and needs a bit more work but it's in there and working.  The stealth system won't be in for a while until I figure out how the AI system is going to work with it and the saving systems. 

 

I want to have player housing in the game at some point.  I think it will be between Skyrim and Fallout 4.  Again this is all pretty roughly thought out and could change at any point.  But I think it will be something like the player will buy a house or shelter but that house will be totally empty.  Like Skyrim when a house is first purchased and it's empty before buying the upgrades.  That area will be marked as buildable for the player.  The player will then be able to place whatever they want to decorate their homes.  This is the part that would be similar to Fallout 4 but there won't be the part of placing walls and floors.  Almost exactly like Home Plate in Fallout 4, that prebuilt player house in the middle of Diamond City. With that all said I started roughing out the object placement mechanics for the player.  There's still a bunch of technical stuff to figure out but that was a key component that is working in game right now. 

 

The only really big remaining systems are ranged combat, magic, and stealth and all the necessary supporting stuff.  Those seem like big systems that will need a good chunk of design support behind them.  But I'm pretty close to being able to put out a proof of concept / tech demo sort of build to see what people think. 

 

On 6/21/2019 at 8:41 PM, AttritionofContrition said:

I've been rooting for your game ever since you opened this thread but I really hope you succeed, this game looks like it has more soul and thought put into it than many games that have been in development for years.

Wow, thank you.  That means a lot to me.  I also agree with you about building exposure.  Once I have enough content to feel comfortable doing a marketing push I'll probably reach out and start posting there. 

On 6/22/2019 at 2:54 AM, Just Checking said:

Nice thing about having a discord for backers is a bigger pool of people to brainstorm tier rewards with.  It'll be like crowdsourcing your crowdfunding ideas.

That's a really good idea to offer patrons rewards that go above and beyond sort of the base downloadable game.   It might be sort of tricky finding a middle ground between how much that would cost and how much reward someone gets.  Like it would be awesome to do fully customized armor sets for people but the workload for that I would only be able to do like one per month which means it would also be kind of expensive.  Definitely something to think about. 

 

I'm also starting to see why game companies have "community managers" where their entire job is just to post on the forums and update social media.  At least in my experience, putting together a decent forum post is a time consuming process.  Thinking about juggling multiple sites, discord, and other social media.  I'm probably going to put that off as long as I can which might come back to bite me in the ass.

 

 

[Just Checking]

I love the look of your town, it's so... classic?  It's got that familiar design that goes back to older fantasy games with the sagging roofs and pointed towers, kind of quirky.  Reminds me of games I played on like... Xbox original.

 

I also heard mention of magic, and I'm curious to know how you want to do that.  The Creatorslab thread from before was positively riddled with random ideas bouncing off each other, and magic, how much of it was there and how it was implemented was a pretty hot point of discussion for a while.  On one side was me, a giant fucking nerd, who was yelling all kinds of probably incredibly unreasonable ideas for how it could all work and what kind of system would make it feel the most robust.  On the other side was someone with a very different view, who was in favor of not having magic at all.  I think it might have even been a name I've seen in this thread, but I can't be sure.  There was also a guy who wanted the project redesigned to be a shooter with minimal to no melee.  That last part doesn't have anything to do with this, I just wanted to bring it up because it illustrates the actual point with this rambling tangent.  Everyone has different ideas on how things should work and what makes a game good, and because of that, knowing where you want to take this from the start gives others something to focus on and add their ideas to in context.  The Creatorslab thread had just about zero direction, it was about twelve people all yelling totally clashing things back and forth with no idea if it even fit into the scope of what the creators were thinking of doing.  From their point of view, they were trying to get a feel for what direction to take development before it really got started based on what their community wanted to see.  From our point of view, it was a free for all of disjointed thoughts with no way to bring them together because we were all picturing a different project and there was basically no such thing as a unified opinion, which surely made the creators' jobs much harder.

 

So yeah, it'd be nice to know how you want to approach something as broad as magic before I launch into wild speculation about different ways it could be done.  Ranged combat is a pretty straightforward concept, it's mostly a matter of just how you want to balance the advantage of attacking from safety.  Usually movement penalties, slower attacking speed and reduced protection are applied to players looking to shoot people so they really feel it when they don't keep their distance and make their shots count.  From there it's how you want to handle accuracy and distances.  Stealth is trickier but is the same core concept across just about all games.  Use tools and your environment to approach your objective carefully, quietly and without being seen, potentially eliminating enemies or clearing an area without having to actually fight but at the cost of needed more careful planning.  Detection functions will for sure be a bitch to program, but the founding idea is always the same, and there's a lot of great stealth games to look at for ideas.  Magic, though.  Magic's a mess and no one can agree how it works or should be presented to the player.  If you want magic in your game, this is the one that probably needs to be discussed, because making it enjoyable to play and feels like it contributes to your playstyle but also isn't totally broken or completely useless is the kind of balancing act veteran circus performers and Xiaolin monks look at and say "Yeah, no thanks"

[mosiah]

Dude, your game looks sick, can't wait to get my hands on it!

[slaen]

Thanks!  It shouldn't be too much longer until I can put out the proof of concept / tech demo.  If that goes well I should be able to start making the actual content for the game.

 

On 6/25/2019 at 4:27 PM, Just Checking said:

I also heard mention of magic, and I'm curious to know how you want to do that.

I've been sort of piecing the overall design together for the magic system recently.  Mostly cobbled together from other games that I like how they did magic.  

Skyrim I like that the player has instant gratification with magic.  Hit a button and fire shoots from your hands.  The downside was that a lot of spells felt like they were taking a back seat to dragon shouts and were sort of slightly different reskins of other spells.

 

Dragon's Dogma the spell effects are sweet.  The cast times are a cool addition but they require that the player has a companion to protect them while casting.  This sort of thing might work in a more Skyrim like game but I think it would take some balancing to make it feel fun.  

 

Fable 2 did a good job at making spells fun, easy, and accessible to everyone.  The downside was that it could turn magic into standing in one place and spamming the same button and spell over and over during combat.  

 

Oblivion I really like that a player can still cast spells with other weapons equipped.

 

Overall I want the player to feel like magic is this super powerful thing.  If the player chooses to focus purely on magic I want them to feel like a glass cannon.  Essentially Raistlin from the Dragonlance novels.  Also I really like the cliche magic stuff like the spellbook, pointy hat, and staff all just seem necessary to have in game. 

At the same time I want battlemages to be a thing.  Warriors in full plate armor throwing fireballs around.  I think the tradeoff would be that wearing heavier armor could slow down cast times or increase the amount of mana a spell required.  Something that still made the player feel powerful but also gave them a reason to consider not wearing a ton of armor.  

 

That's my starting point at least.  But base mechanics will will probably start with something close to Oblivion or Morrowind - spells being readied by hotkey, cast with another hotkey, and cost mana.

 

But I'm open to other thoughts and ideas.  Examples from other sources are always helpful too. 

Also, do you have a link to this Creatorslab thread?  I'd be curious just to dig through and check out some of the ideas since it seems like a lot of similar ground was covered. 

 

 

[FlamingNinja]

5 hours ago, slaen said:

Thanks!  It shouldn't be too much longer until I can put out the proof of concept / tech demo.  If that goes well I should be able to start making the actual content for the game.

 

I've been sort of piecing the overall design together for the magic system recently.  Mostly cobbled together from other games that I like how they did magic.  

Skyrim I like that the player has instant gratification with magic.  Hit a button and fire shoots from your hands.  The downside was that a lot of spells felt like they were taking a back seat to dragon shouts and were sort of slightly different reskins of other spells.

 

for the magic, maybe do a 'hold to cast' type deal, mixture of dogma and skyrim? with more OP spells forcing you to take more time casting them? and with the odd spell aimed directly at specific genders or races?

[Just Checking]

12 hours ago, slaen said:

Also, do you have a link to this Creatorslab thread?  I'd be curious just to dig through and check out some of the ideas since it seems like a lot of similar ground was covered. 

I'll just start off with this, no, I don't have a link.  I don't even think the original thread is accessible anymore, I think it was either deleted or hidden after a while by the people working on the project.  It was to give them some breathing room to figure out what they were doing before making info public, if I remember right.  Also I suspect it might have been so they wouldn't get daily spam from me and the other more active members on that thread arguing back and forth about whether one dumb thing or another should be in the game by default or not.

 

As for your ideas on magic, I get what you're saying about the various ways games handled it.  It's always a bit of a weird one to figure out, it seems.  Especially in terms of deciding how much of your game you want cheesed with spells.  Morrowind is a good example of that.  Amazing level of control with the magic, really fun to use, but a big reason it was so fun was how easy it could be used to completely break the balance of the game.  Between drain spells, chameleon and levitate you could just about rule the entire planet simply through making custom spells that have crazy high numbers but only like two seconds of duration.  Which is to say nothing about Elder Scrolls game breaking alchemy and enchanting exploits, which have been present in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, all in effectively the exact same way.  I guess balancing those abilities between being fun to use and not being super exploitable is harder than it looks.

 

As for your battle mages ideas, I'm reminded of the KOTOR games, in which certain force powers were restricted and couldn't be used with armor.  While I can understand longer cast times or higher costs, have you also considered restricting magic by armor type?  Traditional mage gear like robes, hoods and pointy hats allow the player to cast all spells, and maybe even enhance their power, let you rain down a veritable apocalypse on your targets but god help you if one of them lines an arrow up on you.  Light armor like leather might make higher end spells unusable, but keep access to a lot of mid tier magic, especially if you want to include mobility spells or things like invisibility.  That way stealth characters or speedy fighters can still use some handy effects for their build.  Then heavy armor is restricted to basically flat out damage and healing, like a battle mage or paladin type deal, but can't use pretty much anything else.  Hell, you could even throw in spells that tie in to the sexual elements of the game, restricted to when you're wearing revealing or erotic gear, or just when you're nude.  I imagine the easiest way to set that up would be if you're able to tag the spells, so if you're wearing something that doesn't conform to that spell's tags it's unusable.

 

The obvious exploit there is, like with Elder Scrolls and even good old Runescape, cast the spells you want while wearing mage gear, then switch out your equipment and charge in as a warrior or something.  All the advantages of a mage with all the protection of a warrior when your long range is no longer needed.  The ways to kill that problem are either make switching armor impossible in combat, losing spell effects that are already applying when the spell becomes restricted, or making changing your gear something you can't do in the field, like in the Monster Hunter games.  I feel like that would work under the pretense that fastening armor, warding your robes, or tightening the sixty five belts your edgy assassin needs on his leathers take too long and attract too much attention to devote time to when you could be attacked by nearby enemies.  I personally favor the no switching gear in the field idea.  It's more restricting on the player, but it also means you're committing to a play style when you head out, and you need to actually consider the situation you're about to go into ahead of time.  No inventory full of enchanted gear that you just swap to when you need it.  Simple things like jewelry and your weapons, fair enough, switch them however you want, but no one should be able to run up to a guy with robes, blast his ass with a giant fireball, then rifle through his pack to put on platemail before the other poor bastard even has a chance to get a good look at him.  I'd say make your equipment something you switch when you're at home or an inn, somewhere safe where your guy has time to be doing that, and learned spells become unavailable if your armor doesn't match up to the spell's acceptable attire choices.

 

Another option, a bit more simple, is spells are tied direction to gear.  Maybe you find gloves that contain lightning bolt, a helmet that contains healing, body armor that speeds up your weapon swings and a ring that disables traps or something.  Kind of like "cast when used" enchantments from Morrowind.  That could work too, and if you couple that with the limited armor swapping idea from above, you've got a way to choose a build based on what spells and gear you want at the same time, and then locking in when you go adventuring.  The problem with this one is it relies on one of two setups, the first being randomized loot, and I've played enough randomized loot games to know how real the grind for that perfect setup is.  It might turn building your character into a chore of murdering the same enemy or running one dungeon over and over until you get that one piece of gear you want with just the right randomized effects.  The other setup is binding spells into your gear yourself, but then that just becomes picking and choosing what you want, and if you want to balance it, it'll probably still end up like the restricted armor types I mentioned above.

[slaen]

Reworked some of the sex system stuff that just wasn't working.  It was mostly from the ui that I put in.  At first an animation would just start playing when an NPC interacted with a knocked down player but now it will open up a menu with a selection of available positions.  In some ways it's sort of a consent menu since at this point it's easy enough to hit the exit button and skip the entire thing.  

 

There's also one more animation to finish that's roughly half way done and then there will be an animation to cover every gender combination.  

 

Practiced a bunch of AI stuff.  This project is the first time I've worked with behavior trees and there's lot's a pieces that I'm still figuring out how to use correctly and also how those interact with the other systems I have already in place.  Like right now loading a save file doesn't seem to load blackboard data which breaks some behaviors.  I think it's just a matter of saving that data onto the pawn itself but like I said, I'm still learning.  The in game AI will probably be very basic for the first few builds and I'll slowly try to add functionality as time goes on. 

 

On 6/30/2019 at 4:24 PM, FlamingNinja said:

for the magic, maybe do a 'hold to cast' type deal, mixture of dogma and skyrim? with more OP spells forcing you to take more time casting them? and with the odd spell aimed directly at specific genders or races?

I agree with you.  Probably do something along the lines of charging some spells up too with the longer the player charges the spell the more damage, faster, more aoe type of effect it could have.  It also seems like having an entire spell tree dedicated to something like lust magic would be pretty fun.

On 7/1/2019 at 12:43 AM, Just Checking said:

As for your ideas on magic

Hah, you're right that was the fun part of Morrowind, being able to completely break the system.  I'm mostly alright with that sort of thing as super end game content.  I think you're right with the balancing being a tricky thing and finding that point where it's fun and powerful but not so broken that it ends up being boring to keep playing.  

 

I like the idea of limiting certain spells based upon armor type.  That's cool.  A battle mage could still feel like almost a death tank but also give the player a reason and different experience if they play a pure robe wearing mage.  

 

I understand what you're saying about people that want to switch armor mid fight to get the best of both worlds.  I want to see how this system feels once it's actually in the game and see how people actually play.  If I can avoid restricting the player switching armor I would like to do that.  In a lot of things I'm trying to steer away from mechanics that might feel punishing or restrictive.  It's more that Fable 2 / Skyrim vibe that I'm leaning towards rather than Dark Souls.  It's a good idea I just think the tone doesn't quite fit.  

 

And the spells and abilities tied to gear.  There will probably be magic wands or spells the player can cast with a staff like Skyrim.  But this is a personal preference where I've never liked abilities tied directly to gear. 

 

[Just Checking]

5 hours ago, slaen said:

I understand what you're saying about people that want to switch armor mid fight to get the best of both worlds.  I want to see how this system feels once it's actually in the game and see how people actually play.  If I can avoid restricting the player switching armor I would like to do that.  In a lot of things I'm trying to steer away from mechanics that might feel punishing or restrictive.  It's more that Fable 2 / Skyrim vibe that I'm leaning towards rather than Dark Souls.  It's a good idea I just think the tone doesn't quite fit.  

Don't get me wrong, if you want to leave things totally up to the player, that's perfectly fair, I just think immediately of how to break a game when I see certain systems.  I think the games I like to play just predispose me to finding ways to exploit what I'm given.  And like I said before, the explotability is actually pretty fun in a lot of games.  Maybe the idea that AAA titles try so hard to balance their games and actually remove these exploits made me forget that they also limit how the player can approach problems.  As any of my friends will angrily tell you, I have complained nearly endlessly about how restricting Skyrim felt compared to Oblivion and Morrowind, and a good portion of that probably does boil down to the devs trying so hard to balance the game that they lose part of what I loved about earlier titles.

 

The point is do whatever you want, if you enjoy it other people will too.  And good luck with the AI, I can imagine that's going to be a tricky one.  

[FlamingNinja]

On 7/2/2019 at 3:41 PM, slaen said:

Hah, you're right that was the fun part of Morrowind, being able to completely break the system.  I'm mostly alright with that sort of thing as super end game content.  I think you're right with the balancing being a tricky thing and finding that point where it's fun and powerful but not so broken that it ends up being boring to keep playing.  

 

 

Skyrim has that wonderful feature with the 'god player' exploit. be able to one-punch Alduin or any obscenely powerful boss by somehow enchanting armour to give anything upto 2 million times its stats. fisticuffs playthrough anybody?

[slaen]

Proof of Concept 1.0 download

 

A few words of warning:
This is a proof of concept.  There is very little actual content it's more a demonstration of the game systems.  It shows the systems that are currently in the game, running, and hopefully being stable. 

 

It's a build for 64 bit windows.  I have no idea the minimum system req's.  I'm running an i7 3.7 ghz 32 gb ram and a gtx 970 and I get pretty solid frame rates. 

 

The spawners will spawn hostile NPCs.  After they are spawned they will pause for roughly 5 seconds and then attack the player.  Nothing else is hostile.  

 

If you hit the goblin girl she will play an explosion sound and fx.  Just be warned if your speakers or headphones are at a high volume.  The goblin also doesn't have any scenes yet.  

The UI is only meant to be functional and not pretty at this point.  That actually holds true for must of the stuff that is there currently.  

 

If the player and the NPC they are playing a scene with are on uneven terrain then their animations won't line up currently.  Just found another bug when multiple NPCs try to initiate a scene with the player things get buggy.  I threw in a temporary bandaid but it won't cover everything so just be aware if there are multiple hostile NPCs around it might break things.   

 

The tavern is the only building the player can enter.  There isn't anything there it's just to demonstrate entering / exiting a building transition.  

 

ctrl to crouch, alt to walk, shift to sprint, r to ready weapons, left click to attack, mostly skyrim like controls.  I left sprint really fast if someone wants to explore the map.  There's no actual content out there just empty terrain. 

 

There is no hotkey editor yet.  That's on the to do list still.  

 

But this hopefully proves that I have the abilities and the core functionality required to create an open world rpg similar to Skyrim.  The only major systems to still add to the game are the thieving system, the magic, and some decent AI.  

 

The sex system I want to make a bunch of tweaks to.  The finish / outro animation ends suddenly and then boots the player out of the whole thing.  It's pretty abrupt.  I'm thinking that it will go into another loop for both characters when the scene is finished.  This should allow the player to choose to exit out or choose another scene to play.  There's also an intro animation / idle that I need to put in there I think. 

 

If anyone experiences hard crashes or lockups please let me know.

[Taupeswift]

I played through it and it looks amazing for a Proof of Concept! I didn't notice any issues aside from the ones you have pointed out and there were no crashes or anything. Great job! ?

[Just Checking]

Hey I checked you Proof of Concept, blown away by how nice the character customization is, particularly with the quality of the color control and such.  You can put together some really nice hair and eye colors.  I did notice the hair seems to interact oddly with the lighting, making it look, for example, blue from one angle and blond from another, but that's either going to be worked out, or be left in deliberately as a "hey check out this cool hair thing".  Personally, if it does get worked out, I'd appreciate the option to still be able to use it, magic color changing chromatic hair sounds kind of fun.  Other than that, face shapes are good and don't come out looking really weird and blocky like I've seen in some other unreal engine projects.  It could benefit from the ability to alter the angle on a couple things, eyes and eyebrows namely, but it's hardly a problem without that.  Also I just want to say characters' skin looks good.  At the risk of sounding kind of... serial killer-y, I find skin quality is always really important to how good something looks, low quality skin textures can ruin really nicely sculpted characters and high quality skin can help you look past even the weirdest shapes.  

 

Animations are solid and almost entirely smooth, the only real issue I saw was slight looping jank on the cowgirl animation.  So far it looks like it's coming together pretty well for just being the proof of concept.  Can't wait to see how it gets expanded on.  Oh, I did run around the area a whole bunch with the crazy high powered sprint.  Wanted to check the gravity and stuff so I ran and jumped off the side of a mountain, landed back in the middle of town inside a building.  I was worried I'd gone so fast I broke something until I realized all the buildings had no collisions yet.

 

For those who are interested but can't or don't want to play this little tech demo, here's a screenshot I took after setting all the body sliders to max and messing around with hair and eye color.  How does she get around on those feet with calves like that?  Maybe we'll never know.

[TheShadowVixen]

Was able to check it out for a bit. I gotta say I am very impressed with what you have been able to accomplish so far. I really like the character customization, I was able to make a character that should be a boss in this game. The animations were very well done, though im sure they could use some work. But for a first iteration they worked very well. I'm very interested to see how you were able to make this framework, unreal has never been my forte hence why I have started using unity. I am very excited to see where this goes. Keep up the amazing work!