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

[Just Checking]

7 hours ago, Froggy said:

As my mouse hovered over the link to this thread I wondered to myself "How many lines will it be before there's a link to a Patreon page?"

 

A: 4

In fairness that is pretty new.  

[AttritionofContrition]

On 8/27/2019 at 12:10 PM, slaen said:

I also began implementing a system for lust into the game.  It's taking inspiration from Corruption of Champions.  The player has a lust meter (in pink) over their health bar.  When that bar is filled the player will be stunned and unable to act until their lust is taken care of.   Now I need to make the assets for taking care of that lust - animations for male and female anatomy, and eventually things like a potion option or a magic spell option.

I was wondering what that bar was for. Could open up some interesting possibilities like instead of stabbing someone in the back from stealth you could grope them to stun them. Or you could cast a spell like "frenzy" from skyrim but rather than attacking the nearest person they grapple them. When someone's stuck in that "lust" state will enemies be able to jump them as if they were defeated? Or maybe it will tie into the grappling system you mentioned earlier?

[slaen]

Did a bunch of marketing stuff this week and updated the patreon page.  Tried to make the banner a bit more polished and put together some quick demo videos for the page too, which I've never really done any video editing.  I literally had no idea you could edit videos in photoshop before this week. 

 

Also had a chance to do the facial shapes for goblins.  Those are all set and the rig has been updated now when I get a chance to do a polish pass on the goblin animations I'll try to get some facial animations in there as well.

 

Quest Design Notes:

 

The project is finally at the point where I feel comfortable looking at something like quest design and starting to figure out how that should look.  The way quests are made I'd like to tie in closely to the characters stats system and the overall playstyle of the player.  For instance, taking a look back at the original Fallout, quests were able to be solved in multiple ways which would play to the strengths of specific builds.  Generally the quest solutions fell into categories of combat, speech, and stealth.  Which when loosely translated over to a fantasy rpg come out as fighter, mage, thief.  

 

The initial quest I'm looking at I want to do multiple things.

• Help support the overall feel and theme of the game and the world.  
• Offer the player multiple solutions and interesting choices.  
• Deliver consequences to those choices.
• Be fun and engaging.
• Serve as a proof of concept and a template for quest design and systems moving forward.  

 

Spoilers for the first quest design - just in case.  I don't know if it matters at this point and the quest will probably shift and change as it's being worked on.  This is all at the point of brainstorming as well and will most likely get trimmed down a lot.  

 

The barmaid from the tavern has gone missing.  The tavern keeper wants the player to find her otherwise he'll have to serve the drinks himself.  The player can find out about the quest in 3 ways.  They can speak to the tavern keeper directly, they can hear about it from one of the town guards as the tavern keeper asked the guards for help already, or they can stumble upon the barmaid themselves out in the world.  Finding the girl should be easy they will point the player in the general direction of an old cave or mine outside of town.  

Going to the cave will reveal that it is inhabited by imps (or something similar).  The player then has a number of choices:

 

The warrior path would involve attacking the imps on sight, fighting and killing everything inside of the cave, finding the girl and then returning her to town.
 
The thief approach I'm not entirely certain about.  They could sneak in at night while the imps are asleep and free the girl, sneaking her back out.  The downside here is making the player wait until a specific hour that is sort of difficult to communicate to the player.  They could just treat it similar to the warrior path but stealthily kill all of the imps (similar to Skyrim).  They could find a way to poison or drug the imps and rescue the girl when the imps are incapacitated.  

 

The mage path is also only loosely designed. It could be a simple combat encounter where the player just blasts through the imps with destruction magic.  Or the player could use invisibility to walk past the imps.  Or they could cast a charm spell on one of the imps and have that imp as an ambassador to bring them through the cave and then argue on the player's behalf that the imps should release the girl.  

 

There would also be the speech check tree.  The player would need to talk their way past the imp guarding the entrance and then plead with the imp leader to release the girl.  

 

But now there's the need to support the world and themes of the game.  When the player finds the barmaid she will generally be being "entertained" by multiple imps.  She seems to be enjoying herself as do the imps.  If the player tries to talk through this situation the imps will want something in return.  The player could trade places with the barmaid and help the imps relieve some stress, letting the barmaid return to her duties in town.  The player could trade a follower for the barmaid (of course this would need to wait on a follower system being implemented first).  The player could just join in with the imps in entertaining the barmaid.  She wouldn't be set free but she really wouldn't mind at that point either.  

 

So at that point to finish with the world building there just needs to be a bit of motivation for the barmaid and for the imps.  Granted it could be kept one dimensional as "they wanted to" but that misses the opportunity for adding some story into the game.  I was thinking something like imps generally have a mindset in that they want to corrupt people in the world.  By corrupt I mean introducing human's to their more carnal needs and desires and then encouraging the indulgence of those needs and desires.  The barmaid has also been entertained by the imps once or twice before and will almost certainly end up doing it again in the future (possibly leading to future quests).  

 

Consequences to the player's actions.  I would need to implement a reputation system for these ideas but I don't think that would be too tough to layer into the faction system.  If the player rescues the barmaid by killing all of the imps in front of her she isn't too happy about the situation and has a negative reaction to the player but the tavern keeper is happy and reacts better to the player.  Imps in the future will also be a bit more hostile towards the player.  If the girl is rescued and the imps are alive then the barmaid and tavern keeper both react better towards the player and the imps, depending on how they were handled, will also react better towards the player.  If the player switches places with the barmaid then the imps really like the player more and the barmaid might end up a little jealous after a skill check, and the tavern keeper is just happy to have his help back. There's a number of other combinations based on differing solutions but the general idea is that some people are happy and some aren't.  The parties that end up being happy will react better to the player, offer their services for cheaper, or just unlock specific "reward" scenes or possibly even be the start of a romantic storyline.  

 

What is the player's motivation?  Other than the meta reason of that it is a quest that they were given.  Why would their character want to do this?  They want to be the hero and save the damsel in distress even though it isn't really the typical distress as other games.  They are interested romantically in the tavern keeper and want to impress him.  It could be part of a chain of quests to unlock a permanent room in the tavern for the player.  Maybe there needs to be more context to facilitate player motivation?  Imps have been harassing the player and this is a bit of payback.  Imps have already run off with other women from the town.  Imps have already been trying to corrupt the player and this is just the next step in a long chain of quests and events.  This would give the player the motivation of either fighting or giving in to the corruption or perhaps just trying to find out the imp's motivations.  Are they working for some larger purpose?  Is someone pulling their strings?   

 

The final option would be the scorched earth route.  The player attacks and kills everyone and every thing in sight.  The game becomes one long combat encounter puzzle.  But I also feel that this option is necessary to give the player, even if they don't take it, just knowing that the option is there I feel makes the world more immersive.

 

Am I missing anything?  Did I forget something?  Is there a different playstyle that I'm neglecting?  I'm also trying to keep things relatively simple and self contained to the quest and a few NPCs and not let it get really out of scope. 

 

 

 

---

 

Hah, Just Checking I've been working to get the slime girl nice and jiggly but I've run into a handful of roadblocks so far.  One of which I'm still troubleshooting is the jiggle physics on joints.  I think it depends on the framerate.  If I tweak the physics for when the game is running smoothly then any time it starts to slow down or I leave a lot of stuff running in the background the physics will start going crazy and fly all over the place.  If you check out the goblin girl scenes currently you can see this happening especially in her faster cowgirl animation.  Oh, and the other headache is the transparency stuff on the slime girl body.  One or two overlapping layers I can make look alright but three or four the z sorting issues start to look terrible.  Which happens any time her arm is in front of her body.  I'm still testing things but I think it's going to come down to a point of looking decent and performing well, at least to begin with, and then hopefully doing a polish pass on her in the future. 

 

22 hours ago, AttritionofContrition said:

I was wondering what that bar was for. Could open up some interesting possibilities like instead of stabbing someone in the back from stealth you could grope them to stun them. Or you could cast a spell like "frenzy" from skyrim but rather than attacking the nearest person they grapple them. When someone's stuck in that "lust" state will enemies be able to jump them as if they were defeated? Or maybe it will tie into the grappling system you mentioned earlier?

Nice, I hadn't thought about the frenzy spell from Skyrim before I'll try to test that out.  As for the lust state, I'm thinking that the character would be defenseless like that and at least initially would be treated like they're in that defeated state.  It might tie in with the grappling system.  That was actually part of the reason I started working on the lust system since I'm picturing the initial grapples to be lust type attacks so I needed a stat that they could damage.  I think a lot of this will need to be tested out to make sure it's fun and not just frustrating.  I'm worried that it could play like getting stun locked in other games and I'm trying to avoid that.  As a side note that's also why I don't have hit reactions in the game right now.  The first implementation of hit reactions played an animation but that animation would break any other animation that was already playing, including the melee swing.  Which meant that whoever got in the first attack would be able to stun-lock their opponent.  It made combat really annoying. 

 

[UmbiCs]

Man i love short stacks, short thick girls are the best, the goblin lady looks awesome, this game looks quite promising, and the models look great as well, keep up the good work:)

[Screws]

@slaen Well, you could even have a character backstory option where a player can select one during character creation which might give them minor bonuses to skills and might provide their own RPG-like motivation. I'd suggest making it entirely optional to be a bloodthirsty hero or what not. Kinda like the anime Goblin Slayer who kills all goblins on sight, basically just your typical DND hero murder hobo that sees bad monsters and culls them. Or perhaps you can be more openminded and engage in a more... peaceable way of solving problems. There are some games where you essentially 'defeat' monsters by screwing them, which could be an alternative choice in which case you might have to develop some 'sex skills' or something. Theres a lot of ways you can go about this. I'd recommend maybe making a suggestions thread where people could pop up some ideas to ya, or where you could ask a question and see others responses on how they'd go about it. If anything it helps the brainstorming and conception progression if you don't exactly know what you want to do.

I'd also say if possible maybe implement a random quest system with very vague parameters. Like "Oh this person/persons have been kidnapped by (Insert monster/s here) and they are in (This direction from the current location) rescue them!" It would spawn monsters with their captive wherever in the direction that the player was told within a certain area or you could have preset spawn points for these random quests. Take the game Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War. Essentially you would have random missions but with predefined locations. Something similar could be implemented here.

[Screws]

By the way pacify spell could work too from skyrim.

 

There is another game that is working on something similar on Patreon. I believe its called Magical Investigation or Magical Girl Investigation or something. Blonde haired witch protagonist playing through an RPG like experience fighting monsters and such. Maybe some ideas could be gleamed from how they are doing their thing.

[AttritionofContrition]

21 hours ago, slaen said:

Am I missing anything?  Did I forget something?  Is there a different playstyle that I'm neglecting?  I'm also trying to keep things relatively simple and self contained to the quest and a few NPCs and not let it get really out of scope.

That is considerably more than what I was expecting, it all sounds really great but also sounds like it would be a massive amount of work per quest. Not only do you have to balance the combat encounters for all 3 styles but you have to consider the environment itself for stealth play. Skyrim also ran into similar issues when playing on higher difficulties as ranged and especially magic, the problem being that some dungeons were too cramped and did not allow much in the way of kiting or giving you enough distance to kill a group before they surround you. Having said that I think it's a terrific idea to have quests be so open ended with actual consequences beyond a disposition change, and as Synlaine said, you could always pepper towns with smaller, less in depth "random" quests so if someone just wants to fight or screw (or be screwed by) something they can do so easily.

Speaking of character builds, how are you going to handle progression? Through experience or more like the elder scrolls where you have skills that govern spells/abilities that have to be raised by use?

[Screws]

Could even have it like some games where you are awarded skillpoints for quests. Though personally I think a Fable system would be nice, where you get experience based on the style you are using. Old School fable had it where if you used a ranged weapon you got ranged experience, magic would give you magical experience, etc. Of course getting experience in those would increase your height, magical aura, and musculature from melee, respectively. I mean getting experience from performing actions related to a certain skillset sounds like it would be nice.

Though the skyrim approach might be best.

[slaen]

 

AI can now hear things.  This is the start of putting stealth mechanics into the game.  For testing right now, human characters trigger a noise event when they run or walk.  AI will perceive this noise event and if they aren't already doing something they'll walk over to check out the noise.  AI will probably get confused if there are multiple sources of sound right since I haven't put any logic in to differentiate targets and sound sources yet.  

 

The beginning of the sneak skill is working if the player crouches (ctrl key to toggle) and moves they won't make any noise.  AI will still be able to see the player if the player happens to be in their cone of vision.  

 

The next steps will be testing noise events from things like projectiles and environment objects, probably adding a skill modifier on top of the crouching that will modify the player's chances of being detected, possibly a "detection level" and ui similar to Skyrim's opening and closing eye crosshair system.  

 

The screenshot is the in game debug visualization for the perception system.  The values are all placeholder but the yellow circle is hearing radius, the green circle is the visual radius, and the pink is where an already detected stimulus will be lost.  The green squares on the ground are the chunks of the navmesh that the AI is currently using to pathfind to their target.  The yellow sphere is the last location of a noise event that the AI detected and the green spheres are the sight events. 

 

 

On 9/3/2019 at 1:03 PM, UmbiCs said:

Man i love short stacks, short thick girls are the best, the goblin lady looks awesome, this game looks quite promising, and the models look great as well, keep up the good work:)

Thanks!  I agree you can't go wrong with short curvy women.  There's one more race of shortstacks that I'm thinking of doing but first I want to cover a few other body types with other races and also the male variants.  But there will be more shortstack content in the future. 

 

On 9/4/2019 at 11:16 AM, AttritionofContrition said:

That is considerably more than what I was expecting, it all sounds really great but also sounds like it would be a massive amount of work per quest. Not only do you have to balance the combat encounters for all 3 styles but you have to consider the environment itself for stealth play. Skyrim also ran into similar issues when playing on higher difficulties as ranged and especially magic, the problem being that some dungeons were too cramped and did not allow much in the way of kiting or giving you enough distance to kill a group before they surround you. Having said that I think it's a terrific idea to have quests be so open ended with actual consequences beyond a disposition change, and as Synlaine said, you could always pepper towns with smaller, less in depth "random" quests so if someone just wants to fight or screw (or be screwed by) something they can do so easily.

Speaking of character builds, how are you going to handle progression? Through experience or more like the elder scrolls where you have skills that govern spells/abilities that

have to be raised by use?

It definitely would be a ton of work if every quest needed this level of options.  I think in the Fallout postmortem they only had all of the options on quests from the main quest line and then side quests would only have one or two options instead.  But you're right the physical layout of levels will need to be tied in to the quest design at least for the more complicated quests.  I'm debating on whether or not I should deviate from the more linear dungeons of Skyrim and go back to something more along the lines of say Daggerfall's dungeons with multiple branching paths to explore. 

 

Character builds I'm still figuring out.  That's part of the reason for starting to work on quest design and figure out the interplay between stats and gameplay.  I do like Skyrim's  organic system and not needing to worry about a character build as much as in something like Morrowind.  I think there are a few flaws with the system though.  I remember doing one build where I was working on my blacksmithing skill and spent a bunch of time just leveling up blacksmithing and making new armor the downside was then when I left town I had no combat skills and combat was a major pain to deal with.  Which would be fine if Skyrim wasn't so combat focused. 

 

What I'm currently leaning towards would be a system similar to the original Fallout.  Character stats for things like strength, intelligence, dexterity, which influence the starting values for a set of skills.  Then the player would earn experience through their actions in game and when they level up be able to choose to increase 3 of their skills.  This of course isn't set in stone and I'm be open to other ideas.  Why I'm leaning this way is that I think it would be easier to design for and then balance for the game.  I just look at how unbalanced some skills and builds in Skyrim are and I worry that would be a lot to try to handle and make fun.  It would be a good challenge though. 

 

On 9/5/2019 at 4:32 PM, Synlaine said:

Could even have it like some games where you are awarded skillpoints for quests. Though personally I think a Fable system would be nice, where you get experience based on the style you are using. Old School fable had it where if you used a ranged weapon you got ranged experience, magic would give you magical experience, etc. Of course getting experience in those would increase your height, magical aura, and musculature from melee, respectively. I mean getting experience from performing actions related to a certain skillset sounds like it would be nice.

Though the skyrim approach might be best.

Great point about having different character back stories.  That really reminds me of how Arcanum handled things:

"Frankenstein Monster
You were reanimated by a mad scientist from various body parts he found at grave sites, but somehow you escaped from the laboratory. You are very well constructed, gaining bonuses to Strength (+4), Constitution (+4), Electrical Resistance (+30%), and Poison Resistance (+20%), but you have very slow Dexterity (-6), a damaged brain-larynx connection (you use dumb dialog options), and a susceptibility to fire, Fire Resistance (-20%). You also start out with no money whatsoever."

Just an example but they did a great job with using their stat system and combining that with the roleplaying elements. 

 

I totally agree with you about giving the player the choice of whether or not to be a murder hobo or play more peacefully.  With the sex skills and gameplay I do want to make it possible to "solve" encounters in some sexual way.  But I'm not totally sure how to do that in a fun way.  There's also the restriction of animation time.  I was looking at Monster Girl Dreams and they did a great job with handling a ton of different position and style options during combat.  But it's also a text based game so they didn't have the need to make all of those animations and then transition between all of them.  It's not out of the question but at least the initial versions will probably be just exhausting the opponent through sex and leaving them lying on the ground catching their breath.  

 

The quest design I've thought about how to write quests like what you're talking about with the procedurally generated content at random locations. It's a lot like Skryim's radiant quests.  Random innkeeper sends you to random dungeon to free random person and collect the reward after.  It's a good idea just need to figure out all the basic building blocks and then how to actually program it all. 

 

Oh yeah, Mithos56's project Magical Investigation of Meridiana.  I've been keeping an eye on that project too.  It really helps to see how other people have tackled similar issues. 

 

I thought about doing the experience orbs from Fable as well.  and the character changes based upon your skills is a really cool idea.  But the problem for me was that I didn't like some of the aesthetics of the changes but I wanted the skill increases.  Like ranged weapon skills would make your character taller and I just thought my character started to look weird once they got to a certain height so I would actually roll back that skill to keep my character looking the way I wanted and just never increase the ranged weapon skill after that.  So I would want to have those things be independent I want the player to have control over how their character looks and how they play.  I do like the experience orbs though.  They're really cool how they pop out of enemies and then need to be gathered up after combat it makes the gathering of experience a more direct action and a bit less abstract. 

 

But what part of the Fable system did you like the best?  The direct connection between the skill use and experience?  The character changes?  or was it soemthing else?  Do other leveling and experience systems make a game less fun?  For me personally I remember enjoying the original Fallout and leveling up because every few levels meant choosing a new perk and the perks just felt really well done and added to the overall feel and tone of the game. But that's also a much more pen and paper / abstract skill system compared to Skyrim.

 

 

[AttritionofContrition]

2 hours ago, slaen said:

Character builds I'm still figuring out.  That's part of the reason for starting to work on quest design and figure out the interplay between stats and gameplay.  I do like Skyrim's  organic system and not needing to worry about a character build as much as in something like Morrowind.  I think there are a few flaws with the system though.  I remember doing one build where I was working on my blacksmithing skill and spent a bunch of time just leveling up blacksmithing and making new armor the downside was then when I left town I had no combat skills and combat was a major pain to deal with.  Which would be fine if Skyrim wasn't so combat focused. 

What I'm currently leaning towards would be a system similar to the original Fallout.  Character stats for things like strength, intelligence, dexterity, which influence the starting values for a set of skills.  Then the player would earn experience through their actions in game and when they level up be able to choose to increase 3 of their skills.  This of course isn't set in stone and I'm be open to other ideas.  Why I'm leaning this way is that I think it would be easier to design for and then balance for the game.  I just look at how unbalanced some skills and builds in Skyrim are and I worry that would be a lot to try to handle and make fun.  It would be a good challenge though.
 

But what part of the Fable system did you like the best?  The direct connection between the skill use and experience?  The character changes?  or was it soemthing else?  Do other leveling and experience systems make a game less fun?  For me personally I remember enjoying the original Fallout and leveling up because every few levels meant choosing a new perk and the perks just felt really well done and added to the overall feel and tone of the game. But that's also a much more pen and paper / abstract skill system compared to Skyrim.

Skyrims biggest problem in that regard is level scaling. Or rather, how it was handled. I dislike level scaling in games generally so I'm a bit biased but having your crafting tie into your overall "combat" level was a really bad decision in my opinion. A more traditional leveling system would suit me just fine, I like the elder scrolls style too but I always miss the exp rewards for completing quests and tasks.

Kingdoms of Amalur had an interesting "class" system called destinies where if you spent a certain amount of points in one or more trees you would unlock "classes" that offered certain perks. If you spent so many points in the finesse/sorcery trees for example, you would unlock a selectable class that, when activated, gave you a bonus to your piercing and elemental damage. The more you spend in both trees the more the bonuses would roll in such as increased mana regen, a passive aura that reduced an enemies magical resistance when they land a blow, etc. That might be a bit over the top but your Str/int/dex split reminded me of that right away.

I haven't played fable since I was a teenager but what I remember loving most about it was the journey, from the start as a helpless child to the end where you're a 10 foot greek god. Seeing a character physically change like that over the course of the game was really amazing and different at the time, I can't recall a game ever attempting something quite like that since. However, character appearance is much more important here so I don't think such a system would be a good fit for it as you say. There was something oddly satisfying about collecting those exp orbs though now that you mention it...I might have to replay through the anniversary edition.

Personally, I'd love it if you made the game difficult with a bunch of perks and possible builds like fallout 1/2 but besides the fact that this would go against the style of the game most people probably aren't looking for something too complex in a game that they've been drawn in by the porn side of it. In the end you'll probably just have to find a compromise between what is most fun and what is easiest to balance as a single dev. Looking forward to giving it a spin, whatever you decide.

[Screws]

On 9/10/2019 at 4:32 PM, slaen said:

 

AI can now hear things.  This is the start of putting stealth mechanics into the game.  For testing right now, human characters trigger a noise event when they run or walk.  AI will perceive this noise event and if they aren't already doing something they'll walk over to check out the noise.  AI will probably get confused if there are multiple sources of sound right since I haven't put any logic in to differentiate targets and sound sources yet.  

 

The beginning of the sneak skill is working if the player crouches (ctrl key to toggle) and moves they won't make any noise.  AI will still be able to see the player if the player happens to be in their cone of vision.  

 

The next steps will be testing noise events from things like projectiles and environment objects, probably adding a skill modifier on top of the crouching that will modify the player's chances of being detected, possibly a "detection level" and ui similar to Skyrim's opening and closing eye crosshair system.  

 

The screenshot is the in game debug visualization for the perception system.  The values are all placeholder but the yellow circle is hearing radius, the green circle is the visual radius, and the pink is where an already detected stimulus will be lost.  The green squares on the ground are the chunks of the navmesh that the AI is currently using to pathfind to their target.  The yellow sphere is the last location of a noise event that the AI detected and the green spheres are the sight events. 

 

 

Thanks!  I agree you can't go wrong with short curvy women.  There's one more race of shortstacks that I'm thinking of doing but first I want to cover a few other body types with other races and also the male variants.  But there will be more shortstack content in the future. 

 

It definitely would be a ton of work if every quest needed this level of options.  I think in the Fallout postmortem they only had all of the options on quests from the main quest line and then side quests would only have one or two options instead.  But you're right the physical layout of levels will need to be tied in to the quest design at least for the more complicated quests.  I'm debating on whether or not I should deviate from the more linear dungeons of Skyrim and go back to something more along the lines of say Daggerfall's dungeons with multiple branching paths to explore. 

 

Character builds I'm still figuring out.  That's part of the reason for starting to work on quest design and figure out the interplay between stats and gameplay.  I do like Skyrim's  organic system and not needing to worry about a character build as much as in something like Morrowind.  I think there are a few flaws with the system though.  I remember doing one build where I was working on my blacksmithing skill and spent a bunch of time just leveling up blacksmithing and making new armor the downside was then when I left town I had no combat skills and combat was a major pain to deal with.  Which would be fine if Skyrim wasn't so combat focused. 

 

What I'm currently leaning towards would be a system similar to the original Fallout.  Character stats for things like strength, intelligence, dexterity, which influence the starting values for a set of skills.  Then the player would earn experience through their actions in game and when they level up be able to choose to increase 3 of their skills.  This of course isn't set in stone and I'm be open to other ideas.  Why I'm leaning this way is that I think it would be easier to design for and then balance for the game.  I just look at how unbalanced some skills and builds in Skyrim are and I worry that would be a lot to try to handle and make fun.  It would be a good challenge though. 

 

Great point about having different character back stories.  That really reminds me of how Arcanum handled things:

"Frankenstein Monster
You were reanimated by a mad scientist from various body parts he found at grave sites, but somehow you escaped from the laboratory. You are very well constructed, gaining bonuses to Strength (+4), Constitution (+4), Electrical Resistance (+30%), and Poison Resistance (+20%), but you have very slow Dexterity (-6), a damaged brain-larynx connection (you use dumb dialog options), and a susceptibility to fire, Fire Resistance (-20%). You also start out with no money whatsoever."

Just an example but they did a great job with using their stat system and combining that with the roleplaying elements. 

 

I totally agree with you about giving the player the choice of whether or not to be a murder hobo or play more peacefully.  With the sex skills and gameplay I do want to make it possible to "solve" encounters in some sexual way.  But I'm not totally sure how to do that in a fun way.  There's also the restriction of animation time.  I was looking at Monster Girl Dreams and they did a great job with handling a ton of different position and style options during combat.  But it's also a text based game so they didn't have the need to make all of those animations and then transition between all of them.  It's not out of the question but at least the initial versions will probably be just exhausting the opponent through sex and leaving them lying on the ground catching their breath.  

 

The quest design I've thought about how to write quests like what you're talking about with the procedurally generated content at random locations. It's a lot like Skryim's radiant quests.  Random innkeeper sends you to random dungeon to free random person and collect the reward after.  It's a good idea just need to figure out all the basic building blocks and then how to actually program it all. 

 

Oh yeah, Mithos56's project Magical Investigation of Meridiana.  I've been keeping an eye on that project too.  It really helps to see how other people have tackled similar issues. 

 

I thought about doing the experience orbs from Fable as well.  and the character changes based upon your skills is a really cool idea.  But the problem for me was that I didn't like some of the aesthetics of the changes but I wanted the skill increases.  Like ranged weapon skills would make your character taller and I just thought my character started to look weird once they got to a certain height so I would actually roll back that skill to keep my character looking the way I wanted and just never increase the ranged weapon skill after that.  So I would want to have those things be independent I want the player to have control over how their character looks and how they play.  I do like the experience orbs though.  They're really cool how they pop out of enemies and then need to be gathered up after combat it makes the gathering of experience a more direct action and a bit less abstract. 

 

But what part of the Fable system did you like the best?  The direct connection between the skill use and experience?  The character changes?  or was it soemthing else?  Do other leveling and experience systems make a game less fun?  For me personally I remember enjoying the original Fallout and leveling up because every few levels meant choosing a new perk and the perks just felt really well done and added to the overall feel and tone of the game. But that's also a much more pen and paper / abstract skill system compared to Skyrim.

 

 

I mean I think character changes should be left in the customization menu, but experience for doing skillrelated things was my favorite. It made sense a melee fighter would gain melee experience and not suddenly be able to cast an inferno that destroys half the continent XD I mean definitely a customization shop in game, where one can go to change their appearance and such. Instead of experience orbs just award experience directly in a numerical value. Spend experience points instead of just earning a solid point to spend to something. Like say one skill is valued at 400 ranged experience and you earned up to 563 on shooting up some gobbos or something. I'd look to Fable 1-2 for the RPG aspects but I will say Fable 3 did a pretty great job in combat and they did have in combat animations that would trigger. Which could be the way you could go about handling sexual combat. I'd even say research a bunch of 2D platformer sex based games, some of them tackle sex as in defeating an enemy and dropping them into the weakened state like you have right now, but others feature it where you actively perform an ability to initiate a scene.

[Screws]

To be honest, more customization and approaches on how to do things in an RPG is always a good thing. You make the game more of an RPG the more choices and options you give to players. People look for that sandboxy feel and I think Fable 2 possibly did it the best in all the fable games. Fable 1 and 3 both roped ya into singular plotlines more or less, Though Fable 1 did offer more Roleplayability choices then Fable 3. Fable 2 offered the most choices and interesting gameplay in my opinion but Fable 3 did do combat the best i'd like to think even though they restricted magic and ranged combat by a lot, favoring the melee for sure.

Just think of it like a balancing act. Fun with functionality!

[slaen]

 

Download Feign Proof of Concept Build 1.2

 

Help support the project on patreon

 

 

Version 1.2 Changelist:

• Placeholder footstep sounds.  They were free on the marketplace and I wanted to see what the process for hooking them up was.  
• Slime girl.  First pass on her assets.  She has basic functionality but no combat or scene animations.  
• 3 new outfits.  There's two sets of bandit armor and a tavern keeper outfit.  I'm testing out cloth solutions with these armor sets.  Bandit armor 1 has a dynamic cloth sim applied to it but there are a few issues with it.  Bandit armor 2 the loincloth is static right now and I want to test dynamic joint chains which means a quick rigging pass.  The same with the tavern keeper apron is static until I resolve how I want to handle cloth.  
• Combat I'm trying to slow down the pace of combat just a little.  When a character has a weapon ready their movement speed will slow down a little.  I also lowered the damage from melee strikes it should take 7 or 8 melee hits to knock someone down.  Then I wanted to differentiate the difference between the knockdown state and the ragdoll state more.  Now after a character is knocked down it will take 4 melee hits to make them ragdoll and completely inactive.  Once this gets a bit more finalized I'll add in hit reactions and fx, right now it's difficult to tell if the melee hits are landing on a knocked down opponent.  
• AI perception has been updated to included hearing events.  AI will now hear other characters in a small radius around them.  The player will make noise when they are running or walking but they can sneak (ctrl key to toggle) and remain unheard.  The sneak skill, speed, animations, will all be updated in the future this is just the initial functionality pass.
• Pickpocketing is also roughly implemented.  While the player is sneaking they can access other character inventories.  Skill and detection checks will come in a future update but for now the player will always be successful while pickpocketing.  
• Starting a dialogue with a character will now pause their AI so they won't keep walking while in a conversation.  They will also turn to face the player and after dialogue is finished go back to what they were doing.  
• The trading UI can also be opened through a placeholder dialogue.  It should open the player and NPC inventories and allow the player to trade items back and forth.  The next step is to add gold values to objects and then add or subtract gold when trading items.  
• Lots of little environment updates and assets.  Did an LOD pass for most existing assets and updated the lighting.  Should bring the framerate back up a bit. 

Just on a total side note: patreon posts are really strange to format.  Like it's possible to upload images into individual posts but the overview section they have to be uploaded to a third party site.  Then being able to link images sometimes works but other times just deletes the image.  Why can't I just drag and drop stuff?  or why is it more complicated than making a forum post?  Hah, sorry it just took me way too long to make a simple post on patreon so I'm a bit put off. 

 

 

On 9/10/2019 at 9:32 PM, AttritionofContrition said:

Skyrims biggest problem in that regard is level scaling. Or rather, how it was handled. I dislike level scaling in games generally so I'm a bit biased but having your crafting tie into your overall "combat" level was a really bad decision in my opinion. A more traditional leveling system would suit me just fine, I like the elder scrolls style too but I always miss the exp rewards for completing quests and tasks.

Kingdoms of Amalur had an interesting "class" system called destinies where if you spent a certain amount of points in one or more trees you would unlock "classes" that offered certain perks. If you spent so many points in the finesse/sorcery trees for example, you would unlock a selectable class that, when activated, gave you a bonus to your piercing and elemental damage. The more you spend in both trees the more the bonuses would roll in such as increased mana regen, a passive aura that reduced an enemies magical resistance when they land a blow, etc. That might be a bit over the top but your Str/int/dex split reminded me of that right away.

 

I've been playing Fallout 4 recently and looking at how they do things.  The experience system is pretty nice.  At the end of every quest there's that quest completed text giving the name of the quest and the stage that was finished and then the experience awarded.  Then the experience bar pops up and fills while that little bit of music and sfx play.  I'll probably use that as a target if I go withe awarding experience points.  

 

Maybe I should go back and play Kingdoms of Amalur again.  It's been a long time and I don't remember their systems very well.  

 

The question of complexity is something that I've been wrestling with for a while.  Initially I made a ton of assumptions about who would play adult games and what they would play them for and I keep getting surprised by what people end up asking for.  At this point I'm beginning to think that there's a very broad spectrum of people that want to play a well made deep rpg that contains adult content and situations.  This of course is theory and conjecture and a ton of simplification but look at the popularity of Game of Thrones.   Most of their episodes have a very solid formula:  dialogue / intrigue scene + violent scene + nude scene.   Then there's the overarching plot that ties everything together and gives it context.  There's content there for roughly everyone.  Even if part of the audience doesn't like one specific type of content they'll stick around for the content they do like and I think that most people will get drawn into the story and the concept even if they originally came to watch people getting their heads chopped off.

 

That's sort of where I'm at with the level of complexity thing.  Even if people start out only interested in the game for the porn I'd like them to at least be surprised and say "oh, hey there's actually a really good game here too" and then hopefully be pulled into the other aspects of the game.

 

Another point that has come up a few times and that I've read in other forum posts is the idea of context.  The idea that adding context to the sex scenes can make them that much more impactful and meaningful.  I don't think that's really possible if I focus only on making sex animations.  But I want to make gameplay systems that enhance the player's experience and really make them get into character.  At least that's what I want to achieve with the stats, skills, and experience systems. 

 

On 9/12/2019 at 10:58 PM, Synlaine said:

I'd look to Fable 1-2 for the RPG aspects but I will say Fable 3 did a pretty great job in combat and they did have in combat animations that would trigger. Which could be the way you could go about handling sexual combat. I'd even say research a bunch of 2D platformer sex based games, some of them tackle sex as in defeating an enemy and dropping them into the weakened state like you have right now, but others feature it where you actively perform an ability to initiate a scene.

Fable 2 was always my favorite out of the three.  I guess I don't remember the combat from 3 being that different but I'll go back and check it out.  Just have to dig out the old console.  

Using 2d sidescrolling games as inspiration is a great idea that I hadn't considered.  Are there any specific ones that you have in mind?

 

[AttritionofContrition]

8 hours ago, slaen said:

At this point I'm beginning to think that there's a very broad spectrum of people that want to play a well made deep rpg that contains adult content and situations.  This of course is theory and conjecture and a ton of simplification but look at the popularity of Game of Thrones.   Most of their episodes have a very solid formula:  dialogue / intrigue scene + violent scene + nude scene.   Then there's the overarching plot that ties everything together and gives it context.  There's content there for roughly everyone.  Even if part of the audience doesn't like one specific type of content they'll stick around for the content they do like and I think that most people will get drawn into the story and the concept even if they originally came to watch people getting their heads chopped off.

 

That's sort of where I'm at with the level of complexity thing.  Even if people start out only interested in the game for the porn I'd like them to at least be surprised and say "oh, hey there's actually a really good game here too" and then hopefully be pulled into the other aspects of the game.

Indeed there are, games such as Future Fragments and Crisis Point: Extinction come to mind (which also coincidentally happen to be 2d platformer/metroidvania style games) with a measurable amount of success. While they aren't rpgs they're good examples of games that draw many people for more than just the porn, it also helps that the devs don't drag their feet nearly as bad as say, cloud meadow, in releasing updates. Wild Life looks very promising as well, my only concern with them is that when projects get big and more and more people are added to the development your game then has two additional obstacles: Team cohesion and a "Too many cooks spoil the broth" kind of situation. After seeing more than a handful of games absolutely disintegrate and/or change under the weight of their own success I've come to sympathize more with devs that would prefer working alone throughout but I digress.

Good update, new armors look great, slime girl presses all my buttons, and the town and surrounding land look much better. Goblin lust state animation also caught me off guard, I notice they do that animation if they're hit with the potion or are 2nd in line to a downed character which got me to wondering: Will witnessing sex build your/npcs lust meter as well?

[Screws]

On 9/15/2019 at 5:05 PM, slaen said:

 

Download Feign Proof of Concept Build 1.2

 

Help support the project on patreon

 

 

Version 1.2 Changelist:

• Placeholder footstep sounds.  They were free on the marketplace and I wanted to see what the process for hooking them up was.  
• Slime girl.  First pass on her assets.  She has basic functionality but no combat or scene animations.  
• 3 new outfits.  There's two sets of bandit armor and a tavern keeper outfit.  I'm testing out cloth solutions with these armor sets.  Bandit armor 1 has a dynamic cloth sim applied to it but there are a few issues with it.  Bandit armor 2 the loincloth is static right now and I want to test dynamic joint chains which means a quick rigging pass.  The same with the tavern keeper apron is static until I resolve how I want to handle cloth.  
• Combat I'm trying to slow down the pace of combat just a little.  When a character has a weapon ready their movement speed will slow down a little.  I also lowered the damage from melee strikes it should take 7 or 8 melee hits to knock someone down.  Then I wanted to differentiate the difference between the knockdown state and the ragdoll state more.  Now after a character is knocked down it will take 4 melee hits to make them ragdoll and completely inactive.  Once this gets a bit more finalized I'll add in hit reactions and fx, right now it's difficult to tell if the melee hits are landing on a knocked down opponent.  
• AI perception has been updated to included hearing events.  AI will now hear other characters in a small radius around them.  The player will make noise when they are running or walking but they can sneak (ctrl key to toggle) and remain unheard.  The sneak skill, speed, animations, will all be updated in the future this is just the initial functionality pass.
• Pickpocketing is also roughly implemented.  While the player is sneaking they can access other character inventories.  Skill and detection checks will come in a future update but for now the player will always be successful while pickpocketing.  
• Starting a dialogue with a character will now pause their AI so they won't keep walking while in a conversation.  They will also turn to face the player and after dialogue is finished go back to what they were doing.  
• The trading UI can also be opened through a placeholder dialogue.  It should open the player and NPC inventories and allow the player to trade items back and forth.  The next step is to add gold values to objects and then add or subtract gold when trading items.  
• Lots of little environment updates and assets.  Did an LOD pass for most existing assets and updated the lighting.  Should bring the framerate back up a bit. 

Just on a total side note: patreon posts are really strange to format.  Like it's possible to upload images into individual posts but the overview section they have to be uploaded to a third party site.  Then being able to link images sometimes works but other times just deletes the image.  Why can't I just drag and drop stuff?  or why is it more complicated than making a forum post?  Hah, sorry it just took me way too long to make a simple post on patreon so I'm a bit put off. 

 

 

 

I've been playing Fallout 4 recently and looking at how they do things.  The experience system is pretty nice.  At the end of every quest there's that quest completed text giving the name of the quest and the stage that was finished and then the experience awarded.  Then the experience bar pops up and fills while that little bit of music and sfx play.  I'll probably use that as a target if I go withe awarding experience points.  

 

Maybe I should go back and play Kingdoms of Amalur again.  It's been a long time and I don't remember their systems very well.  

 

The question of complexity is something that I've been wrestling with for a while.  Initially I made a ton of assumptions about who would play adult games and what they would play them for and I keep getting surprised by what people end up asking for.  At this point I'm beginning to think that there's a very broad spectrum of people that want to play a well made deep rpg that contains adult content and situations.  This of course is theory and conjecture and a ton of simplification but look at the popularity of Game of Thrones.   Most of their episodes have a very solid formula:  dialogue / intrigue scene + violent scene + nude scene.   Then there's the overarching plot that ties everything together and gives it context.  There's content there for roughly everyone.  Even if part of the audience doesn't like one specific type of content they'll stick around for the content they do like and I think that most people will get drawn into the story and the concept even if they originally came to watch people getting their heads chopped off.

 

That's sort of where I'm at with the level of complexity thing.  Even if people start out only interested in the game for the porn I'd like them to at least be surprised and say "oh, hey there's actually a really good game here too" and then hopefully be pulled into the other aspects of the game.

 

Another point that has come up a few times and that I've read in other forum posts is the idea of context.  The idea that adding context to the sex scenes can make them that much more impactful and meaningful.  I don't think that's really possible if I focus only on making sex animations.  But I want to make gameplay systems that enhance the player's experience and really make them get into character.  At least that's what I want to achieve with the stats, skills, and experience systems. 

 

Fable 2 was always my favorite out of the three.  I guess I don't remember the combat from 3 being that different but I'll go back and check it out.  Just have to dig out the old console.  

Using 2d sidescrolling games as inspiration is a great idea that I hadn't considered.  Are there any specific ones that you have in mind?

 

Yeah Fable 3 had a more "in flow" combat system with epic kill animations though I preferred the magic system from fable 1.

 

As for 2D platformers hmmm. I think one was called rise of the succubus where you would down enemies like you're doing now but you'd gain power to enhance your abilities from banging the various monsters. Flying Princess is a breeding game where monsters have to be in a lust state to initiate sex scenes. My brain is drawing a blank honestly. Kincaid is a new furry themed side scrolled which is implementing a 'stunned' condition in which you rapidly click to fill up this bar to snap out of it. Even while getting banged you can struggle out of it. Apparently it's consensual it's just considered 'surprise sex'. 

[slaen]

 

 

Spent some time reworking the imp.  The sculpt is getting pretty close to what I want but I'll probably let it sit for a day or two and come back to it with fresh eyes.  I wanted him to look sort of demonic but not menacing and to fit with the rest of the character work in game.  

I also took some time and put together a rough hotkey editor in the options menu.  There's functionality testing to do and some commands in there that I need to hide but for this iteration I just grabbed everything in the input mappings arrays.  

Tracked down some bugs with LOD settings on the skeletal meshes.  The auto LOD generation doesn't play well with blendshapes in game.  I'll need to find another solution for character LOD generation or just keep researching ways of optimizing skeletal meshes.

Began creating modular assets for building interiors.  Very similar to how in Fallout 4 there are chunks for walls and floors I was breaking down individual pieces so that moving forward I can quickly put together building interiors once all of the pieces are made.  There are one or two small issues that I didn't realize before hand with things z-fighting and flickering that I still need to fix but this should be faster than putting together every building interior together inside of a 3d package.  

 

 

On 9/16/2019 at 4:29 AM, AttritionofContrition said:

Indeed there are, games such as Future Fragments and Crisis Point: Extinction come to mind (which also coincidentally happen to be 2d platformer/metroidvania style games) with a measurable amount of success. While they aren't rpgs they're good examples of games that draw many people for more than just the porn, it also helps that the devs don't drag their feet nearly as bad as say, cloud meadow, in releasing updates. Wild Life looks very promising as well, my only concern with them is that when projects get big and more and more people are added to the development your game then has two additional obstacles: Team cohesion and a "Too many cooks spoil the broth" kind of situation. After seeing more than a handful of games absolutely disintegrate and/or change under the weight of their own success I've come to sympathize more with devs that would prefer working alone throughout but I digress.

Good update, new armors look great, slime girl presses all my buttons, and the town and surrounding land look much better. Goblin lust state animation also caught me off guard, I notice they do that animation if they're hit with the potion or are 2nd in line to a downed character which got me to wondering: Will witnessing sex build your/npcs lust meter as well?

Team cohesion and having too many cooks is such a scary and difficult thing to deal with.  In the past I've worked with other people on side projects and it's such a difficult thing to get and then keep everyone motivated and working on the same page.  When a project isn't structured and there isn't a paycheck involved it's a monumental task.  But then again even on professional teams I've worked on things usually end up getting watered down and designed by committee.  But I don't have those issues at the moment.  I just have the issue of wishing I had either more hands or more time in the day so I could work faster.

 

Thanks, yeah the world is starting to take shape finally.  I had also forgotten I hooked up the goblin girls to react that way to their target being already engaged.  When I can get some extra time I'd like to add some stages to that lust state animation and of course do those animations for the human characters as well.  The witnessing sex building the lust meter would be a cool feature I'm trying to figure out how to handle.  With NPC characters it's a bit easier because they have a clearly set target.  With the player I'm not sure how to handle it yet without running a bunch of line of sight checks and things like that.  There's also the problem of player agency.  I don't want the player to lose control over their player state if they don't want to which so far has been a tricky thing to balance design-wise.  What do you think?  How much does that feature add to immersion?  and then there's the issue of what if the actual player isn't into the thing that their character's lust is being increased by. 

 

On 9/20/2019 at 4:53 PM, Synlaine said:

As for 2D platformers hmmm. I think one was called rise of the succubus where you would down enemies like you're doing now but you'd gain power to enhance your abilities from banging the various monsters. Flying Princess is a breeding game where monsters have to be in a lust state to initiate sex scenes. My brain is drawing a blank honestly. Kincaid is a new furry themed side scrolled which is implementing a 'stunned' condition in which you rapidly click to fill up this bar to snap out of it. Even while getting banged you can struggle out of it. Apparently it's consensual it's just considered 'surprise sex'. 

Cool I'll have to check those out.  Hah, the "surprise sex" is definitely something a lot of adult games need to find ways to deal with in order to work with payment processors. 

 

 

[Guest]

@slaen: I'd have a question about your game i think has a huge potential and i like it very much.

 

If i want to become a female chars like in Skyrim by exemple, will there be special naughty quests for our female chars or the quests will be same for both genders?

 

I means if quests changes according to the gender choose?

[Just Checking]

It took me longer than I thought but I've finally played the newest test build.  Things are looking really good, I ran around a bunch and played with lanterns at night, which made the town look great.  Also inspected your slime girl, who's looking pretty dang good.  Do you eventually want to give your creatures some random variance or something?  It'd be cool to see slimes in different colors or similar.  I'm personally not much of a fan of large lips but I'm not going to complain that hard because let's be real, it makes a degree of sense for a creature that usually gets by sucking the "fluids" from their prey.  Besides, they're slimes, they can be whatever shape they, and by that I mean you, like.

 

The other thing I noticed was jiggle physics is in.  Don't know how long it's been there for since I haven't had a chance to look at this stuff much for a while, but it's cool to see.  Boobs might need a little more resistance though, as they tend to fly around and stretch wildly when a character moves or turns too abruptly.  At least that's what I've noticed, if no one else is having that maybe my computer's just weird.

 

Beyond those, though, it's looking really good, I like your little outpost towers you've got on the road out of town.  So far the visual aesthetic of it all is just really nice.  Looking forward to seeing more.  Also the imp is looking pretty good too.  It'll be cool to see him with his textures and stuff all on him.

[AttritionofContrition]

On 9/24/2019 at 11:16 AM, slaen said:

I had also forgotten I hooked up the goblin girls to react that way to their target being already engaged.  When I can get some extra time I'd like to add some stages to that lust state animation and of course do those animations for the human characters as well.  The witnessing sex building the lust meter would be a cool feature I'm trying to figure out how to handle.  With NPC characters it's a bit easier because they have a clearly set target.  With the player I'm not sure how to handle it yet without running a bunch of line of sight checks and things like that.  There's also the problem of player agency.  I don't want the player to lose control over their player state if they don't want to which so far has been a tricky thing to balance design-wise.  What do you think?  How much does that feature add to immersion?  and then there's the issue of what if the actual player isn't into the thing that their character's lust is being increased by.

Maybe at character creation you could define what your character is attracted to, which could then be tied into what scenes play around or what scenes happen to them. Earlier in the thread someone asked if there would be an option to disable certain pairings and that could be one way to go about it. I like this because it's a somewhat immersive way to determine what content you'll see while at the same time adding a little bit more roleplay potential. I say somewhat because if you get defeated by someone they aren't going to care about your preferences but you could always play it off like they weren't interested. It really doesn't make sense for it to disable what other people do to one another, however, and I could see that interfering with your example quest if someone had all straight pairings disabled.

Being able to choose what happens to your character is most important I think, I mean I don't wanna be getting busy with a bunch of slime girls in the slime dungeon *wink wink nudge nudge* only to be interrupted by a slime tentacle monster trying to mount my dude! I know I said I wanted to fuck the slimes but not like this!! Joking aside it sounds like lust is going to need to a different approach for players compared to npcs. Stuns sound good for npcs so long as you can't exploit it and just stun/off everyone in an instant but I couldn't imagine any way of that working for the player the other way around without becoming an issue. If you're still keen on implementing that grapple system it could play a more important role, with your lust threshold determining the difficulty of said grapples and occurrence. Instead of the player becoming stunned at 100% lust they could instead be more vulnerable to a grapple, that way it's both avoidable (you relieve yourself or drink a potion to decrease lust) and not so abrupt that you can't see it coming.

[Just Checking]

7 hours ago, AttritionofContrition said:

 Stuns sound good for npcs so long as you can't exploit it and just stun/off everyone in an instant but I couldn't imagine any way of that working for the player the other way around without becoming an issue. If you're still keen on implementing that grapple system it could play a more important role, with your lust threshold determining the difficulty of said grapples and occurrence. Instead of the player becoming stunned at 100% lust they could instead be more vulnerable to a grapple, that way it's both avoidable (you relieve yourself or drink a potion to decrease lust) and not so abrupt that you can't see it coming.

I agree with this handling of lust in combat, making it just a hard lose condition for the player could become problematic from the gameplay angle.  It might not be so much of a problem with NPCs.  Or perhaps there could be... like, overlust?  At 100% lust your character or the enemy is greatly compromised by their desires and vulnerable in combat, at 200% they just collapse.  Give players a bit of a buffer to feel the effects but not just instantly lose.  If the enemy is armed with some kind of lust inducing spell or poison, or just being sexy and enticing, you've got stages of danger to consider, at one point where our character will struggle to resist an enemy's assault and another where they just actively go for it themselves because they're a hair's breadth from losing their mind. 

 

Also in terms of in-combat stuns I'd personally treat the stun less like a lasting status effect and more like the way Fromsoft likes to do them, with the old poise systems from DeS and DS1 and 2.  After a certain amount of hits the character is locked into a stumbling animation that takes a moment to recover from.  These were present in Morrowind and Oblivion too, and they were just a bit of extra punishment.  They were, however, a problem across all those games as they were exploitable and allowed for instant victory stunlocks the opponent or player had no hope of recovering from in time to survive, so instead of the fromsoft "break this threshold and they stumble, potentially over and over if you have a heavy enough weapon" or the old elder scrolls "Happens randomly based on agility/strength comparisons" it could be better used as maybe different weapon types build stun faster on successive hits (blunt or heavier weapons doing more and lighter, less impact oriented ones doing less), when it breaks they stumble or trip and have to recover for a couple seconds giving time for an opportunistic grapple, but then are immune to further stunning for several seconds after recovery.  Or something similar.

 

Something like that would also give players not only an incentive to try out different fighting styles, but also use those weapons differently.  Stunning weapons would encourage careful fighting as they could earn you some free hits when the foe stumbles or let you easily grapple, but their slower swings would leave you otherwise exposed to counterattack, or maybe they just do more damage when an enemy is stunned and less when they're not, giving you power spikes during the fight rather than consistent damage from lighter weapons.  And then if you don't want to take a violent approach and instead defeat your foe with their own carnal desires you have degrees of difficulty for winning the fight depending on if you ant to try to grapple your opponent while they're struggling with themselves or just keep up the pressure until they give in on their own.  God I love just throwing out ideas with no responsibility to implement them.

[slaen]

 

I was doodling on the imp a little bit and got carried away and he turned into a goblin.  He's a bit rough and still needs a polish pass but I think he's shaping up pretty well.  

Did a quick ui for resting / waiting.  The hotkey is hardcoded to T right now.  It's similar to the Skyrim system.  It will fully heal the player until I put in the rest of the logic.  

Started working on dynamic encounter spawners.  Essentially when the player gets close enough to a specific point on the map these spawners will randomly choose an AI character to spawn.  If there is already an AI character that has spawned it won't do anything until that previous character dies.  The next step is hooking this into the game's time of day settings so that encounters will respawn after a set amount of time, like 2 or 3 in game days, rather than every time the player enters the spawn location.  This is also the first step in setting up stuff like Skyrim's random encounters on the road, or spawning leveled content based on the player's level.

 

On 9/24/2019 at 11:29 AM, Guest said:

@slaen: I'd have a question about your game i think has a huge potential and i like it very much.

 

If i want to become a female chars like in Skyrim by exemple, will there be special naughty quests for our female chars or the quests will be same for both genders?

 

I means if quests changes according to the gender choose?

Thanks!  As for the quests changing based on gender.  Sort of...?  There will be specific options based on what the player has for anatomy - similar to how the sex scene selection works right now.   I'm also going to try designing quests in such a way as there's clearly dominant and submissive ways of going through them.  But I don't want to force the player into one specific type of play style.   So for example - one player's character is the stereotypical damsel in distress and is constantly being ravaged by NPCs.  While another player's character is a female barbarian and is going through the game splitting skulls a taking names.  Even though they are both women it's two totally different playstyles.  I'm hoping and planning to support both.  Does that answer your question?  or did I go off on a bit of a tangent?

 

On 9/24/2019 at 5:44 PM, Just Checking said:

It took me longer than I thought but I've finally played the newest test build.  Things are looking really good, I ran around a bunch and played with lanterns at night, which made the town look great.  Also inspected your slime girl, who's looking pretty dang good.  Do you eventually want to give your creatures some random variance or something?  It'd be cool to see slimes in different colors or similar.  I'm personally not much of a fan of large lips but I'm not going to complain that hard because let's be real, it makes a degree of sense for a creature that usually gets by sucking the "fluids" from their prey.  Besides, they're slimes, they can be whatever shape they, and by that I mean you, like.

Hah, nice I'm glad you got a chance to check out the build.  It's really come a long way since feb. and being just a character editor. 

 

As to the NPC variations - yes, that's something I plan on doing.  So far the goblins and slime girls are set up so that their outfits will be able to change and their hairstyles will also change.  I hadn't thought about doing skin color but I could pretty quickly throw that into the shader.  I was also toying with the idea that different colored slimes are completely different characters and shapes and would have different abilities.  Not sure if that will happen or when but just a thought. 

 

Jiggle physics and dynamic cloth and all that stuff is something I haven't worked with before and I'm learning as I go.  Right now I think the human jiggle is really bouncy and rubbery and a bit too subtle.  Then with the goblin's jiggle I tried to fix that and go the opposite way and now they end up being really floppy with certain animations.  I also think, and I might be wrong, but that it's framerate dependent.  There are sometimes that I'm testing and things look pretty good but then other times I'll have a bunch of other programs running in the background and the jiggles will be going nuts.  So, I'm working on it and it will probably take some time to get looking better. 

 

Hah, and the lust system and mechanics.  Those are going to take some time.  It would be so much easier to just have a template to work from for those mechanics.  Like all the other base mechanics I can lift from already existing games but making new systems is going to take some experimenting.   I'll have to go back and check out those stumbling states and see if that would work for what I'm thinking of. 

 

On 9/25/2019 at 11:18 AM, AttritionofContrition said:

Maybe at character creation you could define what your character is attracted to, which could then be tied into what scenes play around or what scenes happen to them. Earlier in the thread someone asked if there would be an option to disable certain pairings and that could be one way to go about it. I like this because it's a somewhat immersive way to determine what content you'll see while at the same time adding a little bit more roleplay potential. I say somewhat because if you get defeated by someone they aren't going to care about your preferences but you could always play it off like they weren't interested. It really doesn't make sense for it to disable what other people do to one another, however, and I could see that interfering with your example quest if someone had all straight pairings disabled.

Hmm I hadn't considered if someone had specific pairings disabled how that would change quest design.  That could be tricky to design around. 

 

Figuring out how to handle the player's lust state is going to be tough.  I like the idea that they're most susceptible to grapples though.  I really need to do those grapple animations and the rest of the grapple back end into the game and then start testing. 

 

There's a bunch of mechanics in Monster Girl Dreams dealing with player's preferences/fetishes stuns, holds, charms that are really well done and seem like they might work for some of these mechanics.  The biggest downside is they have the "luxury" of being a primarily text based game and translating those mechanics over into 3d might now work so well. 

 

 

[Just Checking]

5 hours ago, slaen said:

Hah, and the lust system and mechanics.  Those are going to take some time.  It would be so much easier to just have a template to work from for those mechanics.  Like all the other base mechanics I can lift from already existing games but making new systems is going to take some experimenting.   I'll have to go back and check out those stumbling states and see if that would work for what I'm thinking of. 

Could you repurpose a system you CAN find a template for, just tweak it a bit?  There's no way no one's got an exhaustion or hunger system available.  Same kind of idea, it amps up slowly over time, and if you can find some way to hook a few triggers into it to give it a spike when certain things happen, for example when the player is subjected to lust building attacks?  Maybe that would be harder to work with since you didn't write it and might not be able to tweak it very efficiently.

[slaen]

This is the first time I've really worked with single player design and I wanted a starting point for the combat encounters so I've been really digging into Bethesda's titles.  There seems to be a clear evolution starting at Daggerfall and arriving at Skyrim and Fallout 4 in the way that the encounter design is handled.  I wouldn't be surprised if at Bethesda they even have a chart of different size levels of encounters.  

These seem to be the rules of thumb and have a lot of variation in application.
There's the one off encounters of walking on the road and a couple of wolves attack.  Then the next level of encounter would be roughly 3 fights that would usually escalate in difficulty and be set in a guard tower or small cave.  The first enemy is on the exterior and lets the player know what enemy type is in the cave, then inside of the cave there will be the middle section of enemies usually a group of 2, then the culmination of the cave and the "boss" encounter which could either be a single higher level enemy or mixed group of enemies.  The loot design also roughly follows this pattern and will be set with or directly after each enemy encounter.  The first loot is going to be random junk, then some mid tier stuff maybe a few weapons, and then there will generally be a treasure chest after the boss encounter.  

Using that as a starting point I began roughing out a guard tower interior and exterior on the road leading out of town.  I'm still experimenting with the AI behavior and the overall layout and design of the tower trying to figure out what types of spaces I need so the player can still maneuver but at the same time be pushed into the encounter.  

 

I also started working on the logic for the player after they've been defeated.  At the moment when the player hits the exit button after a defeat scene the screen will fade to black and then they will respawn in town.  I think I have it set up in such a way that this will be customizeable based upon who the player was defeated by and then what the impact of that defeat should be.  The initial feature will be similar to CoC where the player is defeated and they wake up back in camp missing a bit of money.  The plan is to make the system deeper sort of like Skyrim's death alternative mod, where there are a number of different outcomes after the player "dies".  

Hunted down a few bugs I saw posted.  The first person view losing blendshapes during scenes should be fixed now.  

Updated the NPC spawn point logic.  There's still the parent area that once the player crosses into they will spawn the characters inside of that area.  But now that spawner will support multiple locations with multiple actors across those locations.  Also when the player leaves the area it will trigger a short timer that will then despawn those characters and free up resources.  

Finally started the low poly for the Imp.  I should be doing the bakes later on tonight and then start texturing.

 

On 10/1/2019 at 6:06 PM, Just Checking said:

Could you repurpose a system you CAN find a template for, just tweak it a bit?  There's no way no one's got an exhaustion or hunger system available.  Same kind of idea, it amps up slowly over time, and if you can find some way to hook a few triggers into it to give it a spike when certain things happen, for example when the player is subjected to lust building attacks?  Maybe that would be harder to work with since you didn't write it and might not be able to tweak it very efficiently.

Well it's more the design of the system rather than the programming that I'm wrestling with.  I'm trying to figure out if those systems would be fun or just annoying.  Like for example take the melee combat in Morrowind.  It's a really cool idea that during melee combat the player could miss, fumble a strike, or be deflected by armor.  Which is why there is a dice roll to hit every time the player swings their melee weapon to attack an enemy.  The problem is that isn't any fun to be visually hitting an enemy with your in game weapon but then to have the game telling you that was a missed strike.  So that's sort of what I'm worried about doing here.

 

[Just Checking]

22 hours ago, slaen said:

Well it's more the design of the system rather than the programming that I'm wrestling with.  I'm trying to figure out if those systems would be fun or just annoying.  Like for example take the melee combat in Morrowind.  It's a really cool idea that during melee combat the player could miss, fumble a strike, or be deflected by armor.  Which is why there is a dice roll to hit every time the player swings their melee weapon to attack an enemy.  The problem is that isn't any fun to be visually hitting an enemy with your in game weapon but then to have the game telling you that was a missed strike.  So that's sort of what I'm worried about doing here.

 

I can understand that.  In fact some hundred years ago in the thread here I think I even said a similar thing in regards to it.  My thought was letting the player choose how much impact it played by having a few potential degrees, if the player doesn't want lust to be a factor for anything outside specific enemy attacks, they can disable the ambient building effect, and if it is enabled have a few options for how powerful it is.  Maybe it's as simple as a faster or slower buildup depending on difficulty, maybe at different difficulty increments it puts a cap on how high it can get just by time or ambient exposure, or maybe higher difficulties impose more severe penalties and lower ones do basically nothing.

 

The thing is I totally get what you mean about whether that system is fun or not.  For instance, I love certain Lovers mods in Oblivion, but one that I really like has a lust system built in that I have no clue how to tweak because the options aren't presented for the player.  After about a day your character is experiencing penalties to their stats and after about three you're practically debilitated at low levels, and even at high levels you're just about reduced to the functionality of a PC ten levels lower.  Unless you're doing something to reduce it like every eight in game hours it penalizes you pretty hard.  Now I know a lot of us around here are horny little goons, we probably wouldn't be on this site if we weren't, but I'm pretty sure I can go a few days and not have my brain fall out of my head and be reduced to a gibbering wreck.  The other features of that mod are cool but that one aspect is really annoying.

 

On the other hand I use Sexlab Aroused in Skyrim, and a number of mods that hook into it.  I like Aroused because I can choose how hard my character gets hit by lust building effects, and some of the other mods let me tailor what I want those effects to be.  Personally, I mostly just use... I think it's Aroused Enhancements to visually and audibly indicate how horny character is.  The fact other mods will trigger easier if my character is aroused is usually penalty enough as far as I'm concerned, I can do without the stat hits and debuffs that come with a lot of other mods.  But the thing is that those other mods still have demand, so if it was possible for the player to decide what, if any, effects they want lust to have, that'd be pretty sweet.

 

The other answer I can see is to have "lust" a status effect that you get from taking certain attacks, or possibly be applied to the player after certain situations, that lasts a certain amount of time and makes the character vulnerable to the things discussed above in the thread.  Maybe the effect stacks a few times to make you more vulnerable but other than setting up for certain things to occur in combat it doesn't really do anything.  That way you don't have to worry about lust being tracked and having certain thresholds that enable stuff and being like 1% short at the time locks you out of it.

[slaen]

 

Download Feign Proof of Concept Build 1.3

Help support the project on patreon

 

The 15th came a little too early for me this month.  Most everything in this build should be working but there are pieces that I haven't tested and a lot of placeholder assets.  My focus for the month was getting the design and mechanics together to get the gameplay loop into the game.  A rough initial version is in there but it needs polish and art assets.  

Just as a further note - slime girls and the imps don't have a full animation set yet.  So they don't have working combat or any interaction scenes.  

 

Version 1.3 Changelist:

• Male imps are in the game.  Still an early implementation and the animations are placeholder until I can get the time to figure out how to handle that tail.  
• The tavern has gotten a layout pass and was the test bed for the new modular interior building assets.  The visuals haven't changed a whole lot but everything on the interior has been reworked with the new modular assets.  
• New waiting mechanic to quickly pass time.  Currently set to the 'T' hotkey.
• Dynamic spawn points.  Singular spawns for one off encounters as well as larger group spawners are in and working.  Take the road out of town into the green fields and walk towards the 2nd tower.  Stay on the road and the spawns will trigger.  The distance is kept small so it's very noticeable when the player triggers the spawn.  There are still more features to implement to handle going from the exterior world to interior spaces but this is the basic foundation.  
• Hotkeys can now be changed in the options menu.  
• A few bugs were fixed.  First person view was previously losing the body morphs while playing scenes.  That should be fixed now.  
• Eyelashes now have an intensity slider in the character creator.  
• The 2nd tower heading out of town is also where I'm testing a lot of things and why the artwork is all placeholder for it.  It's the blockout version for figuring out a basic multi level encounter, the minimum spaces required for that encounter, how the AI should handle the encounter, and planning out different playstyle solutions to the encounter.  
• AI also has a basic understanding of useable objects in the game world.  If an AI notices one of the street lights is out they will walk over and turn it on then go back to what they were doing.  Nothing complicated but it's the beginning implementation for idle behaviors for AI.  
• The most basic gameplay loop is implemented. Start in town, travel to the 2nd guard tower, clear and loot the tower, travel back to town to heal at the tavern. 

On 10/9/2019 at 3:39 PM, Just Checking said:

On the other hand I use Sexlab Aroused in Skyrim, and a number of mods that hook into it.  I like Aroused because I can choose how hard my character gets hit by lust building effects, and some of the other mods let me tailor what I want those effects to be.  Personally, I mostly just use... I think it's Aroused Enhancements to visually and audibly indicate how horny character is.  The fact other mods will trigger easier if my character is aroused is usually penalty enough as far as I'm concerned, I can do without the stat hits and debuffs that come with a lot of other mods.  But the thing is that those other mods still have demand, so if it was possible for the player to decide what, if any, effects they want lust to have, that'd be pretty sweet.

 

The other answer I can see is to have "lust" a status effect that you get from taking certain attacks, or possibly be applied to the player after certain situations, that lasts a certain amount of time and makes the character vulnerable to the things discussed above in the thread.  Maybe the effect stacks a few times to make you more vulnerable but other than setting up for certain things to occur in combat it doesn't really do anything.  That way you don't have to worry about lust being tracked and having certain thresholds that enable stuff and being like 1% short at the time locks you out of it.

Ok what what if virginity is a thing to the player?  Like a self imposed difficulty thing.  The player's lust won't increase until it is lost.  Then lust will increase based upon the player's libido levels.  Getting to the point with a high enough libido that the player will be overwhelmed by their lust levels and lose control of their actions.  So the player can increase or decrease their libido levels through some in game mechanics and have control over how quickly their lust increases.  So if the player wants to be completely incapacitated by lust during fights all they need to do is keep their libido at a high level.  If they would rather have fights be about hitting people with swords or about being overwhelmed with lust and by the monsters in the game.  I dunno just thinking out loud.  But let me know if I should check our some of those skyrim or oblivion mods if they won't take too long to get a feel for their mechanics.  It's also crazy to think this thread has been going on for so long.  I should go back and read through the posts again because I'm sure I've forgotten stuff that we've already discussed.