Experimentation

Quick Update

I’m finally starting to feel like I can see light at the other end of the tunnel (which hopefully isn’t an oncoming train). Mini-work events and dreams are now integrated back into the game, and I’ve resolved issues I was having with sleep and intoxication (both of which were having issues with variables hidden away in places where they were hard to spot).

At this point, I think a lot of what’s left to do is bug testing to catch things I overlooked, and getting all of the incidental sequences added in (waking up in the morning, getting job notices, etc.).

Since this has been taking too damn long to begin with, I’m considering releasing what I have once it’s relatively playable again, and leaving it up to players to decide if they want to try it out and let me know which scenes feel out-of-place and what kind of additional requirements each need.

Avatar Madness

Over on the graphical side of things, I got to try out Fponias’ batch render tool. It’s not quite to a point where I can use it yet (minor posing and lighting issues), but it’s pretty awesome to be able to point to a directory full of character variants and have it render the scene with each one plugged in.

Thus far, I’ve been using a paper doll approach for the player character, with different parts of the character on different layers which are assembled in-engine. In previous posts, I’ve documented a lot of the challenges this method presents when it comes to creating masks, manually painting shadows that are lost in the process, and the like.

My helpers have proposed, and are presently exploring, an alternative of rendering individual images with every possible parts combination directly in the studio, rather than layered images. Their pitch is to encode all of these variations as frames in a video file, and have the game show the one frame that corresponds to the combination of body type, tan, clothing, and hair color the player has in their game.

Fponias provided a sample video produced by his modified plugin, mostly because it was amusing. The timing of the renders was a bit too tight, and caught some physics bouncing which ends up making it look somewhat animated. The result is entertaining, so I’ve linked it here.

Tan Masks

In discussing possibilities for an update to the PC avatar system, I found there was some confusion as to how my existing tanning system (and image masks in general) work. I thought it advantageous to do some sample images to help illustrate the system the game currently uses for tanning and tan lines.

I thought players might be interested in it, too, so I’ve turned it into a behind-the-scenes post for this month. Backers can click here to go check it out on Patreon and here on SubscribeStar.