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Progress Report - December 17, 2024
🕑 Added 2024-12-18 08:38:45 +0000 UTCHello, everyone!
I apologize for the Progress Report being a day late. I ended up not sleeping at all from Sunday into Monday, meaning that by the time Monday proper rolled around I was pushing 24+ hours of being awake and was not at all in a position to really make a Progress Report post. Insomnia and fucked sleep schedules are one hell of a combination. Do not recommend. One out of five on Yelp.
I'm now properly rested and in a much better state, and so here we are!
Last week, I noted how Mimi was working on recording for the Frozen video, and I had no idea when that audio would be turned in. Well, it turned out that the audio would be turned in on the 13th, and so I ended up spending the bulk of this week processing the 90 minutes of audio she sent in. Finished up processing it all earlier today, actually.
Right now, I need to make an executive decision on if I want to write some interjection dialogue to sprinkle throughout the video, or just leave it in its current state of 50+ minutes of runtime without a single word being spoken. I'm torn on the matter, because on the one hand I'm really uncomfortable with that much empty space in a video (as anyone whose watched any of my videos can attest to, I'm sure). On the other hand, though, I just don't really care enough.
Like, I can't really word this in a way that doesn't sound worse than it really is, but I have no particular artistic love for the Frozen video. It's not that I dislike it - I just don't feel anything about it one way or the other, as an artistic endeavor. It was made spontaneously, on the spot, over a series of livestreams. It was never intended to be a video in the same way that my usual videos are - there is no particular story or idea it's exploring or trying to convey. It's just the culmination of a year's worth of "hey this sounds like fun".
I appreciate the video on a technical side - an hour-long SFM video made as a single continuous take, spread across 24 project files, is a respectable feat in my opinion - but it just has no artistic value to me. And so, with me being an artist, I just don't really care about it. I'm only finishing it up (and spending thousands on the audio) out of a sense of obligation.
So on one hand, I feel an artistic obligation to add interjection dialogue to it all. But on the other hand, I feel like any artistic obligation is wasted on it, because it wasn't written as an artistic piece. I'm currently strongly leaning toward just saying "fuck it" and leaving it as it is. Mimi did a fantastic job on all of her lewd sounds. I wouldn't feel bad about letting people fully indulge on her fantastic performance.
Beyond the Frozen video, most of my time this week was spent exploring the lewd game idea some more. I've recently taken up using the Obsidian note-taking tool for organizing my ideas, and the ability to hyperlink ideas together makes it a whole lot easier than trying to keep everything sorted in a Notepad text file.
I mentioned last week how I was a bit torn on the idea, and was considering rewriting it all. Well, I did that. The above is a screenshot of the notes from that rewrite. As you can tell, I ended up writing a fair bit.
I then ended up scrapping all of that and rewriting it again.
The above rewrite ended up getting lost in the weeds. It couldn't decide what it wanted to be, and so it ended up being a little bit of everything. And on top of all of that, I was having trouble really wrapping everything up in the scifi setting and making everything feel... I don't want to say meaningful, but as it was it all felt too random and arbitrary. Cohesive, I guess?
In the end, I decided to slough off the scifi aspect entirely, and instead focus on just a single aspect of the scifi game: brothel management. I ended up coming up with a pretty slick set of mechanics, and an entirely emergent progression of gameplay mechanics. I'm quite pleased with what I came up with there.
I then decided to scrap all of that and rewrite it all a fourth time.
That rewrite came from a pair of factors: the brothel simulator had fragmented into two different segments, and I wasn't happy with how little involvement there was with the actual sex aspect of the game.
In a nutshell, the game evolved from a brothel simulator into being a Slutty Sims that turned into a brothel simulator. You started out in control of a single character, managing every aspect of her life and micromanaging her decisions on an hour-to-hour basis, all the way down to how many hours of sleep she gets. And then at a certain point, once your singular character was in a stable position, your control expanded to handling multiple characters whom you didn't micromanage so much, and instead you only managed their work lives at the brothel itself while they simulated their off-work hours, and once you reach this point, you stopped micromanaging your starting character and she was treated the same as all the other ladies.
In retrospect though, I had basically written two games: a Slutty Sims game, and a brothel simulator game. And because they were written all to utilize a singular game system, the Slutty Sims section had the same restraints as the brothel simulator section. Namely, the fact that all of the actual sex itself was just a single canned animation that planned in the background, with no user engagement at all - it was designed to support up to 8 ladies all banging at the same time, so having even a semi-involved minigame for all 8 of them would have been not only mentally taxing, but straight-up physically impossible in many situations.
Upon reflection, I realized that I honestly like the Slutty Sims idea better between the two, and I wanted the sex sequences to be more intimately involving the player. So I jettisoned the brothel simulator aspect and doubled down on the Slutty Sims idea: one character, and you focus all your attention on guiding her on her journey from becoming a complete nobody to being the biggest slut in the world.
I haven't worked out the details of how the sex minigame itself would work, but the high-level idea is that you need to balance "experience satisfaction" and "partner orgasm" meters for as long as possible. Satisfaction decreases the longer you run a single position, motivating changing positions; and Orgasm increases the faster you play back a position (think the old Zone flash games, with buttons for both position and speed). The goal is to edge out both the Satisfaction and Orgasm meters for max points, without letting the Orgasm meter run over and end the experience. More points = more cash.
Right now the biggest problem I am looking at is the position-swapping. There are a lot of ways that characters can fuck - it's how I'm still in business ten years on, after all. How do I narrow down the literal hundreds of ways two people can bone to just a quarter-dozen positions the player can quickly switch between? I don't know. That's what I need to solve.
I did a little bit of Blender work this week, but not as much as I would have liked. I'm currently still stuck on the softbody simulations. Namely, I'm having trouble with the softbodies collapsing in on themselves like deflated balloons. Deflated saggy boobs is not what I want. They manage to deform rather nicely with physics pushing into them, which is what I want (the ultimate goal here is grabbing and squeezing boobs realistically). I just don't want them deflating. I can avoid the deflating by making them really rigid, but then they don't deform the way I want when physics push into them. It's a real catch-22, and I need to just spend more time both experimenting and also just swallowing my pride and looking up tutorials on it all.
Looking at the week ahead, I'm thinking that I am going to split my focus between Blender and the game design. I'm going to contemplate the interjection audio for Frozen in the back of my mind, but unless I feel inspired and compelled to actually write down lines and send them to Mimi, at this point I am considering the door on Frozen audio closed. And with that, the work I am spending on Frozen for this intermission is concluded. Getting all of the audio installed in SFM, adding the outfits to the males, revising the camera animation to be more consistent throughout the video, and doing the final low-quality 360p render, are all tasks for after the next Overbreed+short video pair.
I'd love to hear peoples' thoughts on the game design stuff. Do you think dropping the scifi story and focusing on just a simple manager game is a good idea? Do you think focusing on just the Slutty Sims aspect is a good idea? Or do you like the bigger-focus scifi story? Do you like the two-focus Slutty Sims + brothel manager idea? Do you prefer just the brothel idea? How do you feel about making individual sex scenes more involved, at the expense of less characters to manage? Just thoughts in general, really.
As a final note, as this week's article image suggests, I am considering doing something with Rebecca and tentacles. More specifically, I am thinking of taking all of my Blender experiments and culminating them into a short, simple video. Bring all the experiments out of the lab and into the field, as it were.
I am considering a Rebecca tentacle video explicitly, because I think it'd be a good demonstration of everything I've been looking into. The tentacle Bezier animation system, cloth simulation for Rebecca's coat and skirt (god I hate rigging and animating coats and skirts with bones; if I can just cloth simulate them, oh lord that'd be so much easier - and would look better besides!), softbody for her jiggly bits (even if Rebecca doesn't have much, she still has some!) and for her hair (an experiment I haven't even started on yet, been focused on the jiggly physics still), as well as just getting used to the Blender animation workflow.
I will probably end up spending some time investigating building an alternate workflow for animating in Blender, building something similar to SFM's Animation Set list, because just from the small animation experiments I have done in Blender, I have come to the conclusion it is clunky as fuck. Especially when it comes to jumping between animating armatures and character blendshapes. So, that'll be interesting.
But that's all in the future. One thing at a time.
That's all for now. Until next week, everyone!
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