January Progress Update!

Everything is going fine here. Core systems are in place, new small mechanics are implemented, and overall I'm happy of the progress I've made now that the hardest part is done.

Firstly, an important issue that was brought to my attention by DingleBerrie on itchio is: since I decided to work on all these systems right after publishing on Steam, it looked like the game was abandoned due to the lack of updates.

That's understandable, but what happened was that now that Theanthria is now on Steam, I need to hold it it to higher standards, and that's what I've been doing by fixing some of the game's major issues. But I noticed there were many systems I wanted to rework, and I didn't anticipate it would take me this long. But no, the game is not abandoned at all. I'm still working on it as I have always been.

So there's no need to worry, but I do apologize for the lack of clarity.

I figured would be better to force myself to make a monthly update, since usually I only report when I have something to show, mainly in new builds. But since I'm taking so long in this one, is best to report on the progress I've been doing instead of waiting months for the build update. Sometimes I forget that even tho for me Theanthria is something I work every day, you have no clue whats going on. And that paired with the fact that a lot of adult-type games get frequently abandoned by their creators, makes me understand how people can be a bit skeptical of other projects that haven't been updated for a while.

That being said, the very good news for you and me is that most of those core systems are done. This means that the structural, logic side of the game is almost complete!

So things like models optimization, scene management, scene transitions, spawn-despawn of characters, scheduling, (most of ) ai behaviour, player movement, dialogue implementation, dynamic conversant runtime selection, pairing... etcetcetc... is done! yay!

I call this the boring stuff, because is the logical platform of the game, not something immediately noticeable. You may call this the "skeleton" of the game. You might be more familiar with cooler stuff like art, animations, character dialogue, and creating scenes. The things the player actually sees (and the things I'm more excited to work with hoho).

I'm happy because (additional mechanics and fixes aside) I think I can work on fun scenes, cool characters, props, and writing the narrative, instead of staring at Visual Studio all day.

Speaking of scenes

^ This is me testing a workflow for body and finger tracking motion capture. Just a simple, messing around moving my fingers animation, but I'm happy how it turned out.

As I said on Twitter, I want to use this for story scenes.

Something infinitely frustrating was how sequential everything needed to be...

I couldn't work on the Delivery system without having made first a good scheduler system for the characters. But I couldn't work on a scheduler because I needed a spawner... which is useless if first I haven't solved how the characters models are are gonna behave (material assignment, additional meshes if necessary... animation-controlled vs baked-animations, etc).

So there I went, working on what I now call the Anthrogen system, which is the workflow I now have to quickly create and implement new characters into the game.

This is the thing I'm the happiest with. Finally managed to develop a setup that allows me to create multiple girls, and have them all on screen without destroying your pc.

I spend a solid month and a half working on the anthrogen alone . _.

Look at my crowd of cute anthro girls, I'm so proud of them :,)

Look at my nice, turgid framerate (top right corner, below DSP load and Stream load).

There's really only 7 different characters there, just copy pasted, but you can see how I can have a full crowd of many different characters, all walking around, with their own schedules and behaviours :D

^This is a simple character manager, part of my setup. It tracks their current location, intended location, respective homes.

It also tracks the last known position of the character, so when spawning/despawning, I can know where the girl is, for continuity and to prevent losing her.

Speaking of spawning...

This is my scene transition setup. When entering a building's interior, characters are despawned for optimization reasons, and spawned again on their last known positions for continuity. I hope the illusion is virtually seamless.

Also, again inspired by Cyberpunk 2077, I just love so much how in that game, you transition between scenes naturally with an uniterrupted door animation.

I wanted to copy that, and (ignoring unfinished polish aside) I think it turned out quite well.

Also! Importantly, the girls also need to transition from interior to exterior and viceversa. Since I want them to go to work, home, story-related locations, etc...

I never liked how on Skyrim or many other RPGs, characters just evaporate in front of the doors to "enter" a building. Pragmatic, yes, and I know none complains about it... I just personally don't like it.

So I wanted to make a way for them to seem like they are actually going into the building...

...and out of it.

Doggies introduced!

I mentioned this in a twitter thingy before, but I wanted to add actual dog girls, instead of just wolf-like girls (^like Sara in the background^), so I made a cute dog-girl head model as a new anthro type.

This isn't terribly important, just an addition I figured wouldn't take much with my current workflow. Man am I glad I redid my old expressions system, which was almost impossible to built upon.

Also regarding characters, I added top and bottom color customization. Small addition that adds lots of variety.

Stacked Delivieries!

Literally stacked.. heh...

The deliveries system is one of many that I redid basically from scratch. With this new setup I finally managed to add something a lot of people were mentioning was lacking: multiple simultaneous deliveries!

It was a bit tricky to figure out how to make them, but now each delivery is its own "job", belonging to its own class, instead of relying on a huge script that managed all deliveries.

And since each delivery carries its own information, with this approach I even can make small cute polishes like adding the name of the girl to the package.

Would be cool to add restaurant logos, special labels, etc... I'll check later. For now, I don't want to get stuck polishing sub-systems instead of progressing on the game.

Well that's it for most of the stuff I've been working on. I wanted to somehow add here the long and annoying struggle that I had with the dialogue system and what a pain it was to get it to track each girl's character model with their corresponding dialogue actor, having it work with multiple characters that are essentially the same actor... but there wasn't anything particularly exciting to say or to show. Same with many other smaller systems.

I'm just very glad they are out of the way, so I can focus on more exciting things, and possibly things that are better represented in a visual format. So at least I'll have more things to actually show in subsequent updates.

For now the next immediate mission is to solidify and pretty-up the map. After that, is just a matter of having all the systems working in place and lots of debugging so I can finally have a new build of Theanthria.

I'll let you know. I'll tell you what happens in the devlog in february, if there isn't anything to communicate in the meantime.

As always, thank you for reading, for being here, and for your support🫂