July Progress Update!

While I'm still working on the town itself, I'm also working on closing the main loop. The current stage is the last one: dating sequences. So, the work for this month was -besides the aforementioned town design- working on the characters, relationships, customization for better and more varied bodies, and a small weather system. I wanted to have a more robust customization/character-creation system, and relationship system before I started working on individual scenes.

I'm also reworking some of my conversation system, so I can have better, more character driven interactions with the girls for dating, and generally forming relationships.

(...Also there are some very useful things that are not very excited to talk about that I've been working on. Like optimizing my workflow, or file management [I was ecstatic to find out I can just save .blend files directly into Unity's project folder, and it reads them as an .fbx, so i can modify many models directly without the hassle of re-importing]... important stuff nonetheless, but nothing flashy)

Anyway, first thing is a new animal type: Cobra girls! :D

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I'm very happy with my model ended up looking. Man did i struggle so much to get what people call the "cobra hood" right.

Reptiles are always trickier than mammals when it comes to anthropomorphizing. So getting a reptile girl to look cute is complicated. I ended up studying and taking a lot of elements from Skygracer's style. You can tell by the very high cheekbones, the reptile "smile" that reaches very far back that he loves doing, the tall eye sockets, and narrow eyes.

New body sliders!

This is my neat new "slider" customization script. I avoided full body customization for a while because I thought it wasn't really possible with my setup, say, using blend shapes to control the shape of the body, because that would entail making perfectly matching blend shapes for every single one of the clothes meshes the characters wear, then going through that process any time I decide to add new clothes in the future. Is not impossible, but very messy and time consuming, so I left it as a possibility I could work on eventually, but most likely wouldn't.

...But! Experimenting with modifying the bones' scales themselves of the girls instead of using blendshapes turned out perfectly fine. There were some issues like modifying one bone size also modifies the subsequent bones in the hierarchy, (say, I want to make the shoulders broader but not the head along with them, or make the hip slightly narrower without shrinking the thighs) so I added a "bone size compensator" to the script.

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The best part of my system is that it was surprisingly painless to integrate with my Anthrogen system. So each bone size config gets saved to each girl's VillagerDNA script (yes that's what I named it), along with hair color, eye color, size, hairstyle, etc etc. So now you will be able to see more varied villagers, with different body types and shapes!

Steam post image^ I can make chunkier bigger girls...

^... and smaller skinnier ones.

Another thing regarding the new customization improvements.

I did actually end up using blend shapes, after all. Not to modify the whole body, but for other things like muscle definition.

So now I'm happy to introduce fit girls to Theanthria.

Speaking of... 4 More new girls!

Strong goth bovine girl Branwen!

(I love how her back ended up looking)

Small albino snake girl Astghik!

Massive cobra mommy Nazenig!

And thick, bottom heavy bovine girl Eirwen!

(Also I modified Danny a bit since she is a sort of tomboy character, so she now has a more fit body)

Finally, Weather System!

Not a lot to say since is fairly simple. It's an addition to my skybox system that also manages ambient light, fog, etc. Adding things like a rain profile was just a matter of a different light config and a designated rain skyboxes material.

It may be a small addition, but is very important for coziness, and narrative reasons. So I'm happy I added it. In the future, I want to implement mechanics like: chances of slipping higher when raining, that would be funny...

For August, I'll still be working on, of course, town itself yay... but also on completing some dating scenes. So finally after all this time I'll have the complete working gameplay loop.

There's now very few things left to work on to have a playable new build. Namely: the town, enough characters to populate it, a new inventory system, dialogue trees for the girls, UI, and the dating sequences. After that, what's left for me to work on, besides bug fixing and such, is lore, character backgrounds, and story scenes. So, things you haven't seen yet, and that I'm very excited to work on hoho. I haven't even shown you my acting sequence system with multiple girls, I hope I can soon... but ah we will see...

Thank you for reading and see you next time 🫂