Lust & Lead – Dev Log 01

Hello everyone! Sorry for the late post. I was a bit preoccupied fixing something but, as promised, I'm sticking to that two-week schedule.

First off, I want to talk about the unveiling of Lust & Lead and how well it's gone! Honestly, I've been quite surprised by how receptive people have been to the new game and I'm happy to see so many excited to get their hands on it.

Since I made the announcement, I took a short break and then moved on to getting started on the Artifacts/Perks system, as well as fixing up some broken stuff in the Scenes System. After all that, I decided to prioritize working on the game's story and script.

Some of you might be wondering why I've decided to delve into the script now, so soon after announcing the game. Well, I've already been keeping notes and designing characters for the story, but I also need to make sure everything is concrete. It helps a lot, especially with getting voice talent on board, which I'll want to try and do before the game hits any kind of Alpha.

So, what that means for this Dev Log is that I don't have a lot to show. I can talk about some of the changes I've made, but I'll save those for later because, as I mentioned in the announcement post, I want to take a brief look back.

You see, Lust & Lead has a fairly straightforward premise, but my initial plans for the project were a bit more... ambitious, I should say? At least in the art department. 

So, some of you may be disappointed by this but I originally started making Lust & Lead in a much more up-to-date style. I had initially planned for the retro style but wanted to try something new. After working on this style for a couple of weeks, I decided to go back to the retro style for a number of reasons, the biggest of which being scope.

Characters admittedly took a bit longer but, as character art is my specialty, I was quite confident in my ability to model, texture and set up materials for more contemporary-looking characters. Where I wasn't as confident was environments, and that was basically the dealbreaker.

I realized that with a higher fidelity style comes a sort of expectation for everything to meet that same quality standard. Lust & Lead is meant to be a small and fun game, not a massive undertaking, so I backtracked a bit.

This was literally causing me sleepless nights and, knowing that people liked Sin Spire and its retro aesthetic, I realized I had something that not many other developers have, which is a niche within this already fairly sparse niche of 3D erotic horror video games.

With a retro style I could accomplish more across the board and have fun while doing it. That said, I did like some of the work I did for the HD version, so I figured I'd show off some screenshots. Though I wasn't able to take any new ones due to a lot of this stuff being shoved away somewhere in my asset folders, a lot of these screenshots are fairly bad.

You can hopefully see the level of detail and styling I was going for. The game was still very much stylized, but with more granular detail in the skin, clothing and materials. The downside was that this style relied much more heavily on good lighting because the textures weren't nearly as diffuse as they are in the current retro style.

I do want to quickly point out that, at some point in the future, I do want to experiment with different levels of fidelity. As I said, I like working in the retro style but I also don’t want to be a one-trick-pony. I know that it filters some people and that not everyone is fond of the look, but I’d rather work with a style I artistically have full control over for a project like this.

A lot of the stuff I did in the HD version actually ended up sticking around. For example, the cloth masking system is better than Sin Spire's for one simple reason: it does more than just mask out the body. This new clothing system also applies a soft AO to the body to simulate the clothing casting a shadow. It's a simple but effective technique that helps improve the believability of the outfits and skin.

But more importantly: Wrinklemaps.

I was originally going to do away with these once I moved to the retro style, but a part of me felt it would be interesting to actually incorporate Wrinklemaps into the retro style for specific characters. This is mainly limited to story-focused human characters rather than the basic mobs in the game.

The reasoning is fairly simple. Wrinklemaps have to evaluate quite a lot of information, and having 20+ enemies all evaluating that same information probably wouldn't be great for performance.

Unlike the HD version, the Wrinklemaps here use a simple greyscale overlay instead of a normal map. Normal maps, of course, aren't used here in the 6th-gen-inspired style.

One thing I made for the HD style that didn't carry over (or at least didn't really work very well) was a skin ripple system.

It was a basic system that would take a socket and then, from that socket's position, create a ripple effect that carried across the skin and deformed the model slightly. It does still technically work but, without enough geometry to support it, it's kind of useless.

Back to Retro

Overall, while it was painful to basically remove all the work that was done for the HD style, it wasn't all for nothing.

I'm much more comfortable working in the lower-definition style and I've also allowed myself the freedom to not stick to a strict polygon count. I'm just trying to stay close to the aesthetic while allowing room for smoother geo or a bit more texture resolution where I think it makes a difference.

As a brief note, unlike Sin Spire, I'm intending for texture filtering to be a toggleable option in the settings.

In case you don't know, texture filtering is what stops textures in games from being pixelated. The PS1 and early software-rendered PC games didn't have texture filtering, but by the time the N64 and the PS2 came around, texture filtering was kind of standard.

A lot of indie games, especially in the retro 3D space, disable texture filtering outright even if it's inaccurate to the aesthetic they're targeting.

I do like that look, but I also like the smoother look, especially when it comes to characters. The option is currently set up and working, but whether or not it'll cause problems remains to be seen.

Okay, so this post ended up ballooning out of control.

I was originally going to talk a bit more about the game's features, as well as some other things that happened and a few experiments I've been working on, but at over 1000 words I think I've talked this subject to death.

I also wanted to address some (very) frequently asked questions regarding the game, its approach to progression, the main character’s appearance and so on but I’ll also save that for later.

Next time I'll probably focus more on what's currently being worked on rather than looking back at what happened over the preceding couple of months. By that point I’ll probably, hopefully, have some new art to show off as well.

Until then, I hope you're all doing well, and I'll see you next time.