MGA Dev Report Week 4: 2024-02-25:

I obviously have a lot to learn about blender and setting up the animation rigs, and then animating them. But I had success in setting up the bones for the shuttles landing gear. And I am able to get the doors to move like I want them too. I’m not happy with the results just yet, but it shouldn’t take me too long to get something good. Mainly I decided to break some of the rules with bones and IK rigging, and got something that looks nice when it animates.

So let’s talk a bit about combat and how it will be set up. Combat is going to be the biggest thing facing the player and it needs to be engaging, fast, and fun. The goals I have is to never (hardly ever) lock out the player from being able to control their avatar. But there will be stuns and other things that will make things very hard to work on. I’m going to list the requirements that I have (in requirements language).

1. All actions will cost stamina

2. Stamina will recover in a parabolic fashion. The higher the stamina bar is the faster it will fill.

3. Emptying the stamina bar will stun the character.

4. Moving costs stamina. Slower walking drains slower than running or sprinting. For the most part this will be hidden as the stamina recovery will be greater than the walking cost, but it will be evident when the character is attacking, vs attacking & moving

5. A character will also have a conscious bar. Effectively the character’s hit points. When the character’s conscious bar empties they will be knocked unconscious and ragdoll to the ground

6. A character will have a mana pool. Mana pool is filled at a continuous rate, based on environmental factors. (I won’t explain what these are, it’s a plot point, showing up in chapter 2!)

7. Mana is keyed to a characters will power. As mana drains so does the will power. Will power is important for resisting illusions and mental suggestions.

8. (Spicy DLC). A character will have an arousal bar. When it fills the character climaxes and is stunned until recovery.

9. When a character is stunned there will recover after a length of time, or can shorten the time through player actions.

10. (Spicy DLC). All clothing will have a durability pool. Clothes with low durability have their benefits decreased. Clothes have a cost to repair, but if past a certain point they cannot be repaired. Clothes with 0 durability are destroyed.

11. Actions may be restricted based on status of the character. A character can’t punch if their wrists are restrained behind their back for example. But they can still kick.

So from this, you can see that the player will have to manage multiple bars. Since I don’t want any deaths in the game, I’m using a conscious bar instead of hit points. We have the following bars: Conscious, Stamina, and Mana. For the Spicy DLC there will also be an aroused bar. I don’t plan on blocking access to the Spicy DLC, but putting all the adult material into it allows me to sell the game on steam without the censors getting their undies in a knot. Also I will probably have to offer different spicy DLC based on region. Thank you censorship laws in Japan. I love the games you produce but the mosaic censorship laws are a bitch aren’t they?

The next big thing I’ll explain is attributes. When it comes to attributes I like the paired system. With one attribute providing a bonus to attack, and another attribute providing defence.

For each of the bars:

· Stamina: Major Affecting Attribute: End(urance)

· Mana: Major Affecting Attribute: Int(elligence) Minor: Wis(dom)

· Conscious: Major Affecting Attribute: Vit(ality) Minor: End(urance)

There are some other stats that will come into play. The big one will be in the Spicy DLC which will be inhibition. That start’s fairly high. And increase the character’s embarrassment depending on how exposed they are. For example if a character with full inhibition gets her shirt ripped off, she might cover her breasts and run away instead of fighting. The more clothes that get ripped away the higher the chances of the character panicking.

So there will be stats like:

· Inhibition: Affects how embarrassed the character gets

· Embarrassment: Gives a chance for the character to panic.

· Excitement: How excited the character is, higher excitement might make them stronger, but also more impulsive

· Exhibitionism: Related to Inhibition, but the character might grow more aroused the more exposed they get, they might also get stronger in combat and skill become less costly the more exposed they are

· Submission: A character will get more excited as they get bound and humiliated

· Domination: The opposite of submission, they might get more excited dominating/tying up their foes

· Masochism: May be overpowered, but the character converts some conscious damage to arousal.

· Sadism: The character will get excited inflicting pain.

I don’t have the full list together, but this gives you an idea on what will be happening. For the first chapter a lot of these mechanics won’t be available. But as more chapters get unlocked the more mechanics will be available to play with.

· Finish off the basic mesh for the shuttle the player arrives in, and finish off the animations

· Review/research the best way to do UV unwrapping and positioning to make a toon model

· Review/research the shaders in blender and Unreal Engine to get that tune shading. I know I’m going to have to edit the normal

· Hopefully have a tune/cel shaded shuttle complete this week

Dev Report Week 3: 2024-02-19
I added an extra day to the week since it’s a long weekend, and this is a weekend project. I have been working on the shuttle for the opening scene and made some decisions on it.

The basic skin of the shuttle is in place. The colors are picked, and the doors, wings and control surfaces are in place as well. I’m still learning the best way to set up the UV maps and textures to get the Anime/Toon look I’m going for. I’ve provided a few images of how the shuttle looks. There’s still some things I want to add before I import it into Unreal Engine. Like the landing gear, and the mechanics on the passenger doors.

The shuttle is mostly a lifting body design but also has variable wings like the F-14.

I was going to talk about the various different humans that will show up in world. And some of the background of the universe.

For those familiar with my works Elknid’s Behemoth and Agent Lenna, this will be part of the same universe. There’s three types of humans, only slightly changed from basic humans.

Normal Humans:

These are your every day humans, you would expect to see around. They’re typically what you would find on Earth. They make up around 85% of the population on the planet. Nothing much to say about them

Resource Optimized Humans:

These are also known as Station Rats. Their genome has been changed to make them smaller, with males topping out at 155cm, and females at 145cm. They have slightly larger heads in proportion to their bodies.

They’re optimized for remote stations and places with lighter gravity than typical planets. Since they’re smaller than normal humans, the derogatory name Station Rat is often used to refer to them. They’ve also been optimized to eat less, and work in hotter climate conditions. Basically the corporations higher them to fill out the stations they don’t want to fund to the level needed for regular humans and heavy worlders.

Since they’re smaller, they have a lower body temperature, and usually wear more clothes than the average human does.

Heavy Worlders:

These are humans who have been changed to work on worlds of higher gravity and pressure than normal. They have a heavier bone structure, and are taller than average. With males around 215 cm, and females at 200 cm. Designed for remote mining worlds, they’re also less intelligent than normal humans. They’ve been bred to be trusting and gullible. But there are of course outstanding individuals.

With a larger body, they have a higher body temperature, which works well for colder worlds. But on normal worlds they are prone to overheating, and wear less clothing and showing off more skin than normal humans and Station Rats.

Make Up of Society:

The society is very much a dystopian society seen in most cyberpunk genre stories, with large corporations that effectively run different sectors of the galaxy. They are constantly at each other throats, with alliances and wars. The government barely holds them in check with its military might, but really, they’re on the take as well. And as long as a corporation doesn’t do something completely insane than the government won’t do anything.

There’s also constant wars going on between corporations, governments, pirates, and anyone else you can think of. Perfect for a demon invasion to happen. They do happen, and Ava/Meghan was the lead hero in the one against the wrath demons. People in the know, know about her. People who are fans of Magical Girls know of her exploits. But most think it’s silly and not real.

But with the constant wars going on, there’s a lot of fighting, and conscription is a good way to get soldiers. Almost all the male population has been in some sort of conflict and seen a lot of death. In fact, thanks to the wars and primary males being on the front line, there’s a disparity between the sexes on the remote planets. There are typically nine females for every male. And often the males that survive the wars are scooped up by the upper crust to prevent inbreeding. Among the heavy worlders and station rats this is even bigger, since they’ve had their genes fiddled with their population was skewed at the start.

On some worlds, they’ve used artificial insemination to help boost their population, and to try to get back to a normal population balance. Unfortunately, in some sectors, the corporations providing the services are skewing the results to keep the population under control.

About the World of the Game:

The world is a fairly new mining world, only about a hundred years old. It’s an independent world, outside of any of the sector alliances, and was mostly a normal mining world. Primarily basic metals, like Iron, Copper, Zinc, basically very Earth like in it’s distribution of materials. It does not have any of the strange materials that other worlds have to make them special.

But thirty years ago, they struck it big. Some miners found some energy crystals that have never been seen before. And it’s an energy crystal that provides light as well as can be tapped for power. But other strange materials have been found on other planets, that had new applications that they could be used about, causing a tech boom.

This is what the colonists were hoping for. They built a new city, around the mine they found the crystals. They aimed to have two million people living and working there. With skyscrapers filling the skylines.

And just as they were going, disaster struck. Children were getting sick and dying. Adults seemed to be immune, but anyone under the age of eighteen were getting sick. And no-one, rich or poor was immune from whatever it was.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. While the crystals they used drained at a constant rate, when they were removed from the planet that rate increased. If they were pulled from the solar system they disintegrated. Again no-one could figure out why.

This all happened with the last year. People fled the world, and the expected boom fizzled out before it got started. People with families ran from the world and went to the nearby space colony. Anyone who became pregnant was immediately taken off the world and forbidden from stepping on the world again.

This is where Meghan comes into the picture. She’s spent the last year traveling. Using her biometrics to travel along the alliance systems she’s fought for. Being the hero who fought off the wrath demons came with some privileges. But now she’s come to an independent world, not knowing what has been going on and has to make her way.

Goal for the Next Week

MGA Developer Report #2 2024-02-11
I didn’t hit the goals, but I did get some work done on the opening sequence. The opening sequence is the introduction of Meghan and her trip to her new world. So, I started to lay out the spaceport where her passenger shuttle would touch down. With Sci-fi, there is an element of realism and making something technically possible. So, I fell down the rabbit hole of how a practical spaceport would be and what it would need to hook into the rest of the game. That led to the shuttle, how big the shuttle would be, and so forth. Let’s just say I started to work on the passenger seats and how those would work with the shuttle and build out from there.

Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone with it, and made sure that it would work nicely with the corruption aspect of the game, and making sure that good old steel cuffs would work with the seat, and to make sure that if our heroine were bound in the seat naked, she would be able to survive the 3G acceleration that the shuttle would use to get back into orbit. You know, practical things like that. The good news is that I’ve also written a good portion of the opening dialog and how it will fit in with the tutorial of the game. The important part for me is that I want to make sure that the opening sequence before the player gets control of the main actor is 30 seconds, or at most 60 seconds. I don’t want the opening sequence to be a wall of text for 20 minutes before you can actually do something. Also, there’s a big part of ‘show, don’t tell.’  And with video games, this is weighed more towards the show and discovery than blatantly telling the player what is happening. I think a lot of games fail at this point.

I’ve also thought about the control scheme some more. I want to make sure it’s fairly dynamic and offers a wide range of options for those people who are insane like that. I’ve been racking my creativity about this. I’m trying to make the decision of real-time vs turn-based combat. The type of game I like to play is more real-time than turn-based. But real-time combat has limitations on what type of skills you can get access to quickly. And turn-based allows you to have many skills available. Since the player can decide what they want to do in each case, both are capable of online co-op, but real-time leads to a better experience for everyone involved and not having to wait for people to make decisions. Also real time leads to some of the other mechanics I want to involve.

Anyway what I’m thinking of is a two sequence skill active sequence. This will hopefully work well with both the controller and mouse and keyboard actions, though more optimized for mouse and keyboard.

This is currently under design and will probably change.

I still have the D-pad unassigned. With the double key activation and 3 weapon groups, there can be 243 skills mapped to the controller, though I doubt anyone will use that many. But there will be a in game UI for assigning these as the players want. At the start of the game the player won’t be able to select different weapons, maybe in the later part of chapter one they’ll be able to pick up knives, clubs and swords I haven’t decided. It will be introduced in chapter 2 as a new feature. I don’t want to go stupid on overloading the players at the start with what they can do.

So at the start there will be four action groups:

To punch mid, the player on keyboard would do 1 -> 2. On the controller, it would be LeftFaceButton -> TopFaceButton. I think combat will be a bit slower but still fun, especially as I add more skills throughout the story. Just think of the possibilities as player skill with the system grows.

This post is getting long, so I’ll leave you with a render of the passenger chair. It’s what I think will be good for a 3G acceleration / weightless environment. It has a very tall back for one class of engineered humans.

Next week, if I don’t have much more progress to show, I’ll go over the Resource Optimized Humans (station rats) and Heavy Worlders (no one dares to call them names). I’ll also talk about some of the background, one of the alliances of worlds, and the mining planet and how it fits into the galaxy.

My goal for this week:

· Finish the passenger shuttle for the opening sequence, and set up the shaders in Blender and Unreal Engine.

Magical Girl Ava Development Post Week 1: 2024-02-04
To help with my creative endevours I've started to work on a new game called Magical Girl Ava and the Cursed Harness.  It's set in the same universe as Elknid's Behemoth and Lenna Agent of Paddle.

Let me introduce Magical Girl Ava. Megan Higgins is a 19-year-old ‘retired’ magical girl who’s spent t ten years fighting the wrath demons that invaded her home world. She started when she was eight and retired just after graduating high school. She’s spent the last year hiding from her family, past, and war and has come to her new home to start a new, quiet life.

Little does she know that the tech boom on her new home-world has a nefarious past, and she’ll be pulled back into the battle, this time with the agents of lust.

Main Genres:

Corruption, BDSM, Bondage, Female Protagonist, Robots, Demons, Uniforms, Exhibitionism, Inhibition

So what do I have done so far?

Story-wise:

Tech-wise:

Art-wise:

Planned Features / Decisions:

General Art Style:

This week’s goal:

My goal is to post progress about once a week. But for now I’ll leave you with a couple of renders of Ava’s collar.

Spoilers Below: Really do not read this if you don't want it spoiled

These are MAJOR spoilers on the plot, do not read and bitch about it later. Really I mean it. This is for those people who say that the story should come before development, and this is to show that the story is significantly far along. But the development of the story will follow the tech and some plot points may have to change based on it. And this is just a very small portion of the story.