Previous post: https://subscribestar.adult/posts/2335477
Video: https://youtu.be/7YGlZk7ZGFk

It’s 12th of the month again. Time to talk about what was done in the game.

Most of this I mentioned or showed before, in posts or on discord.

Basic weather system in a form of rain was added into the game. It has a chance to trigger or stop every hour. It includes particle effect that become possible after updating the engine in the previous month.

Rain effect effect made in a way that indoors areas are excluded, plus it has different sound effect depending on if you’re inside or outside.

In the future I want weather to affect NPCs’ behavior. And the fact that the game is now tracking if the player is indoors or outdoors could also be useful for other things.

Most of the time this month I spend teaching NPCs interact with objects in the game world. As a demonstration of what it does you can see in the video how NPCs sit on stools in the tavern or Blacksmith Briena working on her anvil. 

Also a couple of NPC’s can be seen smoking, and previously added “works” like fishing or sweeping floor now uses same code too. So NPCs aren’t hard-coded to do it, they do these actions because of the schedule they were assigned. They think “I’m a blacksmith and that’s my working hours. Hmm.. That’s an anvil over there, I’ll go use it for some time”.

Apart from normal NPCs behavior in the future similar system can be used for something more spicy.

There are still a lot of work on this ahead. For example to make it so NPCs don’t fight over intractable objects when two of them try to use it at same time.

I don’t actually know about how these things are done, I’m figuring stuff out as I go :)

While things above were main focus, apart from that I was working on some smaller things. 

Went over a list of bugs I accumulated over time and were able to fix all of them (apart from one that appears to fix itself with engine update).

Was working on swamp area yesterday, making it look more swamp like, with new shallow water tile-set, waterlilies as ingame objects, reed sprites that are growing from the water. 

Animation on the water tiles will need some tweaking.

Also, a scene with elf femboy got an illustration. I will have to work on how scenes between NPCs will be triggered before it’s added into the game.

Saying “when it’s ready” is fair and makes sense, but it also feels a little disrespectful. I think I will commit and say that the first version should be ready at September 12th. If it’s not completely ready in terms of what I want to see in the first version, I’ll upload what I have. It won’t be content rich version, but you should be able to run around and check out what I’m working on by yourself :)

Previous post: https://subscribestar.adult/posts/2285305
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfKQZr1QBSY

This month I spend working on two big things.

First one is the quest system I promised to focus on in previous post.

I have successfully basic quest journal. It loads quests from data base, works with save system, saves all the progress, and shows it to the player in GUI.

For testing purposes I added a simple mushroom quest – gather 3 mushrooms and bring them to the quest giver. You can see it in the video.

In terms of future improvement I have this idea about "clues". Those would be some facts about world, some lore knowledge, maybe rumors, that player gathered. Quest objective would be linked to some of the clues. In the situation where player doesn't know how to do an objective because he wasn't reading dialogue and the quest description isn't stating clearly where to go, player can press a button to "think" about the objective and if he has enough related clues gathered he would come up with a solution. For example "I was asked to find three mushrooms, and I heard mushrooms grow in that one forest, maybe I should go there next". Won't be required for the quests, more like fail safe mechanic

Now with basic cutscenes and quests working I can start to work on MC’s intro to the village.

Second big thing I was working on is updating to Godot 4.6

Previously I was working in Godot 3.6, and was hesitant to update. I gave it a try but got a lot of errors I couldn’t find any info about, so I decided to stay with 3.6

This month I was also thinking about how to make rain effect and run into realization that what I want to do won’t be working in 3.6 but should be possible in Godot 4.6, so I gave it another go.

This time I got about 300+ errors and warnings, but none I couldn’t understand. So I spend a week fixing and remaking everything.

Screenshot shows the stage when I was able to make the game running:

Tilemap system got completely remade so I had to recreate all the village and surrounding landscape.

Navigation system broke too, and needed to be remade. As well as many other thing.

Now every single error and warning were fixed and the game is working fully on Godot 4.6 :)

With new tilemap system it was now possible to assign custom metadata to every tile, so I was able to use it for footsteps sounds. Previously after new part of landscape was added I had to paint on separate layer what sound would be playing on what tile, and I don’t need to spend time on it in the future – it will be done automatically. It means development in the future will go slightly faster.

Same thing for NPC navigation – previously I would manually create navigation polygone (area where NPCs can go, so they won’t try to go through walls), but now it will be generated automatically based on the tiles and collisions of the objects that I placed in the world. It again means I won’t have to spend my time on this in the future and development would go faster.

On the screenshot top house has automatically generated navigation, and the bottom one shows old manually created one.

It’s good idea to invest time into things like these now to save time in the future.

Those are two big things I was focused on, but there are a few small things too

Made some simple cobblestone tiles. Should help to add some variety to the look of roads and to footstep sounds

Statue in the local church got an illustration. As is tradition :D

MC got an illustration for his possible first scene. 

Done some with the landscape, added Sheriff’s house and Sheriff / village guard Rhona herself:

She’ll keep these unruly femboys in line.

For the next month I wan to work NPCs behavior. The goal will be to make it so when they come into the tavern they would be able to choose a stool and sit on it. Not because they are programmed but as a random part of their roaming. With that working later I would be able to build on top of it, so NPC would be interacting with objects when they decide to, and maybe trigger scenes too.

Previous post: https://subscribestar.adult/posts/2233486
Video: https://youtu.be/wZ1CA87fDwg

That 12th again, and it’s time to talk about what was done this month cycle.

Most of this I mentioned or showed before, in posts or on discord.

With holiday’s it’s always harder to stay on task, so this month’s additions might be a little smaller, but still, important tasks were done.

I have a long list of tasks that I can choose from what I want to work on today. It contains big important and very complex tasks, or something simple that can be done in one session.

Maybe it will explain why sometimes it might look like I add stuff at random :)

I’m working on expanding dialogue system, so it can be used for creating simple cutscenes like in WaB. 

I started from the paintings on the walls you can interact with. 

Also added new type of item that start a cutscene when used in inventory. For example a piece of paper with a drawing on it, that you can take a look at. 

Dialogue UI changes when cutscene starts, it hides unnecessary panels and shows the button in the bottom left corner. When pressed it hides other UI, letting you enjoy the picture 

Building on this, I’m working on first sexy scene with Briena the blacksmith (can’t really show in youtube video or public post). I added basic functions for showing/hiding an image, fading in and fading out, white splash effect, etc. Now I need to decide how to do audio effects for these scenes. It needs to be easy enough to use when adding new scenes, but I don’t want to constantly store all the effects in memory. 

Other, more complicated thing to do in the future will be making characters move around during cutscenes. It would be pain to animate their movement manually, so I need to use existing movement and navigation

Non quest items can be dropped from the inventory and picked up again. They stay persistent in the game world, so if you load the save file they will be where you dropped them. Apart from player littering, it will be used for spawning items that can be picked up, like mushrooms for example. It’s the technical foundation I needed to be working for other things in the future

I was struggling with day/night lighting in VoB. Wanted to make dark period of night and bright period of day longer, and transition periods shorter, but couldn't wrap my head around what mathematical formula would represent that. 

So I added these little gizmos to the script. Now in the editor I can change these curves how I want and the first one will affect how light the day or dark the night are, while the second one controls the sunset light, making the light more red. Should help a lot with tweaking things around and finding right colors and light intensity.

I also added crickets sounds during the night. They spawn from some of the trees, so in the game they won’t just sound in your head, but should feel like they are coming from somewhere in the world. Planning to add birds sounds during the day, and other sound effects, like water sounds near the river, etc.

A pop-up Quick Menu were added into the game. It opens if you press Alt, middle mouse, or X on xbox controller. It’s needed so the game can be played with mouse only or with controller (or maybe later with touch controls). The menu lets you access other menus that would normally require to press a button on the keyboard.

A slider to change dialogue speed was added to the settings.

And clicking sounds were added to buttons :)

There was a bug for some time with menus that pause the game. If you quickly open some menu and immediately close it, if you do it quick enough several times clicking like maniac it can completely break NPCs’ navigation, so they get stuck moving in place till you reload the save file. I didn't know how to approach this problem, but now I figured it out. 

The problem was that all the menus and various ways to close them would execute “pause/unpause game” command by themselves, so when you do it quick enough they would interfere with each other, trying to pause the game while other is trying to unpause it. So the solution was to forbid them from pausing or unpausing the game, instead when it needs to be done they file a formal request to one single script to do it, and that script executes all requests it receives in order (in 3-4 business days xD), so nothing is interfering. 

The solution makes sense and doesn’t look like a hack, so this is reassuring to me

Herbalist Eilisha and her house were added into the game. I made a couple custom props, but I think her house would need more custom assets to differentiate it from other villagers.

You can see her has a large tentacle cactus plant next to her bed. For reasons, probably

Big plan for the next month cycle is to make simple quest system and a very basic quest to test it. Something classic like “bring me 3 mushrooms”

Quest system would require to keep track of conditions and check if they are met, provide info for player and also serve as a database of what was changed/achieved by player. So in dialogue with NPC we could for example check if certain quest is complete and provide specific reaction.

Ir would also have to work with existing save system and be resilient to player shenanigans. For example if we need to get 3 mushrooms, find them, and on the way to finish the quest drop one of them on the ground, the quest should update accordingly, stating that we still need one more mushroom. It funny to me that not all popular quest system plugins that you can buy for Unreal5 for example pass this simple mushroom test.

I’m mentioning this plan to work on the quest system this month so I won’t postpone complex task and commit to it.

P.S.: While recording video for the post I spotted three new bugs xD

Previous post can be found here: https://subscribestar.adult/posts/2077464
Video: https://youtu.be/bpX7GvSA5Ts

That’s the end of the first month cycle that I’m focusing on Village of Boobs, so lets talk about how it’s going.

Most of this I mentioned or showed before, in posts or on discord.

Since last post like this I was focused on main character, making assets, and designing village. Also I was doing tests with game performance and what can affect it.

I have decided that this will be main character and polished his look. I’m considering different outfits or possible body changes, but it’s not something that is very important at the moment. 

Characters screen plus basic character stats were coded and added into the game. The name of MC is a placeholder of course :D

MC gets attribute points after leveling up, and player can allocate them to attributes at any point.

You can see some buttons aren’t active. It means these systems weren’t added into the game yet.

Sex statistic was also added into the character screen for MC and for NPCs too. It’s filled with some test data for now.

Hunger, Thirst and Sleep is something I’m considering. It’s not decided yet, but it won’t be like full on survival game.

Watch the video for a little tour. We got some new swamp area, a farm, cemetery, newly added characters and new assets.

Chickens were added as first farm animals with basic behavior. They wake up, come out of their chicken coop, roam around, and at the end of the day go back to sleep. 

Farmer Pyotr, and his wife Olga were added as characters into the game. Innkeeper Martha got an update of her illustration, so now I like how she looks. 

One of big things that were worrying me is how character were spasming out when you skip time. (you could see it in the video in one of the previous posts) They behavior were not able to keep up with the speed they are moving with, so they were constantly overshooting where they were trying to go. I solved it by speeding up physics processing when the time speeds up, so now their movements are calculated properly. 

They are also now turn towards player when speaking to them, which wasn’t working before.

Reworked how beds work in the game, so they don’t need any hacks anymore to work with character navigation. Took an inspiration from how it is done in Skyrim, where the marker NPC interacts with is invisible and placed outside the bed. This will be helpful with other interactable objects too.

Also made double sided beds. NPCs can occupy their side, but if both are occupied, they signal to each other and later in development it might have a chance to trigger a scene between NPCs.

I don’t have a library of assets that come with RPG Maker in Godot so I working on various assets for the game. Fence tile-set, filed tiles, crops, deed trees, boulders and rocks, chicken coop etc. It doesn’t sound like much, but there are a lot that I need, and a lot will be required in the future.

Previously I said that we will need at least five scenes for the first version. So far we got illustrations for 3 scenes: titfuck with Briena, milking of Dark elf mom, and naked boobs scene with Pigtails chan I posted today.

The is still work need with whole cutscenes system, with how the scenes will be triggered, with sound-effects and dialogues, but the things are coming along ;) 

P.S.: There are some stuttering in the video. It’s not present in the game, I think it’s something to do with frame rate interacting with recording