Hey y'all, progress update time. Changes span across a few categories:

I got the big UI architecture idea working! That took the bulk of my dev time. I'll be using this UI code to build everything now. Right now there's not much to see besides a single unstyled omni-testing-button (which I am very proud of!) that tests all aspects of the UI code tree at once. You'll probably see the new UI in all future screenshots. Behold the nerd diagrams I madly scrawled to be able to understand it:

Built better camera zoom smoothing and motion interactions. Being able to move the view around without thinking about it is SUCH a bigger deal than I thought! Courtesy of my partner, who has been championing designing a better baseline player experience.

Core engine

Fixed eyebrows sometimes being the wrong color... by adding a whole new feature for rendering small, rapidly changing pieces of characters. An unexpected detour and significant engine upgrade.

Backgrounds are smarter and better tile-able to prepare for interactive customizable environments.

Did lots of testing for how I wanna store the game's files. It's part of the larger push toward the character creation tools. Plus, this'll be needed for save files and custom scenarios.

Rewrote the game loading code! I needed to in order to make better testing environments for the stuff mentioned above. And since we're gonna use this engine in multiple games, it helps to make the engine itself customizable. Now I can easily fiddle with basic ideas that aren't fully ready, like this lil node/wiring... thingy:

Fluids and shaders

I'm learning to code fluid and effects rendering now (glsl shaders~). I have no idea when this specific journey will pay off, so I'm spending personal time and not dev time on it. I've tried to give myself quick crash courses in order to learn this kind of programming in the past, but it's too arcane compared to what I normally do. If I ever want to make fluids look the way I want them to in my games, I'll have to sit down and learn to write shaders the slow and steady way. Wish me luck y'all.

My thoughts

Gosh, I'm thankful the UI code is fully operational now. It's been the single most difficult aspect of any game project for me. The inside of this game engine is a constantly shifting set of modular pieces. The outside shell is the opposite- a rigid structure. I needed the UI to work with both halves of that situation. 

What I've built now has got two big features: 

I underestimated the challenges of making something that fulfills these two requirements. But here we are, some months (and concerned DMs) later. And yep, this works.

The reason for the second requirement is that it gives me the ability to build my own dev tools in-engine. And as a result, our tools can become the player's toys. Right now I'm using the freshly-working UI code to build the facial expression designer we're using for development. This'll become part of the player's character customizer. Stuff like full customizers, detailed readouts, and complex controls are best displayed over top the game like a web page. 

Meanwhile, we can also do in-the-world UI. This is what you'd mostly use when just playing, since it's better at visualization, and it can visually interact with the world or characters' bodies. 

The player's baseline experience is drastically affected by UI. I mostly neglected this entire branch of game design when I was doing solo dev. I didn't have much interest or knowledge about the topic, other than a general desire to make my games "feel good". It's a good thing for all of us that I now have a team member who has passion and knowledge about UI and user experience. With our powers combined (me as developer/artist, them as designer/advisor), I think we can make effective use of these new UI features.

Next up

My partner has had to hold me back and convince me to write this post. I'm eager to race forward after finally getting this far. 

We're now -- FINALLY -- in the feature wrap-up phase. Meaning I'm not intending to write any new features or mechanics until release. All of my efforts are now going into filling out and USING the game engine's current features. 

It's totally understandable to not wanna support right now. My method of building this engine (slow and steady, addressing long-term needs first) ended up guaranteeing a long development cycle without playable builds. I didn't predict the lack of playable builds part. But I think this will produce the best games in the end, so I'm pressing forward. The fact that there are SO MANY of you who are still so driven to support this project for SO LONG is inspiring as hell. I'm just blown away. 

I think it's worth continuing with the same approach: do it right, do it thoroughly, don't dress it up before it's ready, but still do try my best not to keep everyone waiting. Since regular progress posts eat up quite a bit of dev time, I'm gonna continue to focus on coding more, and only posting when there's noteworthy progress to talk about, or something to show off. 

Thanks for keeping this going, y'all.

<3

Lemme chat about posting schedules for a moment.

Last time, I had an idea. Doing small monthly updates, and saving big posts for whenever there's fun progress to show. Since big posts are stressful for me, it sounded ideal. Everyone seemed happy with that plan.

Problem: to my anxious brain, "a small post" == "a big post". I was stressing the exact same amount, going through the same thoughts: should I just delay the post a little longer, so I can try to make what I'm doing look "presentable enough" to post? Thus, everyone's wondering where the scheduled post is and I'm wasting dev time on nonsense.

I've had a couple of extremely tumultuous but informative years IRL, and I'm slowly accepting that there's nothing heroic about smashing your head against the wall over and over. Anxiety isn't something I can just power through and expect good results. So... 

I'm done with trying to force myself into a consistent posting schedule. If you require that to feel comfy supporting a creator, that's understandable! Don't expect one here for the time being. I'm working on my anxiety in the background, so who knows how things'll change over time.

Until we're in the swing of releasing builds, we're just gonna post whenever there's a thing to share. Any other arrangement has slowed game development down way too much. Posts might be days or months apart, depending on the size of the feature being worked on. It's a learning process! Maybe we'll come to a new decision in a week >.>

We're making a game and the lewd sandbox engine that powers it. Most of what I've talked about so far is the engine building. Time to talk about the game:

New title: Fluttercord Experiments.

We have a theme! Meaning, a setting, backstory, and ethos. The game is an ongoing conversation/research project between Fluttershy and Discord. 

Fluttershy wants to learn what unimagined possibilities exist with the Lord of Chaos as her lover. So Discord is showing her an infinite tapestry of lewd logistics and scenarios to satisfy her curiosity. Discord wants to learn what's enjoyable (and ethical) to do to ponies, so Fluttershy is acting as his guide.

You play as the Fluttercord duo, ascending their original timeline to pull in volunteers (ponies, other creatures, or even themselves), from multiple worlds/timelines to conduct their experiments.

Discord sets the stage, controls the world's physics, and creates tools with his magic. Fluttershy helps you find a wholesome way to navigate the ethics of pushing your volunteers' bodies and minds to cartoonish extremes. 

I had little beyond "lewd" as the basis for big design choices until now. We ended up in a sketchy dungeon with mismatched tech aesthetics as a result. We're moving into Discord's domain now. Discord's presence explains the chaotic premise of a sandbox about tinkering with bodies, minds, cloning, and cartoon physics. Everything from UI design to all the technical sfx, animations, rigging etc, have become so much easier to make them make sense. 

The art has been low priority so far. I've restrained myself from spending dev time on it directly, unless it's a visual feature that relies on it. That being said...

Here's a recent screencap from testing the new environment configuration features (layers, colors, tiling). The game's vibe is improving.

I've been drawing for myself outside of work, but my excitement is seeping into my personal sketching practice. So, now we have some concept art to show off! These are rough assets, concepts, and mockups for the game Fluttercord Experiments (previously SHF3). It's reflective of the theme, our current direction, and the mechanics that are either planned or already implemented in the engine. (also, these are not organized in any way, and subject to change on a whim)

Menu concepts for a start screen and sidebar (these are separate menus, just mashed together in the sketch).

Exploration mode is our planned progression mode, led by Fluttershy. You unlock and upgrade stuff by fulfilling requests and experimenting. It'll sneakily teach you to play the game. Discord leads the current sandbox mode, where everything is infinite and free.

The sidebar is a concept for a (far future) feature where creatures can live in the menus, be lewd there, and help guide you.

Animation and character select concepts:

A messy bunch of concepts. Figuring out invisibility fx, and the toy spawner, inventory, and tinkering station:

Plushification feature concept:

Plushification is a multipurpose power. Make them sit and watch whatever's in front of them, use them as a toy, or play with their plush form instead of their normal form. Most importantly, it gives me as a developer an easy-to-rig-and-animate version of a character that can be moved around or held. 

Working through ideas about the beds they're laying on, and the floor beneath that:

I'm excited. We're replacing the old "beds", which were locked into a static spot, with placeable, configurable playmats. Sometimes you want ponies to lay on a big soft flower pillow, and sometimes you want them on something more hardcore. 

The playmat being a game object means that it'll be able to be granted any ability in the game, like having a live electrical current, storing fluids, even having a mind :3

Also, having them laying on a mat on the floor solves a lot of logistical problems.

Fluid pipe rendering and object placement:

Don't get too hung up on details here. The first full piping in this engine will look somewhat like this. They'll be underground, stackable, with overlays to help with visibility. 

... and that's all for now!

The code is progressing well. There are loose threads that have to be tied before things really work. But otherwise, the engine work is entering into a final wrap-up phase. 

To the ones in my comments and DMs that need to hear this: You have two options to play this game. Support me and wait, or don't support me and still wait. 

I'd be plonking away at this game and engine with or without financial support. But good grief, y'all's support is SO helpful, given the cost of living rn. Thank you all so much for keeping us fed while we do this. 

<3

This was an interesting month for me and my fiancee! 

We spent most of this month talking to each other, and to healthcare professionals. The insights have helped our well-being more than I can describe. From better understanding how our past traumas affect our present selves and perceptions, to finding new approaches to parts of life that used to feel insurmountable, and more. Plus we've gained better access to healthcare we've been needing!

Every day seems to feel a little bit easier than the last, and the future is looking brighter and brighter.

---

The talking has been really needed, and not just for our personal mental health. 

I'm transitioning from being primarily a solo dev on this game (with occasional commissioned art/assets), to being a full time, two-person team with my fiancee. That means a lot of meta-level work: communicating, setting up our environment to be able to collaborate while working, figuring out how to not step on each others' toes, and lots lots more. 

So, my new team member is focusing on things like:

That frees me up to spend my mental resources on the kinds of things I'm actually good at. 

This meta work has been our February. For March, we're excited to focus our combined power on moving this game forward.

---

Ever since we started working together, our ideas and projects have been more grounded yet more exciting. But collaboration increases demands on our communication, and requires us to understand ourselves and each other well enough to be effective as a team. So far, it's going great!

We made progress on every aspect of life this month, which has helped make it easier to keep working on the game more sustainably. Somehow, without touching the game's code, this month was incredibly fruitful and productive.

Not to mention all the administrative work that we got done together with far less stress than was ever possible before. 

---

All that being said, here's a recap of what we got done in this last month of February:

Also, I'm not ready to go into full details yet, but I'm too excited not to share:

And a summary of some of our next plans starting in this next month of March:

---

Thanks again to everyone who has been so patient and supportive even during the phases of development that can feel stagnant at a glance. You make it possible to work on these passion projects without needing to get a separate job just to survive along the way. Given the scope of this project it wouldn't have even been feasible to be working on it for as long and often as it'd need in the first place. 

And now, except far less lonely and far more excited than before, back to the Critter Codin' Cave we go! 

Here's what I've been up to since we last talked about the game:

- Expression and reactions expanded.
- Advanced ability to swap groups of assets quickly.

This is a great thing for expressions, since there's a lot of asset swapping with the many layers of the mouth and eyes. Expressions are pretty streamlined on the tech side now! 

- Expand the UI structure.
- Improve UI and game events.

Hard to describe this one. I'm simplifying the signals being sent around the game to describe what the player is doing. The structure and code is more complex to support this, but as a result, the player can easily be simulated by the debugger... or by unicorn magic or machines in the future. 

For now though, this is driving us toward a usable expression designer, which is the first and most important (for release) part of the character creator. The character creator will start as a brain editor. The brain is harder to make manually since it's got a lot of pieces that are hard to test without tweaking the values live.

- Game "actions" design.

Big-picture, I see one final hole in the engine besides UI. It's a simple channel of information to describe events in the game. I touched on this idea above. I'm not gonna dig too deep right now since this still in the pen-and-paper phase, but... the cool things that come long-term from this is time control! Like, being able to set up automated machines on a pony, skip forward in time, and see how they're faring after hours or days. Short-term, this is an enormous help in debugging ^^;

- Make the engine more portable.

I'm also, on the side, working on the engine's portability. This engine will be used in most/all of my projects so it needs to be easy to maintain and update between games. Things like character data and UI designs might change, but under the hood everything else should be wired up to work cross-project. I'm about 90% there!

- Outsourcing help.

I'm also working on integrating my partner into helping with code tasks. Tedious things that I can't automate, don't need right away, but would help a lot if they were done. I don't want to spend my dev time on them when I could be working on bigger features, but really wish someone would do them. I'm excited about this part! Will report how it goes~

- so many bugs fixed.

Okay yep. That's it for now! I'll be posting monthly wrap-ups, which will usually describe whatever's in progress but not ready to show off yet. Whenever there's something visual or cool to show off, I'll post it as soon as it's show-offable!

My communication has been bad. I'm gonna try a new format. Two types of posts: random progress updates whenever something's ready, and monthly wrap-ups. My brain is happier with less rigid structure, but consistency is important, so this might strike the right balance.

What's the state of things?
This year was low in visible progress and lacking posts. It's because of a major life upheaval. I thought the feelings of chaos would eventually  calm down and let me work, but instead I've just become accustomed to operating within it. As 2024 ends, I'm left with feelings of satisfaction and embarrassment.

I'm very excited and satisfied with the state of the engine. It's a little daunting in size when looking at the whole thing: a lewd-focused sandbox game engine needs a lot of custom, hand-built things. But despite its growing size, I think each system (fluid dynamics, sensations, emotions, reactions, overlapping animation management, modular body parts, etc etc there are a bunch) is in a workable enough state to be impressive on its own, if it were the focal point of a game. Not only that, but my programming skill is so much better after all the effort to remove stress from my life. I'm even better at making this stuff than ever.

But here's where I'm embarrassed. I'll be blunt. I'm heavily neuro-spicy. I have had a tendency to lose perspective in ways that might seem silly to others. I've got this ridiculously powerful engine already. But I've left out a couple relatively simple pieces that it needs to actually... run a game. Thus I'm stuck just methodically trying to fill those missing holes in the engine while my audience waits with straining patience. That wouldn't have happened if I'd just built things rougher and more big-picture instead of being all meticulous about doing it piece by piece.

My work has gotten less rigidly focused over the course of this year. I'm just hopping between interconnected things. Right now it's a much-needed UI code upgrade that's helping me test and finish off the reactions code, and will also finally give me a simple UI to do everything else with.

In hindsight I would've opted for simpler systems for everything at the start, enough to run something very basic. Then released a whole little game with it. Then built the engine more. Repeat.

I regret that I didn't do it that way. Back when I started remaking this engine, I was so frustrated with how the old engine felt like it was at its limit before I even got half of my ideas into it. And I knew the reason it was so limited was because of my past mistakes. My early choices as a less-experienced programmer had led to a tangled and unstable foundation. So I tried to write this new engine the way I wished the old one had been made. I was too afraid of being limited by my new engine, and that led me to focus on too much depth first. 

In the long run, it's fine. I'll finish up the core pieces needed, and I'll show stuff off as it's ready. The depth I put in isn't wasted, but it's very inconveniently timed. Sometime in the relatively near future, I'll have the missing pieces filled in and ready to play with.

Those of my supporters who decide to keep funding this process, thank you. Those who don't want to, thanks so much for your support in the past. Genuinely. Even if this project ended up losing most of its funding, I'd finish making it, albeit much slower since I'd need other work. It's just too cool. I gotta see it through.

My next post will contain more specifics about what's being built n stuff. Thanks for hanging around throughout all of this <3

Whoops, last two posts weren't set to public. Substar makes it very easy to accidentally make posts paid-only. All posts here should be public except subscriber-only releases.