Another Release...

Here we go, a bit more than a month after the last release and we're off again.

What's new?

Honestly, not much really new stuff. This update is mostly fixes and a few upgrades to stuff in the last version. The main part of it is the Combat System. While I was originally building it, there were a lot of things I tried that didn't work so the combat had got cluttered and getting it to do what it should was getting harder. So I scrapped it and redid it from fresh, optimising, standardising and hopefully improving. At the core, it should operate the same, but less buggy.

There were also some issues in Inventories which took a while to spot, but the ones I found are now fixed.

What about the public release?

That will go out in two weeks time. Usually I'll wait a month then release, but the combat stuff was bad enough that I'd rather count this release as the proper one and reset the timer, but not to a full month because the public release is already overdue.

Combat System Changes

As I said, the combat system has been rebuilt from the ground up. So functionally attacking, specials and switching between combat modes is the same, but better under the dashboard.

Lunging

The lunge was an issue. In theory it makes sense to throw yourself to where the enemy is and hit or grope them. In reality, other enemies got in the way, terrain pushes you aside and any number of things could make it hard to position right. The solution was a hybrid of Lunge and a teleport. The lunge functionality still works, but for now it has been toggled to teleport functionality and just skips moving from A to B and just blips straight to B with a fancy lightning effect.

Alignments

It's still not 100%. Some things knock off the rotations, but the takedowns seem to be aligned properly now. It's better but may not be perfect yet.

Enemy Special Attacks

A complaint was that when an enemy does a special attack, you can only stand there and take it. Now, you have a brief block window when they come out of teleport to take them out. The window length is defined by your game difficulty. This doesn't work on takedowns, that's what Struggle is for.

Knockback

This now works. Damage throws the enemy back. Damage actually kills them eventually and takes them out of their logic so they stay dead.

Inventory Updates

There were a few bugs in here. Clothes repairing when you picked something up, items not adding to inventory and items not being used properly. These have been fixed and Stat bars have been added to the inventory screen so you can see the effect items have.

Fluids

While I was fixing takedowns, the fluids were annoying me. So I've added some new effects for that. Thicker and more visible, and with collision. There's more I want to do with them, but will need to wait for the next few phases.

What's Next?

I've already started on the next phase, doing stuff that has no impact on the existing game but can be switched over when it is ready. A new character builder is in progress, and planning for the new character models. The ones we have now are good, but we have a few issues with adding to them.

The first is that the models are pro grade but we only have access to canines and a werewolf. We could add species but I'm not sure we can build them to the right quality and we'd have style mismatches. We can modify them as much as we want, but this is a skill issue on our end.

Second, the skeletons are custom. The canines have a custom skeleton, the werewolf has a different one. We need a standardised character skeleton so animations work globally. I want to change them into the UE skeleton, but that means re-rigging the models and starting from scratch with our own models might just be about the same in difficulty and time.

We haven't made a decision yet, that will be next week, but what is being built now for the character creator would work either way we go. The main bits of this next phase are bringing character models up to a finalised standard with a high level of customisation. That and upgrading the movement to Motion Matching, which is another reason to use the UE skeletons.

Please ignore the abomination in the shower. Everything is placeholders, and all the parts on the model are swappable from the menu. Or will be as I build it. The other advantage of this customisation is the game can be made SFW and marketed a bit better. We're not sure how to go about it yet, but it could be SFW by default, locking combat to just the Fight Mode, removing genital options in the Builder and giving it SFW skins. Then to enable NSFW either download from Patreon, Subscribestar or toggle it on in the options menu.

Something to think about!