Brief Update

Hey guys,

I want to give you a brief update on progress with the next build.

Things did not go great last month.

At the start of the month, I continued my work on the penetration system, making some progress there. I've decided the best course of action is to roll my own system that uses splines to align the bones with the holes, and Final IK to assist with hip alignment. I also began recording footage for and editing a new trailer to post on e621.

Then in the middle of March, disaster struck. A snowstorm caused power outages across the state, and when the power returned, I discovered a 4TB drive on which I had two years of collected reference material, substance painter files, plugins, models, etc which I'd collected for use in the game, had been fried.

Thankfully, the Unity project for the game itself and all the files in it were on a different drive. Though the 4TB drive also held the backups of that, so I immediately made a new backup of the project on another drive.

What does this mean for progress on the game? Well, it's a setback, but not a catastrophic one. In fact, if I hadn't mentioned it, you wouldn't even know because everything in the game is still there. I've still got all the models and textures and animations, and even some of the sound effects and animations I'd prepared but have not yet put to use.

The most important stuff I lost with the drive failure were things like the original photoshop files for my logo and icons, and the substance painter files for the stallion and fennec that I spent hours working on. But I'd also spent many hours collecting sound effects for the game and music to use for future trailers, and other stuff like that, so that's more work I'll have to redo later.

If you're wondering why I didn't have a backup of all those files, well, 4TB is a lot of data and I didn't have enough space to back up anything except the most important stuff which is what was already in the game. Though in retrospect I should have kept the substance painter files with the game's assets so those would get backed up too. But those only affect a few of the characters, and mainly the annoyance here is that I won't be able to easily make color variations of the stallion's texture without re-doing a lot of work on it.

Unfortunately, on that drive I also had all the videos I'd recorded. Which meant that the trailer I was working on at the start of the month I had to re-record and re-edit entirely. I released that trailer a little over a week ago on e621.

But the drive failing on me wasn't even the worst thing to happen last month.

Last week, I also got word that my dad who'd been in the hospital all month with difficulty breathing had passed away after one of his lungs collapsed.

So basically, all of March sucked.

Work on the game must continue though, so in spite of everything that's happened I'm gonna keep plugging away and try to get a new build out for you guys later this month with a functioning penetration system, and maybe some improvements to the audio.

Also the other day I decided to look into the possibility of adding a desktop mode because a lot of folks don't have VR headsets and I keep getting asked about it. I discovered late last year someone made a headset emulator for the VR interaction framework I'm using. This plugin turned out to be easy to implement, and you can now walk around in the game using keyboard and mouse, and if you hold down Q or E you can even move the hands and even select menu items with them. A little work needs to be done so you can select the menu items just by looking at them because using the hands to do this is a bit janky, and I need to implement a method to trigger teleporting. But I should be able to get those functioning properly later this month. If you've already got VR this news might not be that exciting for you, but adding a desktop mode will hopefully entice more people to support the game, and that's really important to ensure I can continue to work on it because this is my only source of income at the moment.

Anyway, I guess that about covers things for now. I'll hopefully have another update  for you in a couple weeks.