April 2025 Work Report

Hello! This month was dedicated to adapting new content to the basic bondage systems. In particular, work was done on replacing all existing animations, refining animation mixing, optimizing work and much more. First things first...

Reassembling Animations :

Demonstration: https://youtu.be/qL7uJI5fTAI

I'll start with the fact that I had to completely get rid of the old struggle animations and the very concept of adapting old assets to new ones.

So, 20 struggle animations that were originally there were completely redone, 10 new animations were added, as well as over 30 key poses for the correct mixing of the resting state, struggle animations and transitions between them.

When approaching the creation of new animations, I tried to adhere to the fact that new "relatively" photorealistic models with sane anatomy should move accordingly. In projects similar to this one, I saw too many examples of how quite reliable models moved either very comically or indecently awkwardly, which greatly broke the immersion and imposed a strong feeling of unreliability of what was happening.

If you spent enough time in the game, you might have noticed some inconsistencies in the animations, for example, when you tried to untie the hands - only the upper part of the body could move leaving the lower part completely static, the same thing could happen when you tried to untie the legs, while the upper part of the body is in a state of rest and completely motionless. The problem with this mainly lies in technical features, such as the impossibility of matching the movement of one animation machine with another, since they do not know anything about each other's work. I tried to completely get rid of this problem, since I set myself a fairly sane task - the animations should look authentic and match each other, even if there is a need to mix them.

The main feature of the new animation work is that I spent an inordinate amount of time not only redoing existing assets, but also creating new key poses, key animation poses and poses for transitions from one state to another. Simply put, I made animations for almost all occasions.

Despite my usual state of maniacally complicating everything where there is no need for it - I decided to go the simple way, now all poses, animations and transitions are cached in one place and are called only when necessary, without the intervention of external systems. Now animations have become much easier to control and also CORRECTLY mix them, so as not to waste time on producing assets, when their mixing will give approximately the same result ...

Now that I have a big pile of assets, I completely rewrote the state machine, which ultimately simplified the implementation of new animations in the future, simplified the understanding of what I'm doing, given that all transitions happen in one place and rely only on key states, and also simplified the work for the game itself, since there is no longer a need to clutter the system with additional handlers, interfaces, etc. All the work happens in one place and all animations are called only when they are needed without the need to check with external systems. Yes, I'm too pleased with myself in this regard =))).

This update also allows more experimentation with state addiction, for example it is no longer difficult to move the hands into a different position when wearing mittens, since there is always only one key state at a time and I know that I have a pose that I can mix with the key one without causing visual problems.

This also allows you to embed unique facial animations for each of the release methods, depending on the presence of items worn.

Upgrade Item Influence And Other :

I thought for a long time about the current content filling, which relates to objects for bondage and other accessories related to it. First of all, I was concerned about the ratio of the development of the visual series and the number of items that are inherited from a number of basic items and have identical practical application. The game has a bunch of similar items that differ only visually or have different strength characteristics, which for the most part makes them useless in the game plan and against this background there was a need to balance this order.

Since I give greater priority to gameplay elements than to thoughtless replenishment of content - I came to the conclusion that the game should only have those items that can have unique characteristics, different approaches to their removal and special properties that affect the previous 2 points. Agree that getting into unique circumstances due to the properties of certain items - sounds much more interesting than pressing one button and waiting for release depending only on the durability of the item.

The exact list of items that will be included in the update is still being formed, but this should be enough at the start.

I spent a little time to determine how each of the items would affect certain characteristics of the character and his abilities. To avoid the question of what they actually do, an inspector overlay was added that can be called at any time. When you hover over an item, you will get all the necessary information about it. Some properties shown above may be a little unreliable, I'm still working on it...

There will also be new consumables in the game that will help you get free much faster than usual - I'm talking about lockpicks and a pocket knife.

In fact, these are just auxiliary elements that can help you (if you have them), this means that they are not absolutely necessary and you can still cope without them. All consumables have their own durability, which is spent at the moment of their use, that is, their durability is spent with the durability of the item to which they are applied. Their initial quantity and durability may vary depending on the character's talents.

A pocket knife is needed to cut ropes, belts, and other non-metallic materials. The knife cannot be used if mittens or an armbinder are worn on your hands.

Lockpicks are needed to open items with locking devices, such as shackles or metal collars. Lockpicks cannot be used if mittens or an armbinder are worn on your hands.

The use of consumables can also change dynamically depending on the items worn or the pose the character is in. To determine this possibility, there are indicators signaling this possibility.

Improving The Visual Series :

Well, I did quite a painstaking job on the new look of the objects. First of all, I was interested not only in the functionality of the object itself, but also in its fundamental features.

I wanted not only a +- reliable model, but also the dependencies that it carries. After all, some objects are unique in their material, the presence of parts, the sound they make, etc. I was seriously fired up by this question, and well, that's what happened.

Last month I already had a fascinating experience with the physical behavior of some elements of the hairstyle and the first thing I started with was giving dynamics to static objects. Now some of the objects can boast the presence of moving elements, for example, the fabric gag has the physics of pieces of fabric that are located on the back of the head, fixed in a knot, as well as the physics of straps and rings, wherever they are. I don’t know, maybe this gives them a little expensiveness, using a set of simple actions.

Also added are some features in the form of noises emitted when wearing items, animation and visual upgrades.

I do not forget about the widespread use of particles of skeletal meshes. The pile will be partially used in the creation of clothing, but jute ropes also have similar material behavior.

Probably the most labor-intensive innovation will be the adaptation of surfaces, or rather the compression or contraction of surfaces formed under the influence of the worn object. I did not come up with anything new, each worn object uses already prepared Morph keys to form small caverns. This works not only with the surface of the body, but also with the clothes worn by the character and gives more credibility.

Material production now uses ColorID textures. This gives a performance boost due to fewer draw calls, and also introduces the ability to change the color of 1 to 3 elements to the preferred one. The color change panel is currently in experimental features, but will most likely be available when the update is released.

Voiceover Update :

Demonstration : https://youtu.be/fKPIxpe8VEE

Since the end of last year, I have been working on dubbing with a good friend. My main task is to replace the stock voices of actresses, which leave much to be desired, with more developed and addictive ones.

I will not get too ahead of myself - at the moment, we are working with four actresses and we may be in the process of selecting candidates, but we already have an acceptable result that we can work with.

Firstly, the approach to filling the voice banks has been changed, what does this mean:

• All characters will make unique noises based on the embedded character. There are 3 of them, these are "Aggressive", "Neutral" and "Meek".

• Each bank contains noises of all three types of characters, each of which contains noises for a certain type of gag, as well as noises "without a gag".

What does this give:

• A large variety of noises.

• Greater addictiveness due to the selection of noise options for each gag.

• Ability to change the nature of the noise of the game and any non-player characters in the settings.

• Well, and actually more authenticity due to the acceptable quality of dubbing.

The approach to using assets has also been changed, that is, now the character plays pre-prepared samples from 3 to 6 seconds long, which made it possible to synchronize the tempo and context of the sound by adjusting the tracks to the sound of breathing. Although the samples are played randomly, they began to sound uniform, without sharp changes in volume and character, as if it were a single sound track.

At the moment, a bank for one actress is complete and it will appear when the update is released (there may be several of them). The result of the dubbing can be assessed in the video below.

That's all I have for now. Next month will be dedicated to reworking addictive race related assets, there will be a lot of interesting stuff. See you soon, don't be bored!