Report for 2024

I thought it would be a good idea to make a report on the work done for the year and tell about it both to those who have been following my work from the beginning and to those who have just arrived.

🎉 Before I begin, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday and may all your dreams come true in the new year !!! 🎉

If you don't want to read this long post, I'll tell you what it's all about. Here I'll talk about the "My Pretty Toy" project, from its initial idea and development in the embryo, to the current state of the project, as well as some of the development processes and their difficulties.

Idea and sample material :

The starting point of the time I spent on development can be considered January 2023. Since it was then that I began to track the market of games on the theme of "Lady in Distress", as well as collect the necessary material and information on similar projects. At the moment, the project will be 2 years old in January next year.

I was prompted to start my own project at that time by a large amount of free time, as well as the questionable quality of most projects on a fairly popular topic. Although I met games along the way that amazed with their graphics and mechanics, but such projects were like a diamond in a pile of fakes and simply abandoned or unfinished tech demos.

I've always been attracted to the open-world RPG genre, with a bunch of possibilities, where every action of the player could affect something, and then an idea settled in my head that if we make a game in a similar genre, what if we make it less voluminous in scale, leaving the feeling that you are still in a big world, but make it more capacious and rich. What if we take stealth mechanics as a game basis, which would fit so well into the theme of bonjad, but also leave the player with a lot of opportunities for a creative approach to the gameplay... So I took this idea as a basis.

In my head the idea sounded very simple - I want to make some kind of medieval "Black Ops" where the player will take on the role of a spy, since this is primarily a stealth game, it would be quite justified. I took the fantasy genre as a basis, since anything can exist in it and it suited me perfectly, since I was going to cram a lot of things related to the bondage theme into the game.

I worked with documentation and drawing up a roadmap for about a month or two, in order to start working on a rather complex project for one person I needed to immediately assess the complexity of the development, understand how much time it will take and what ideas should be added to the game and which ones to leave for later or abandon them altogether...

Most of the project in the roadmap was tied to the fact that the player would have to sneak up on an enemy and then effectively tie them up, depending on the available arsenal, decide on the fly how to make sure that the prisoner does not escape and does not cause problems in the future, and if the player falls into the clutches of the enemy, he will have to go through trials in the form of finding the key to the handcuffs, overcoming obstacles while tied up, or trying to find a knife blindfolded to cut the ropes. This sounded cool, because at that time I only wanted to make a story campaign and did not even think about a sandbox mode or anything like that. After finishing the documentation a little, I started working on the tools.

Framework :

I didn't have a question what to make the game on, I have a lot of experience developing both on Unity and Unreal Engine, the question was only what to start the project on so that the preparatory part would take a fairly short period of time. Unity was attractive because it had its own design features and could simplify the assembly of all components, at the same time UE had a sufficient number of tools and ready-made solutions out of the box and, what is no less important, I had a ready "foundation" for the future game, it only remained to study it again, refine outdated and ineffective solutions and start prototyping. I have never regretted the choice of the engine, but taking an old project written 5 years ago as a basis for a new project was a big mistake, which I will talk about later.

In general, I already had at least some basis for what to start, this could not but please. At that time, I had a lot of free time and I gave myself free rein to experiment. The start was simple, just doing the basics before moving on to more advanced stuff. I had enough free assets in my arsenal from years of giving away on the Epic Games store that I didn't have to think about the necessary assets.

I started working on movement and basic states that the character can be in. I wanted to add some states where the character can also move but would be limited by his pose, which would force him to change his pose depending on what needs to be done, for example the character had to pick up a key on the floor, but he would have to kneel down, then carefully land on his butt or lie down, to roll around on the floor trying to do it. At that time I was familiar with the "Bound Project" and did not reinvent the wheel, the mechanics that were used there would suit my needs perfectly, so it was decided to follow this example.

I experimented a lot with the animation, especially when the character is tied up. That's when I decided to use only Rootmotion (when the character's capsule moves behind the animation bone), it could give me realistic movements without any effort, since slow and static movement under the animation looked like the character was just rolling on his butt, it was not hard to imagine how it would look with poses lying on the floor.

At that point, it was important for me to convey the authenticity of how the character looks and moves in a tied state, since this was supposed to become an integral part of the future gameplay.

The work on polishing the tools lasted about six months, during which time I needed to decide how the game character would interact with non-player characters, as well as what other tools I needed and for what tasks.

Probably the first and most difficult thing I started with was the bondage system. This task was at the forefront and to this day remains the most complex, most difficult and the biggest pain in my ass. It was not so difficult to do, but to form a general idea of ​​how it should work. Even then, I knew that I wanted to add as many items for eliminating the enemy as I could and had to seriously think about how to organize all this and bring it to basic concepts.

So let's say we have a bunch of gags, ropes, belts, handcuffs, blindfolds, etc. How do we use all of this without breaking anything, but still leaving the player with the freedom of choice? It all turned out to be obvious... I divided all of the items into basic categories and contexts of their use, which gave a powerful boost to how it should work.

So let's say we have a bunch of gags, ropes, belts, handcuffs, bandages and other stuff. How to use all of this without breaking anything, but also leaving the player with the right of freedom of choice? Everything turned out to be obvious...

I divided all the items into basic categories and contexts of their use, which gave a powerful impetus to how it should work.

As you can see, I use special tags that represent certain groups. Their main feature is that they can both represent a certain subject and imply a group of subjects that are nested in them. You can perceive this as a branch of a tree, where each separate branch is individual and can contain many more such vertexes. From this you can get a strict hierarchy, this suits me.

Due to the fact that a certain item had certain contexts of use, I was able to build functional libraries that can give a choice in which context to use an item, as well as check for the presence of an item similar in purpose, preventing the imposition of a bunch of identical items.

Since all these tags and transformations from a bunch of branches could be confusing and not give a clear idea of ​​how it all works, I equated some parts of these tags to one. For example, I didn't want the player to be able to tie only elbows or only knees, so I used an array of tags that would be executed in turn, starting from the base primitive.

This way I could clearly control the order in which items would be applied and removed. In the screenshot above you can see that if the player uses ropes with the context "Arms" they will first bind the wrists, then the lower part of the elbows, then the upper part of the elbows. This allows you to easily bind the wrists using handcuffs, then bind the elbows using a completely different item (if the item supports this context).

Back then it was too easy a way out of the situation, but now there are more complex items that require additional rules and checks in order to be applied, since the item that the character holds in his hand is just a dummy with a bunch of data that the game must work with. At the moment, the tool takes data about the item, then accesses a catalog consisting of settings, check scripts and assets (skeletal meshes, materials, etc.), after which it is decided which item will be applied as data, or will not be due to non-compliance with the rules.

All the basic functionality still comes down to simple functions, which are no longer worth addressing, since the gameplay task manager does it for me. The system remains cumbersome, but at the same time it makes it easier to integrate new items. Now I just need to load ready-made assets and fill in the tables for everything to work, all the main time is taken up only by creating models and their materials and this solution suits me quite well.

After I figured out how the objects should work, I had to solve another equally difficult problem - how to make objects affect the characters, in particular affect the type of their movement if their arms or legs are tied. Everything turned out to be much more difficult when I realized that arms or legs can be untied independently of each other, because if the game character does not do this, the player still has the opportunity to do this trick on the NPC.

With the animation machines that were there before - it worked quite simply, it is enough to put the character in a certain state and even if his legs are freed in the process - he will be able to return to normal if he just gets up on his feet, all that was left was to modify the arm animations in real time, which is much easier than everything else.

Let's smoothly move from the rest of the little things to something more tangible. Probably, AI still remains the main problem of the game, because either I am not able to achieve cool and believable behavior or because I am simply not that good at developing AI.

The basic idea has not changed to this day - these should be ordinary patrolling NPCs who simply walk along the route and represent a temporary obstacle for the player. They can be stopped with your arsenal, improvised means, or simply distracted to get out of the way. In turn, when they see the game character, they should do everything to create problems for him in the form of a temporary helpless state, and also make sure that you do not escape.

The first opponents were exactly like that, all they did was walk along the route and tie you up as tightly as many times you fell into their clutches.

Probably the most difficult thing for me was to make it so that NPCs could use the same functionality as the player, since creating separate tools for all the same needs would be too stupid. Then I thought about a common tool that would manage how objects or actions are used and that would work the same in both directions. Then I moved on to writing a gameplay task service.

This service is still used, its main task is to determine who is performing the task and in whose direction this task is performed (Instigator To Target), and then perform any external functionality, which is quite simple, since the task being performed knows who is performing it and what object in the scene it is applied to.

Now you can encounter it when you tie hands, or give the character a command to sit on your knees, or when you use a leash, etc. This service formed the basis of all interactions in the game and remains indispensable to this day due to its ease of use and separation of logic, since I do not have to code all the logic in the character or its components. It also greatly simplified the management of the AI, because they essentially perform the same tasks, it remains only to tell them which objects or actions to use.

In any case, these were the most basic problems back then and I dealt with them. At the time of completion of the main framework for the game, everything that would be required to implement several gameplay scenes was ready to compare the results of the work, because it is not always possible to do what is written on paper and not always what is cool written on paper looks just as cool in the end...

Techno demo :

In the summer, I took a short break from development to finish some things, after which I started to form ready-made solutions into something unified, something that could be played. To tell the truth, I hadn’t finished even half of what I planned to do for a full-fledged demonstration and everything had to be properly polished.

Based on the plan, the game should resemble a stealth action game, but at the time of assembly, neither one nor the other was ready. There were two questions: what game should the project resemble and what mechanics to take as a basis and subsequently adjust them to ready-made solutions. Since I am still a wild fan of the Hitman series and Kojima’s games, I didn’t think for too long. I took a part from both projects as a basis, namely a fairly large open space like in the latest parts of MGS and stealth mechanics similar to Hitman, where you could use different devices and situations to eliminate the enemy or anyone who stands in your way. At least initially I wanted exactly this kind of gameplay, it could organically fit into hostage rescue missions or intelligence gathering. But it was too early to think about full-fledged missions.

Those who have worked in the game development industry will probably understand this dilemma, when you do not quite understand what scene-dependent mechanics will be used, because you have not yet started creating scenes, at the same time you cannot fully create scenes, because you do not know what mechanics will be used in the end... Here I switched to a simpler approach, which I still use - sandbox mode.

I was looking at discord servers that were related to similar projects, mainly I was interested in the question - where did other authors start and what state were their projects in at the time of public demonstration. Having found out that most of them were demonstrated as tenho previews and did not have enough functionality to fully call it a game - I showed on one of them what was ready at that time, namely primitive AI, the ability to tie up NPCs and a system that allowed you to free yourself from ropes, in a scripted order.

 At that point, even for a demo, it looked terrible to me and I was starting to think about putting the project on the back burner or abandoning it altogether. But to my surprise, the demo got a good response and I continued the project because it was interesting to someone.

Probably the only thing I really put off for later was the story missions, because I simply wouldn't be able to do a large amount of work in the allotted time, because I wanted to finish it before the beginning of 2024 to demonstrate full-fledged gameplay. The main task then was to put everything in order and, to begin with, make a small map in sandbox mode, where all the possibilities would be demonstrated.

I will say that it was not easy to decide on the choice of the first scene in which all the action would take place, I had ideas for where and when the story campaign would take place, but what could be thought up for a demonstration scene, because it should have a large open space for expansion, as well as the ability to introduce new mechanics, items, etc., and do it in such a way that it would not interfere with everything else.

The initial idea was to make some kind of complex room with large rooms and corridors. I could expand it indefinitely, but it didn't really fit with the main idea, everything had to happen in an open world, not limited by tight walls and long corridors. It all seemed too boring to me - monotonous rooms, similar to each other, what kind of rooms are these? It doesn't look like some kind of mansion or something massive. I quickly realized that such a scene is extremely inappropriate for the gameplay and since I didn't have time to redo the mechanics, I redid the scene itself.

I turned to the developments and a small piece of lore, which should serve as the basis for the plot. Slavers appear in it one way or another and they occupy a significant part of this story. Actually, from the question "Where is the main location of the slavers?" came the answer to the question - which scene is more suitable for a sandbox?

Later I came to the obvious thing that if we make a large scene in a remote desert area, where there will be a camp where slave traders rule everything. A small citadel of chaos and lawlessness on the edge of the world, where a human foot usually does not set foot - great, that's what we need! Let it be the old ruins of a once existing castle, to somehow justify the presence of buildings in the scene.

A good idea for a concept, but what now? I can't just make vast possessions or at least show the scale sufficiently in such a short time. For the sake of an experiment, I placed Gray Box right in the center of the scene, so that it would look like ruins and then I think I understood how I would proceed.

What if we don't make the map large enough initially, what if we place the bulk of the buildings right in the center, and then gradually refine the map and add workers' buildings...

From the center out...

Later I took this idea as a basis, which I still develop today. I simply add new independent clusters to the already finished map, which contain new content and mechanics. I also did not ignore the original work with those terrible corridors and rooms and left it for the main scene, where the spy hideout is located. Since its location is classified, it could be anywhere and could also resemble an impenetrable bunker or something like that.

I put everyone in their places and a small piece of the map was available for the first demonstration.

It's doubtful to begin with, but I didn't really believe that anyone would warmly accept this project, since everything in it was questionable and there was no underlying concept.

After working a bit with stealth mechanics, the game already began to resemble, oddly enough, a game. It had sufficiently implemented basic mechanics and the AI, although it worked with a creak, still performed its functions, what else to expect from a project in its infancy.

The year 2024 came, the first build numbered 0.5.0.0 was released. I think the first problems emerged then, in particular with the inconvenience of using items and a bunch of bugs due to the fact that I built the game around the old tools. There was nothing to do, I had to continue working.

The most difficult period :

I think the most difficult period in development were the first 3-4 months after the publication of the first build. This was due to the fact that although I had a ready-made plan, most of it was simply weeded out or the concepts under which most of the necessary systems and services were built simply changed during development, making them either incompatible or unnecessary. Remember that even the developers themselves sometimes do not understand what they are doing...

I had absolutely no idea what to do next, but I had to stick to the plan. The main difficulty at this stage was to decide in which direction to move further? Mindlessly fill the game with content or work out the mechanics, add new slavery options or make an interesting AI? That moment when everything looks cool in your head and on paper, but in the end it is an incomprehensible and mediocre experiment.

Still on track! I did some reworking of the documentation to figure out what to add to the game first. Oddly enough, any of the options that were on my personal roadmap seemed suitable to me, and when I say "any" I mean absolutely any option, so I started by implementing the gameplay segments that seemed easiest to integrate. This is when furniture for hostages was introduced, the arsenal of available items was expanded, and various features like crafting items from improvised means were introduced. I was not sure that this game needed this, it just seemed to me that gags and ropes scattered here and there were a little out of place with the overall picture. I thought it would be better to give the player the ability to collect useful things and create what they need, than to leave everything as is, but it will look like a BDSM party, with ropes and gags scattered in the corners.

It was hard for me to believe, but someone was still interested in the project, despite how slowly the development was going. However, this thought stopped bothering me, because I had a part-time job, and the time I spent on the project was all my free time, I did everything in my power, you can’t jump above your head. I was also consoled by the fact that similar projects that already existed on the market were developing at an even slower speed. I considered this the norm and there was nothing to worry about, but another problem appeared, I ran out of the budget that I allocated for development, so that I could only work on the project and only occasionally do work in my specialty, just to have something to eat.

It seemed like the fourth month of development since the release of the first build. Everything was going swimmingly until my supply of green papers ran out, it happens to everyone. I got a part-time job again, dividing my time between my main job and work on the project. It still seemed to me that something could come of it, so I continue to work on the project.

I will say honestly that I did not strive to become a multimillionaire at the expense of a dubious project and certainly did not strive to profit from players, feeding them promises of how cool my game would be, while delaying updates, because there was catastrophically little time for them, but circumstances were above me and I had to distribute new builds only to paid subscribers on Patreon, people, forgive me...

It seems that since then, problems with releases began, numerous bugs, very raw builds and sometimes builds so unplayable that I became ashamed of my work. Numerous crunches and bug fixing work takes up more time than is allocated for development - this eventually led me to a slight burnout. It's time to throw the project in the oven and turn the heat up to maximum... But not for me.

I collect my thoughts, fix a big pile of problems, and at the same time continue working on the project.

I didn't want to make a game where bondage would be in the forefront, I wanted my project to stand out, be special and original, while at the same time being based on already familiar mechanics and genres. I started introducing other elements into the game that might have seemed useless at that stage of development, but which were to become key in the future. That's how non-lethal weapons, traps, etc. appeared in the game...

This contributed to some development of the project in other areas, slightly distracting from the monotonous gameplay about tying up under stealth. I will note that the players were not at all against the crossbow with sleeping darts, because it allowed them to commit all sorts of obscenities with impunity.

Everything that was added to the game was well-received by the players, however, there were also not very good decisions that I made due to the wrong approach. For example, in one of the major updates, a team manager was added, which allowed recruiting hostages and taking them under control as a hired agent. To be honest, I strongly doubted that this was necessary, but I was too lazy to make a full-fledged character editor with a choice of race, so I thought that recruiting other characters and playing for them would be the best solution until the main part of the game is ready. To this day, the team manager is a pain in my ass, he causes big problems with management, widgets and everything that the game character is tied to and I really regret adding him to the game, but he is there and as practice has shown, he is actively used, what's done is done ...

 Necessary measures :

Around midsummer I was still working hard on the development, but I still didn't understand what exactly I was doing. The game somewhat resembles the general concept, but it seems that this is not what I wanted at all. The reason was trivial - I did not mean a finished project as a sandbox, which the game is to this day. Well, you can't put off what you have now for the sake of something else. It turned out that developing the existing possibilities, game areas and mechanics included in them was a much better solution.

Then I deviated from the plan to get a little distracted and have fun. I wanted to diversify the main scene a little, since it seemed too monotonous to me. I was inspired by the genre in which I was making the game, damn - it's fantasy, what fantasy without gloomy dungeons. Since the scene was littered with the ruins of an old castle, there must be an underground part of this castle with dungeons.

This added a ton of new exploration and gameplay elements, such as enemies being able to trap the player character underground if they got too close to them.

At the same time, I significantly improved the AI ​​so that they could imitate some kind of activity, look at objects or characters, and generally do something other than mindlessly patrolling along one route. The changes also affected the victims of slavers. They became more useful because they could free you or free other NPCs.

I noticed that the changes I was making were much more suitable for a simple open world sandbox than for a story campaign, the essence of which was only to demonstrate and use bondage mechanics. This was not part of my plans, but I liked it much more. But what to do with the original concept? The story was supposed to be a series of scenes where you go through a thorny path, stealthily making your way through enemies, eliminating them as silently as possible. Sandbox mode is pretty cool, but it is not very suitable for a full-fledged game (unless it is Minecraft). Having no idea what I would ultimately want to leave as the basis for the gameplay in the story campaign, I continued working on other parts of the gameplay and refining the existing content.

Later, I finally decided to abandon the story campaign in favor of small tasks on existing scenes, since I had already planned to work on other maps and expansions. Developing a campaign would have taken too much time, plus I had a bunch of mechanics that were already ready, which could be very successfully implemented in free mode, but they had no practical use in the context of single stealth missions. So I reorganized the project plan, shifting the focus to gameplay that would suit the sandbox mode and, as a result, the tasks that would be carried out on the territory of this sandbox.

This alone gave me a clear understanding of which direction to move in...

 Easy as pie :

If you are still reading this longread, then I will get to the point of the above. This is my first fairly large project that I am working on. Most of it was like pain and suffering, but it seems to be all I can do. This is first and foremost my hobby and no matter how hard it is, I am still ready to continue working. I like to find standard solutions in non-standard situations, especially when it comes to developing this project. Making games is hard, making specific and original games is extremely hard! But be that as it may - difficulties make us stronger and better.

I want to express my deep gratitude to the patrons who support me both materially and spiritually. I will not tire of repeating this, but thanks to your support I can do what I like. I hope you are with me for a long time!

Believe in yourself, believe in me, believe in my belief in you!

At the moment I am working on a full-time development, which allows me not to be distracted from the project for long and to complete the tasks set for myself on time. If anyone was very worried about me, I want to say that I still intend to complete the project and develop it further. I have planned to work on a side project at the beginning of next year, but this will not interfere with the current one, since I leave it a much higher priority. Or rather, My Pretty Toy is the main priority for me at the moment.

There is a lot of new and interesting content ahead of you! Finally, I want to congratulate everyone once again on the upcoming holidays. I wish you all the best!

💗 With love - Nanney 💗