Halls of Power - Agents of Heels Location Spotlight

Hello-hello! It’s about time for a sweet bonus post, don’tcha think? Welcome one and all… We’re in the middle of prepping our public teaser post for the latest version of Natasha out in Heels, but we’ve been wanting to make a little noise on her last night on the town before it slips us by. We promised to do a chitty-chat about our magic mirror room, so here it is!

It’s been a while since we’ve had a “How its Done” post, and today’s no exception! (Kind of). However, we do have some in engine test render eye candy to show off as we enter the halls of power, sex and criminal enterprise: Maeda’s very own Club Kaikaku! Care to see a little about our process and our custom creations?

Heads Up! This post may well contain direct [SPOILERS] or references to potential spoilers for scenes in AoH:MoAR’s v0.13, so be forewarned!

Interior Halls

Y’all might just remember this local from our last Agents of Heels release. Its the place where panties dropped, and Scout was scorned. You can see the Mirror Room entrance just on the left there too. We decided it was about damn time to expand on Maeda’s clubhouse, to build up the gentleman’s quarter some so it’s fit for the likes of the NYC Mayor himself, and also for those of a more perverse nature. As we know by now, Maeda isn’t the top villain Natasha faces these days, and not every path she takes has him as a threat to her, but some still do and so we thought we’d do well to add to his repertoire and assets… you never know how many games Club Kaikaku will appear in, or how many special back rooms it has, now do you?

For real, we wanted to build out the location to give us more and varied options for the future, whether for just this game and Maeda’s schemes, or with the possibility to make more of it in the future depending on which direction the beWilderverse takes over time. Forethought is forearmed, and we enjoy the big picture as much as the sex laced details.

Bonus info! Club Kaikaku gets its name from the Japanese word for reform, making it an allusion to London’s famed “Reform Club”. We like to have those cool touches in the things we name.

Mirror Room Interior

Alright, time to get to the even juicier bits! There’s the mirror room itself! When directing this scene, we knew we wanted something unique, something unusual, and something just a little but mind-fucking for Nat. Maeda isn’t nearly as skilled or as physical as her after all, so mind games were a key move for him. When we put together their first internal meeting… wink wink… we came up with the idea of Natasha being able to see what we wanted to see during the scene, to use that humiliation to further her corruption and downfall. What better way than mirrors? It only took saying the words “who wouldn’t want to be locked in an infinitely reflecting room with Natasha while you fuck her” to know we were on to something.

And so Unshi set about building a custom mirror room for our own personal uses. Don’t have what you need? Make it! That’s what we say. It took a fair bit of effort to get our rendering set up to handle reflections as we wanted them efficiently, and longer render time was our price too, but we’ve got to say it turned out fabulously in game. The delay we faced with v0.13 was mostly due to making this scene (and all 43 renders of it, plus cut and redone CGs too)… Totally worth it right?

As with anything 3D, lighting is about 10% of what you see but 90% of what you feel, and in this case it was the big issue to tackle for sure. When it all comes down to it, the geometries of the scene are mostly flat surfaces and easily pieced together with some practice, but making the two distinct environments of the inside of the club and the inside of the mirror room match was the main hurdle in building it in. 

Maeda’s comes with a distinct oak-panelled and aged feel, trying to replicate the hallowed halls of older establishments and giving that naturally sedated cozy feeling… that way the entertainment soaks up the attentions more than the furnishings. Honestly, our Silence & Stilettoes concepts were great practice at that kind of effect. In contrast, the mirrors are designed to stand out, to catch the eye and highlight the participants from every angle. Light needs be strong enough to reach every surface and reflect every hidden part of Natasha once inside, plus it’s cold (isolating even) so as to make her instinctively feel cut off from the world outside. To make both play nice, Unshi spent some time upskilling along those lines. The next pic will show you the practice in action!

Bonus info! This isn’t the first custom made local done by Unshi for us. Not even close. Countless pieces have been custom built from constituent parts and with beWilder made assets/shaders. Highlights include all of Little Toscana, most of Easy Street too, Nat’s home and… dare we say this mirror room?

Mirror Room Exterior

One good twist deserves another! Why stop at just one anyway? Seriously, when we continued to develop the scene we came up with even more to add to it pretty quick since those horny genius juices were already flowing. Why not expand the show?

As amazing as she is, Natasha is still human… we think… and one thing all humans have in common is a hang up on the unknown. Doubly true for the kind of spy girl that Nat is, since the unknown is what gets you in the end. In the scene, it wasn’t enough just to corrupt her for Maeda, she had to have that spark ignited so the slow burning fuel could pick up and explode down the line, just as we all want it to. What better way than to make her face the idea of being in the public’s eye, to have every little thing she does in that cramped room viewable by anyone at all… maybe even people she knows… while all she sees is the face she makes in the throes of it all… It's enough to made even her mind boggle, and her body to respond to the passion.

To jump back in on the lighting talk, you can see here how the warmly lit club and the cold private reflections room mesh together. In order to limit the central chamber in overpowering the player’s feel of being a viewer from inside the club, we took the approach of lighting it from the floor up rather than above.That came with the effect of limiting the lighting we see as it passes through the one-way glass since it mostly ends up on the ceiling space, and it also had the delightful bonus of underlighting Nat’s bare legs and space between in the scene too. Building a wood panel lip around the floor both elevates Nat from watchers as if on a small stage, while also containing most of that light from bleaching the floor in clubs and thereby limiting that old world feel we’ve come to expect from Club Kaikaku. The only other thing left to do was to contrast the feel a little more with some decorative curtains, that way drawing the eye back to the central chamber rather than extend player’s views into the surrounding back space of the wide-open walls.

All in all… If anyone tells you that it’s a simple thing to really set a scene with the player’s feel in mind, they’re lying. It’s all worth it in the end though, when you get to really put the work to good use and spoil a red dress in the process, right?

Fans from our Discord will know this already, but one of our most popular scenes to date has always been the interrogation scene of Mission 1, where Nat and her captive Faceless Joe square off in a dangerous game of kinky tortures. Well… That just might just be about to change, as more and more fans are pointing to this trippy scene as the spice of the night… It pretty awesome to know that our efforts to make life hard, thick and satisfying for Nat have paid off, and that the time we put into making something uniquely sexy if beloved by the fans.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this look behind the curtain, and we hope that a little but of that passion for perversion has rubbed off on you a little more… (Gross.) Now… Back to making up more crazy, kinky, and bar raising beautifulness to put our girls through for all our enjoyment! We wonder what we’ll think up next to top the mirrors, we’re certainly going to keep trying hard!

… I wonder… Has Noemi ever had a 0-G facial before…? Maybe we should go find out…

Be reflective and beWilder!