January dev report: Hall of Shame Part 2, global updates - pregnancy, and procedural SFX

New Year's holidays are over and it's time to get to work. After all, the content will not do itself.

What have I been doing the last two weeks? A few things.

I spent these days on planning of the 0.8.7 release, making new release of the hall of shame, and I was thinking about where the project is going and I with it. 

Hall of Shame Part 2.

What is it?

For persons who missed the previous releases and who do not know what it is. At the same time with the development of the main (The Last Barbarian) game, I am working on a separate experimental project, “The Hall of Shame”. This is a set of carefully worked out (as far as I can at the moment) animations using the latest experimental graphical features of the Unity Engine. 

Check my previous experiments here:

Bonus content: The Hall of Shame experience 

DEVLOG: HDRP Experience Performance Test 

Why am I doing this?

I constantly improve my animation skills and I'm dissatisfied with the level of graphics that I have in the main project.

You can take this as a kind of research, the results of which I share.

What is the goal?

I hope that after a while I can get the AA-level of graphics and at the same time a good level of performance for upcoming projects.

But in the case of understanding that I can’t achieve this using Unity3D, I can always switch to UE4, although I do not want to do this because of the difficulty of switching from engine to engine. Only time will tell.

What you will see in The Hall of Shame part 2 and when?

Shortly: Sunny island, Torus, tentacles, giving birth, ASAP. 

Global updates 

Pregnancy

Let me tell you more about my dev workflow. 

If you noticed, almost all previous year I made minimum 1 release per month. I think it is a good performance rate, but some of the releases was bigger and some smaller. Why? 

Development of the game is a complex task and some features can’t be done within 1 month sprint. 

I’m working on a few global features. 

First - "dynamic" pregnancy. For now, character can be impregnated in few locations and can have two states: Pregnant and not pregnant. 

I decide that possibility to impregnate Barbarian,  should be available for all monsters with a dick. And pregnancy progress must affect on barbarian movement and combat skills.  (Check youtube video)

So if she pregnant, she moves slower and have weak attacks.

Second - x-ray mode for “sex for resurrection option” and creampies. Current creampie and cumshot scenes made by pre-simulated physics. It’s good for visuals but have some unpleasant limitations. I’m experimenting now with this tool and when I found a balance between quality/size/performance I will implement it for a whole game. 

Sound FX 

Yeah I know. We still don’t have a proper Voice Over. So what I’ve done and what I’m doing now. 

As far as you know we have a lot of sex scenes in the game and they contain unique face expressions during sex act. So using pre-made track is not a good solution for us. Why? Because I should have dozens of unique tracks for every scene to make it sound realistic.  

I decide to try something procedural. 

Let’s analyze some scene for SFX sources by channels.

 Missionary sex with orc as example.  

1st channel - Ambient. It’s simple we have a dungeon. So it’s just a loop sound.

2nd channel - “Penetration effect” It should be synced with a dick moves. I use a dozen different “slick” effects for this channel and play it randomly.  

3rd channel - Orc’s voice. I think we can use the same technique as the 2nd channel. 

4rd channel - Barbarian voice. It’s most difficult. Why? We need a set of clips for following "base" expressions:

• Open mouth breath
• Closed mouth breath
• Open mouth moan pleasurable
• Closed mouth moan pleasurable
• Open mouth moan painful
• Closed mouth moan painful

Each set contains ten of different clips, less than 1 sec length and I call play action for particular animation event. 

You will be able to check it in few days. I will update Hall of Shame with this approach. 

P.S. I'm working on 0.8.7 release too. And as usual it will be available before the end of this month,  so I have a lot of work ahead!

Hope it was interesting for you.

Stay tuned!