Unreal Engine Afterparty [Development Thread]

[Dilly_]

Hey everybody, thought I’d start a development thread for a game I’ve been working on for the last few months. It’s a real-time adult game created in UE5 with high graphical fidelity, story-driven, and with RPG elements. The game is very much under development, and the clips I share here are heavily subject to change. There is some obvious incompleteness that I intend to fix up before releasing anything.

First off, the main menu system is more or less functional, and will include the ability to pause in-game (for saving) or to adjust the graphics. I may do some tweaking of the visuals and logos, but it’s basically ready:


Character creation system overview:


Here’s an older clip of the game demonstrating free-roam mechanics and the ability to adjust player morphs on the fly. You may notice the animations are strange looking (particularly the hands). This will all be corrected before release; but the locomotion is working.


Cinematic character introductions (incomplete- expect one of these for all NPCs in the game)


Cinematic dialogue with branching choices:


So what can you expect from this game?

• In-depth character customization including many body shape options, hairstyles, skin details and customized anatomy (male OR female)
  
• Cutting-edge graphical fidelity, including UE5 Lumen (real-time global illuminations+reflections)
  
• DLSS+FSR2 upscaling (works on AMD and RTX cards)
  
• But what if I have an absolute toaster of a PC? Well, the game is meant to be high-fidelity, but the graphics menu has the option to turn everything way down, from textures to shadows to post-processing. I cannot guarantee the game will run well on your laptop with a 2GB dedicated GPU, but I will try like hell to make sure it can.
  
• RPG trait menu (including skills such as strength, intelligence, charisma, etc). These will influence various activities you can do in-game, as well as dialogue choices
  
• Perk menu (choose various optional fetishes your character can have, which will influence your lust meter)
  
• Cinematic dialogue sequences with branching dialogue choices (witcher 3 style)
  
• A wide variety of clothing options your character can wear, some of which you start with, and some of which can be obtained in-game
  
• The ability to set the anatomy type of ANY NPC in the game (You can make any character futa, or not!)
  
• Photo mode. Get the perfect screenshot whenever or wherever
  
• Intriguing plot lines with humor and drama
  
• An immersive world where NPCs will react to the state of your player (run around naked, people might be shocked!

It’s important to note that these are vast systems which require a lot of time to develop to make sure everything works correctly together. I am but a lone developer, however I intend to see my vision through. This means that when the game is published, if the financial backing of the community is strong enough, things will get done better and faster as I expand the team.

I am currently not accepting any donations for the development of the game. When I publish the release version, the Patreon will go live simultaneously, where Patreons will have access to bonus COSMETIC content (story content will NEVER be paywalled), voting in polls to influence development decisions, access to the discord, as well as access to the latest release of the game instantly.

I will be updating this thread sporadically as I complete features that I find interesting to share. Currently, I am finishing up the opening dialogue for one of the first NPCs you will meet in the game. Then, I plan to introduce the second NPC. The timeframe for release is around ~2 months, and I expect to have a playable version available by the end of August.

Please, feel free to share your thoughts or opinions on the clips I've posted. I have A LOT to work on, so rest assured if there is something you noticed that needs improving, it's something I am aware of and will try my hardest to fix before release.

 

[slider]

Looks like a very ambitious game, but at the same time you already have quite a lot to show for. The character creator seems as solid (if not more) as some other professional games and the art style is looking good. I really look forward the demo!

In the meantime, can you share a bit more about the story, setting or the MC (number of MCs, gender, age, etc)?

 

[Imprezio]

We will watch your career with great interest. - Degenerates

 

[Dilly_]

Looks like a very ambitious game, but at the same time you already have quite a lot to show for. The character creator seems as solid (if not more) as some other professional games and the art style is looking good. I really look forward the demo!

In the meantime, can you share a bit more about the story, setting or the MC (number of MCs, gender, age, etc)?

Yes, I can share a bit more about the story:

Currently there is only the option to play as a female MC. When I started working on the creator I wanted to do both male/female MCs, but I realized it would take a lot more time to implement the male character that could be used for other systems (such as dialogue). The good news is since I have the futa stuff all working (materials+physics) it should speed things up for adding male customizable characters down the line.

After you finish creating your character you wake up in your bedroom, which has some customizable options (lights, bedframe, bedsheets) and a wardrobe/makeup area. I would also like for the player to be able to purchase/obtain things from quests and display them in the bedroom (furniture, sex toys, etc)

Then you can walk around your house a bit and meet its inhabitants, the first of which is your "landlady" (I know- the title is customizable, you can change it to whatever you want) who has some requests, which will lead to you meeting your other (female) "roommate". Eventually you leave your house and explore the neighborhood, meeting the inhabitants and completing tasks along the way, while expanding your wardrobe and unlocking NPC outfits. There will be both male and female NPCs to meet. And again, all of the female NPCs have the option to enable futa. If you're wondering why I'm being vague about specific plotlines, it's because I'm still thinking of some.

Thanks for your kind words about the art style

 

[Dilly_]

Here's a bit of an early preview at what sex will actually look like in the game. It's a bit tricky to keep everything aligned given all the different morphs the player can have, I am still exploring solutions on how best to do that, but I do have a system now similar to the honey select auxiliary animations that will allow you to manually adjust rotations until things more or less line up.

 

[slider]

Wow! It's looking amazing, I'm genuinely impressed that it is already looking better than Honey Select and similar games

 

[Nantec]

Having read a lot of threads where you talked about daz2unreal stuff, I was expecting something like this but not on here.. well, not for sure in this forum.


Some things I can say about the modular neighbourhood is, that it wont run on a lot of consumer computers without problems(maybe make chunks like back in skyrim or artifical girl, sou you can "travel"(if not already in your mind)), if you take a look at silicon lust, he shrinked that neighbourhood down to some houses, you might want to implement a backend system which only enables and disables stuff seen

but all I can say is: Well done, keep it up and dont stop. You will get money if you don't fuck it up. Like others. Like Monster Girl Island or XStoryplayer.. TK17.. SV2..



And, I hope that penis is optional lmao


I think there is a new animation thingy coming up in unreal, or a "better"workflow and tech within the next weeks or so

 

[Dilly_]

Having read a lot of threads where you talked about daz2unreal stuff, I was expecting something like this but not on here.. well, not for sure in this forum.


Some things I can say about the modular neighbourhood is, that it wont run on a lot of consumer computers without problems(maybe make chunks like back in skyrim or artifical girl, sou you can "travel"(if not already in your mind)), if you take a look at silicon lust, he shrinked that neighbourhood down to some houses, you might want to implement a backend system which only enables and disables stuff seen

but all I can say is: Well done, keep it up and dont stop. You will get money if you don't fuck it up. Like others. Like Monster Girl Island or XStoryplayer.. TK17.. SV2..



And, I hope that penis is optional lmao


I think there is a new animation thingy coming up in unreal, or a "better"workflow and tech within the next weeks or so

Thanks for the tips and pointers. I've done some optimizations to the neighborhood scene, and with the right settings enabled it's possible for me to achieve 60-70 FPS with Lumen enabled with software raytracing and up to 3 characters on screen (My card is an RTX 2060 Super). The packaged version of the game runs at slightly higher FPS as well. I fixed an issue with black artifacts on static meshes that were using Nanite and recieving raytraced shadows, however that is an issue with Nanite and not the neighborhood asset. My hope is, that everyone who has a RTX 20x series card or higher (or the AMD equivalent) will be able to maintain 60 fps. Obviously, there are a lot of people who still have GTX 10x series cards or older. It's probably going to be the case that no matter what I do, the game simply won't be able to run well on laptops. But if you crank the DLSS/FSR2 way up, it may just be playable. Graphical fidelity is important to me though, so that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

And yes, the dicks are optional. I want them in the game, and I've had many people reach out to me excited to give all the characters dicks. But I know that's not everyone's cup of tea, so you don't have to enable it for a single character if you don't want to.

And, a brief update clip: Added first person perspective switching, improved animations, and foot IK:

 

[Dilly_]

Boring tech update today. I completely re-did how object interactions work. Previously, I was using on actor overlap to do all of my object interactions. This meant I needed to write code for every item that the player was overlapping with. Not very efficient.

Now, I use line tracing to determine if the character is colliding with an item that has an "interactable" blueprint interface, which handles the code for all manner of interactable objects (NPCs, items you pickup, wardrobe, etc). What this means is it's now a hell of a lot easier for me to quickly add stuff into the game, and have the player do stuff with it.




I also restructured and re-wrote a bunch of code to make it much easier to add customizable male characters down the line (an often requested feature and something I've wanted to add, but don't intend to before release).

Also added code so that the camera will automatically change perspectives if zoomed all the way in or if you zoom out while in 1st person.

 

[slider]

I start to sound too much of a kiss-ass, but I'm quite impressed with every little update. At this rate, your game starts looking like an upgraded version of the Sims with porn mods.

Regarding the male characters/MC, where do you find the greatest difficulties? Is it about their model/skeleton, making them customizable, or fitting them into the demo (extra dialogues/systems)?

 

[Dilly_]

I start to sound too much of a kiss-ass, but I'm quite impressed with every little update. At this rate, your game starts looking like an upgraded version of the Sims with porn mods.

Regarding the male characters/MC, where do you find the greatest difficulties? Is it about their model/skeleton, making them customizable, or fitting them into the demo (extra dialogues/systems)?

This forum (and discord) are the only places I've ever discussed the game, so every bit of feedback is appreciated

The character design stuff is probably the most straightforward as well as the most fun to work on. The fun part is designing them in Daz. The menial part is preparing it for realtime in Blender (merging unneeded bones, merging material slots, adding bones+weight mapping for jiggly bits).

The hardest part by far is the creation of the systems ingame. The char creator is doing all sorts of things with materials and morphs that need to be kept track of. And the dialogue system required a lot of research. But I suppose it's all relative, you may find those things extremely easy if you have been using UE for a long time, but the character design may be difficult.

 

[Dilly_]

Learning new stuff every day. There are many things that can be done to optimize Daz characters in UE. But one thing I hadn't really experimented with was clothing textures. Clothing textures in Daz are often very high res, sometimes even 4k. But even worse, the resolution of the textures are often not powers of 2. This means that Unreal will not be able to generate "mipmaps" for those textures, since it can only create mip chains for textures that are powers of 2. Mipmaps are basically Unreal's solution for texture LODs, and they will be automatically created for textures that are powers of 2.

In plain english, what this means is that if your character is covered in clothing that has textures that are 3200x3200, not only is that way too high resolution and will eat your VRAM quickly, it also wont have a mipmap chain, meaning no matter what distance the camera is from the clothing, it will still render as a 3200x3200 texture. That is not good!

Here is a RenderDoc statistics view of my character BEFORE I optimized the clothing:



1292 MB is being used, over 1 GB of VRAM needed for a single character.

Here is the statistics after optimizing:




A 300mb reduction in VRAM usage. That's nothing to scoff at, and there's still more optimization that can be done (packing greyscale textures into RGB channels, etc)

And finally, here is an overview of a new character (named Lucy). She is a Kawaii chick and streams games when she isn't in college classes. She lives with a thick goth girl (who will be implemented next)

 

[slider]

The hardest part by far is the creation of the systems ingame. The char creator is doing all sorts of things with materials and morphs that need to be kept track of. And the dialogue system required a lot of research.

So, after the release of the demo, a possible temporal solution to implement a mMC could be to make him not morphable? The dialogues would still need to be worked out, but if he is to be the "roomate" and live in the same house, some part of the story and dialogues could be re-used.

And finally, here is an overview of a new character (named Lucy). She is a Kawaii chick and streams games when she isn't in college classes. She lives with a thick goth girl (who will be implemented next)

Another major qtpie, now I'm looking forward seeing the goth girl too. Do you plan to make NPCs modifiable too (looks/genitals/clothes/fetishes)? I definitely like the look of all the characters so far, but since you seem to have a robust customization system, it would also be a plus.

 

[Dilly_]

So, after the release of the demo, a possible temporal solution to implement a mMC could be to make him not morphable? The dialogues would still need to be worked out, but if he is to be the "roomate" and live in the same house, some part of the story and dialogues could be re-used.

Another major qtpie, now I'm looking forward seeing the goth girl too. Do you plan to make NPCs modifiable too (looks/genitals/clothes/fetishes)? I definitely like the look of all the characters so far, but since you seem to have a robust customization system, it would also be a plus.

I did plan on adding some morphs for the male MC, but definitely not as many for the female MC. Changing the dialogue context for male/female characters will be relatively straight forward, since the dialogue system allows for condition checking. Speaking of which...

I'm working on implementing NPC reactions to the character based on their clothing state. The way it works is, when the player enters the NPC's "interact" sphere, they do a check to see the player's clothing state, and then change their expressions accordingly. If you walk up to an NPC naked, they will be shocked. If you're wearing lingerie (or something similar that isn't socially acceptable to walk around casually in) they might act confused or find it funny. Like everything else, it's a work in progress:


And yes, you will be able to change NPC outfits (after you unlock them from doing tasks/quests) and NPC anatomy. I wasn't planning to add NPC morphs to the same extent as the MC though

 

[Dilly_]

Thought it would be interesting to do a a comparison between Daz and UE

Here is my new goth character, Sabrina, rendered in Iray:

And here she is in UE5 Lumen:

 

[slider]

It's amazing that Lumen is looks much better while rendering the model in real time. Maybe Iray's render it's technically more realistic (not really sure about that), but I prefer the UE5's flashy version all around.

One a side note, while the goth girl is as lovely as all the other models, I can see a little "caveat" that I find in 90% of the games. All the girls factions/skulls are pretty similar. While the body, eyes and hair are different, their facial features, jaws and lips are almost identical. This is a natural occurrence while designing characters: you have your own preference/tastes and play on variations of them.

When it comes to future characters, would you consider researching for different looking models for inspiration? There are a myriad of types of beauty and it's always lovely to find variety and uniqueness among the game's characters.

 

[LooLoo Baloo]

All of this work looks really great and I can't wait to play it

 

[Nantec]

Thought it would be interesting to do a a comparison between Daz and UE

And in comparison to the time it took to render.. it's like.. in an instant in ue once shaders are compiled if even needed to recompile

I can only say that you are clearly doing something good("new?") here. You got the basics nailed. You are advancing like someone who cooks a cake which only needs to be made looking good.


But I have one question, did you use Echo's skeleton for your daz characters or just the UE5 Manny or a completely different?

I first used the renaming tool for the unreal manny.. didnt worked so great because my version of the locomotion couldnt work, so I tried to use the base locomotion of Echo.. renamed the bones accordingly with the script found here

You must be registered to see the links

and it worked for the things I wanted to do..

And some posts before you talked about the texture map issues, I recreated or lets say I altered the texture UVs in blender.. instead of having 3200x I made it to 4096 to include the gens seamless.. and with that version of my models, I can simply alter the size always by /2 but have everything which needs to be on the character in one place, I also modified some textures to make them lower resolution if not needed in the scene (tongue and some others.. like the inner vagina/stuff)

When it comes to future characters, would you consider researching for different looking models for inspiration? There are a myriad of types of beauty and it's always lovely to find variety and uniqueness among the game's characters.

This could actually be a problem within the process of getting the daz characters inside, I also tried to actually add the G8 model and all morphs for it inside the game, it worked but couldnt really figure out how to let my morphs stay the way I had them in daz before(might also be because of my altered skeleton) and.. there comes the license issues. The biggest Issues.

Daz wants you to buy the commercial license for products you give to customers in the 3D world. So lets say the creator has 10 different character morphs and altered them, they want you to buy the license for all of them.. tinkering with G8 or others on your own, you might only need the morph package you are altering the characters with.. hella complicated but once read.. should be possible



But about the "goth" character.. if you need some more or other inspiration.. you can look up sensitive.heartless

 

[Dilly_]

It's amazing that Lumen is looks much better while rendering the model in real time. Maybe Iray's render it's technically more realistic (not really sure about that), but I prefer the UE5's flashy version all around.

One a side note, while the goth girl is as lovely as all the other models, I can see a little "caveat" that I find in 90% of the games. All the girls factions/skulls are pretty similar. While the body, eyes and hair are different, their facial features, jaws and lips are almost identical. This is a natural occurrence while designing characters: you have your own preference/tastes and play on variations of them.

When it comes to future characters, would you consider researching for different looking models for inspiration? There are a myriad of types of beauty and it's always lovely to find variety and uniqueness among the game's characters.

Getting the faces right is a bit of a balancing act. Faces in Daz are notoriously difficult to get realistic, but at least in Daz you can crank up the SubD count and use a variety of HD morphs to get more detail/uniqueness. In Unreal, I am using base resolution, meaning there are fewer vertices to use, making the problem of unique faces even more difficult.

I do use a variety of head/face sliders from a variety of models for each of my characters. But I tend not to increase any specific slider too much- as you wouldn't do in Daz either- to avoid "dollface".

If you have specific Daz models with a headshape you'd like to see in the game, feel free to recommend them

 

[Dilly_]

But I have one question, did you use Echo's skeleton for your daz characters or just the UE5 Manny or a completely different?

I am using the default G8.1 skeleton, but I went ahead and made some optimizations for realtime, such as merging the toe bones into the foot bone, merging the lower/upper face rig bones (except for the lower jaw bone- I keep that one for mouth opening controls). For expressions, I use morphs instead of the face rig.

For locomotion, I retargeted to the Windwalker Echo project, as well as added foot IK from the Echo project.

You shouldn't have to worry about renaming bones to match, since you can specify which bones should mimic another bone's behavior in your IK retargeter- regardless of what the name of the bones are.

Thanks for the kind words about my project