Unity Cavatina (Dev Thread)

[stremor]

EDIT: For anyone newly discovering this thread, the project has changed quite a bit since these first few posts, but I'm leaving them up for posterity...because...well... why not?

For an update on what the project has ultimately turned into, see this post and anything after it.

Spoiler: original (very long) post

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[osanaiko]

Damn, those images are beautiful.

Good luck! I hope you get the traction you are hoping for. Please keep posting updates so we can support you.

 

[stremor]

Part 2!

To kick things off, here's a another profile render of a (romanceable, of course!) side character.





(I also edited in a banner at the top of the first post... things seemed a little sparse up there.)

Now, for some hopefully unexcessive ramblings...


Daz is kind of a pain in the ass.
It's a program with a lot of strengths, but an intuitive, non-cumbersome user experience is certainly not one of them.

I've been trying a workflow that uses the animation timeline to aid in posing and rendering. Basically, having each frame on the timeline contain all of the information for character poses and expressions, prop positions/rotations, camera parameters, and whatever else might change in a given scene. Then, assuming everything hasn't been broken by forgetting a small step somewhere in the process, rendering each frame in one go as an image sequence. When everything works as it should, it's significantly faster than what seems to be a more traditional workflow of having, eg. a dedicated Daz scene file per shot/render.

To anyone experimenting with this workflow-- just be sure that you keyframe literally every transform that might move, before you make any changes to it on a given frame. And even then, it might randomly decide to change something you didn't tell it to, causing a character's hand to blast through the nearest impenetrable object for no particular reason. It's also a good idea to make sure that the interpolation is set to 'Constant' for every keyframe, unless you enjoy surprises. (For some reason, I can't seem to reliably just drag and select all keyframes on the timeline to make this change, I have to manually select them all in seemingly arbitrary batches. I don't know why... Because Daz, I guess.)

Oh well, at least the renders look nice.


Writing dialogue
For the script, I've been using

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, which I'm quite enjoying. I've used Yarnspinner in the past on other projects, but it seemed slightly less ideal for this one, and at least from my experience, seems better suited to a more interactive, traditional 'video game' experience with a controllable character, interactable NPCs and objects, and so forth.

Ink is especially well-suited for branching-path stories (which, somewhat ironically, mine probably will not be). But even so, it's a great method of script-writing for a game engine, where any given dialogue moment might trigger a specific game event (sound effects, transitions, visual cues, etc.). It also has a cool little desktop app for writing and exporting your written sequence in a game-ready format, with a neat 'story preview' mode (or whatever they call it).


Things that move
Back over to Unity, where things become a bit more user-friendly, I've just finished a few weather-related effects that should give some life to rainy scenes with windows. I'm sure it'll go through more iteration before I'm completely happy with it, but it's a promising start, I think.

I haven't used Gfycat before, but I'm gonna try embedding a rainy night gif of inside the protagonist's apartment, also with a vague preview of what he looks like. (It fades in, making the loop point kind of unfortunate...so...yeah, I'll have to improve my gif-making skills for future posts).




It's kind of a cool effect, I think, and will hopefully give a bit of life to the scene that can contrast the static character renders. Sound design will also play a big role in making the scenes more interesting and enjoyable.

I'm planning on sharing more of these gifs in future posts once I get more shader work done for things like foliage, clouds, fog, and ambient particle systems.


Animation...?
I've had some promising animation experiments within Daz itself, but the clunky interface and cumbersome timeline tools are tempting me to mess around with bringing my characters over to Blender and seeing how things fare there. There seem to be decent tools for doing this, but I'm unsure of how they handle genitals (I'm not using the stock Daz ones), so I'll need to do some more research and/or experiments there.

Anyway, I think that's it for this post. Thanks for reading!

Damn, those images are beautiful.

Good luck! I hope you get the traction you are hoping for. Please keep posting updates so we can support you.

Thank you!

It's (predictably) proving to be a rather slow process, but I'm determined to get some momentum going and see it through to completion. I've had enough start/stop projects over the years that I definitely intend for this to not suffer the same fate.

 

[stremor]

Just a small update with another '3D Exterior' test, this time at roughly ground level:





... and a GIF of it in motion:



Everything is still very much WIP, but it's slowly coming together.

With this setup, outdoor environments will be adaptable to different times of day and weather (wind, clouds, precipitation, fog, etc), so it'll be fairly straightforward to have a variety of story scenes in the same location with a very different mood and ambience. The 'time of day' and weather system is one I made for a different game, so it was relatively easy to bring over to this project.

For anyone interested in what it looks like in Unity, here's a snip of the scene view. As with many things in game development, it's all smoke and mirrors.



The camera setup is based on layering two cameras-- one for rendering the environment, and another for displaying the character renders from Daz. Nothing too complicated, there.

On the writing side of things, I think I'll probably break this up into a three-chapter release, to make it more manageable on my end, if nothing else. The script for the first chapter is more or less complete, apart from some final edits. From this point, it's mostly just the long grind-y road of general programming, environment setup, and posing/rendering in Daz.

Speaking of which... to end the post, here's a character render of someone new. Her name is Anne, and she's a cellist.

 

[hiya02]

Damn this looks good!
Got something new to show?

 

[stremor]

Damn this looks good!
Got something new to show?

Thank you!

I haven't updated the thread in a while because I've ended up taking the project in a rather different direction, and it's taken a while to fully wrap my head around what I want it to become.

The traditional 'visual novel' model was just something that wasn't really clicking with me over the long term, and I was at risk of burning out and losing interest. So, in short-- it's now going to be more of a game than a visual novel...but... a very simple game that still focuses heavily on the adult side of things, and doesn't bombard the player with tedious, shallow gameplay mechanics..... that's the idea, anyway.

I'll post a more descriptive update later, hopefully before too long... But for now, here's a test render I did a few weeks ago of two of the game's characters... still trying to establish a visual style for the renders with lighting, color, and such:

 

[Ayno Sliqr]

Wow, this looks like an awesome project! Feels so different from everything else that's out there, very refreshing.

I love your vision and your approach on this, I agree with everything you said, especially with the part about multiple endings and keeping things on the erotic and sensual side. And judging by the way you write your posts, I bet the story will be very well written.
The ambience in the two clips you shared is awesome and will add a lot to the game.

I'm already a fan, I'm sure this will turn out great. Good luck!

 

[ChairmanDude]

Not gonna lie, I tend to strongly disagree with your statements about the controversy regarding in-game choices and I couldn't care less for yet another erotic romance story, but regardless of everything, your project looks stunning.

I see that you are pushing for a very perfectionistic product and your visuals are extremely well polished, your hard work deserves much more attention than this thread is getting.

 

[stremor]

Not gonna lie, I tend to strongly disagree with your statements about the controversy regarding in-game choices and I couldn't care less for yet another erotic romance story, but regardless of everything, your project looks stunning.

I see that you are pushing for a very perfectionistic product and your visuals are extremely well polished, your hard work deserves much more attention than this thread is getting.

Thanks! Yeah... it's probably just more that I was having a hard time fitting the 'choice' model into the story I wanted to tell... but either way, I guess it's largely irrelevant now that the project is going in a different direction (which I briefly touched on in the above post), and has moved away from the traditional visual novel format almost entirely.

It'll be more (very casual) game, less story... which I know isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I really needed something more engaging and interesting to work on in order to be able to see it through to completion... I can only do so many slightly-differently-posed Daz renders before I go insane.

The format may change, but the visuals will still be kept to a high standard. I also tend to be overly sensitive to gameplay mechanics that border on tedium, so the 'game' side of it will be pretty streamlined and hopefully not tedious at all... and ideally just an enjoyable, casual experience throughout, whether people are primarily there for the adult content or not.

I'll make another update post later with actual details on what this new direction will be (I realize that this post is kinda vague), but I'm not quite ready yet.

(... and I should probably put an edit in the first post so people just discovering the thread don't think it's still a traditional VN...)

 

[hiya02]

Hope you had a relaxing xmas etc.
Have you figured out the direction for the game yet? I'm just curious since this looked so interesting...

 

[stremor]

Hope you had a relaxing xmas etc.
Have you figured out the direction for the game yet? I'm just curious since this looked so interesting...

Yes! The end of last year was a bit hectic for me, so progress was slow, but I think it's to a place where I don't think I'll be making any more radical changes to the general design (although I expect the indecisive perfectionist in me to make this part difficult, but I'll do my best...)

I unfortunately don't have screenshots or videos to share at the moment, but I can give a general breakdown of the game's design:

• You play as Candice, a professional violinist (she's the one in the banner at the top of my first post).
• The game spans roughly the length of a concert season for most classical musicians (~6-8 months or so, depending on how much content I can get done).
• As you progress through your schedule, you learn new pieces of music, practice them, and perform them in concerts.
• You meet new people in the group of musicians that you play with, you go out to social events with them, get to know them, and (optionally) have sex when the opportunities arise.

The gameplay itself will be:

• Basic 'point and click' gameplay as you navigate around various scenes and menus.
• Simple 'visual novel' style sequences that help to drive the story forward, these will be the 'social events' that you engage in with people you meet throughout the game.
• A turn-based battle system that represents you 'performing' the music. The gameplay here is somewhat similar to classic turn-based RPGs (think Paper Mario or Mario RPG), but with an additional 'rhythm game' mechanic that adds a unique spin to the gameplay.
• A few different collectible types and unlocks, some of which serve a role in the battle gameplay, some of which are just cosmetic.

Some additional notes:

• The game will be full of great arrangements of classical music, done by a composer friend of mine who's quite good at this sort of thing.
• I'm trying to recruit the help of a professional animator acquaintance to help me with the animation side of things, but they're pretty busy, so I'm not sure how things will work out there. As I think I've said in an earlier post, I'd prefer no animation to subpar animation, so I can't make any promises there (yet).
• The adult content will be easy to access and unlock, and won't be stuck behind tedious or difficult gameplay. (and on a related note, the adult content itself will be entirely optional and skippable, if that's the user's preference).

So... yeah... the vision for the project has changed fairly dramatically from my original posts, although the characters, setting, and visual style will still be the same (or better, I hope).

I'll eventually have a new title for the game, and I should probably edit my first post in here so people stumbling across it for the first time don't get the wrong idea.

And since I haven't posted anything in so long, here's a random render of Candice that I don't think I've posted around here before (if I have, apologies for the repost):

 

[stremor]

Well, it seems apparent that I'm quite terrible at maintaining a dev log!

The game is still very much in development (albeit slowly). Turns out that making an actual game is quite a bit more work than a simple visual novel.

At this point, I'm planning to eventually launch it on Steam, as I feel it will have enough quality content to warrant a price tag, and it'd be nice to get a bit of support for future dev projects (I'm not sure that a Patreon would be a good idea, as I feel I'd have a hard time delivering routine updates of high enough quality as long as this project is still in the works.)

...But anyway, here's a small sample of a recent animation test for the main hub screen, where our character will follow the cursor around if it's currently moving.






I'm trying to have most (if not all) of the game be devoid of static/motionless scenes or renders, with as much of it as possible also being interactable in some small way.