Unity Darkens Heir - Monstergirl dungeon crawler - Dev progress, discussion and feedback

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

Hi all,

I have been developing a game for the past year in my free time together with a quite small team and I was looking to discuss the project with a likeminded community for feedback, advice and also ideas and whatnot.
Since this is my first post there will be no links in here, but those aren't necessary yet as the game is still in development.

The game is done in Unity and all code is done mostly from scratch with the exception of the dialogue system which is done by running the UTAGE VN system for unity as subroutines inside the gamescenes.

Why monstergirls? Why not. Also I run a rather large monstergirl community, so my tastes are biased.

Basic premise is that you have an oldschool 3d tilebased first person dungeoncrawler (Might and Magic, Wizardry) with a solid combat system adapted from an established pen and paper system (Rolemaster) to go and fight monstergirls, which can be subdued or enslaved, your interpretation may vary, and dragged back into the city where you can add them to your party as new members or send them to work for you while you go spelunking in the dungeons.

So you have 2 gamelayers, one is the dungeons and combat, another is the management of the city later on.

What I plan on doing is depending on the monstertype you can get different results at work, i.e. if you send an Elf to be a blacksmith you will get different weapons than if you would send a Minotaur to be a blacksmith, etc etc etc.

On top of that, where does the lewd stuff come in?

Actually I am not planning on making the game super lewd, the girls will of course be properly voluptuous and/or cute, skimpy clothing for starters, and I would like to have nude scenes or implied sexytime as unlocks like achievements, ideally like a CG gallery. If you send a girl to make money as stripper or dancer for example. My main focus is to deliver an actually playable solid game first.

Things that are currently done:
- tilebased movement in a 3d environment, collision detection
- event handling inside dungeons
- game dialogue within the dungeon or the city
- character creation
- realtime lighting effects
- custom sound effect handling
- first dungeon set, multiple levels
- 3d environments for the city and several shops/locations (used as scene backgrounds)
- 7 different monstergirl sprites
- turnbased combat system with extensive critical and effect handling according which weapontype is used against which armortype, most work was put into this
- persistent characterdata and a bulletproof save/load system

Important things missing for alpha:
- Inventory handling (base implemented, missing UI, about 40% done)
- actual shop logic for acquiring items or healing, minor issue
- experience handling and levelups
- skill system

The skill system is probably not required for an alpha proof of concept release, but it would make gameplay a lot more interesting. The most major feature missing which will not make it into alpha is the whole city management stuff. That is more for a beta version when we are featurecomplete and start refining what we have.

I would love to have some comments about all this, what you guys think or questions how stuff is done. I'll try to answer everything as I have time and this is also a mental kick in the arse to keep my mind on the game and develop more. It's bloody difficult managing real life, job, family and still do a sideproject like this. I wish I would have done something like this when I was still in school.

And now for some screenshots:

 

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

A few sprites attached from the basic idle stance. First dungeon contains goblin type monsters, so that sets the initial theme. Other dungeons will get different monsters, like the lamia attached above.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

3d tilebased first person dungeoncrawler (Might and Magic, Wizardry)

The magic words to my heart

Actually I am not planning on making the game super lewd, the girls will of course be properly voluptuous and/or cute, skimpy clothing for starters,

I approve. I think it is important to have a good focus on the core part of your game, in this case it would be the combat system. Being lewd is just icing on the case if the game itself is naturally fun. It sounds like your management system is the tool (game mechanic) you are using to give players a reason to keep playing long term, as it lets you upgrade and give a sense of progression. Sex and other lewd stuff tend to be its own system, that doesn't work to well with some games. kinda like oil and water, the main issue is that this vs normal game play have different pacing, and if you keep interupting gameplay with the lewd stuff, unless teh game is mainly lewd stuff, this can get anoying.

I think a way you could kinda deliever lewd content without needing to worry about more art or game mechanics or story telling is simply have enemies with personalities, have them make comments while fighting. "You jerk" "what are you looking at" "hey, eyes up here" "quit staring" "Why does it feel like my panties are missing?" "get your hands off" "are you missing on purpose?" "stop going easy on me" "will you quit grabbing my boobs, baka..." etc, so feed back from the characters that refect their personality, feelings, and or suggesting more is going on than we see.

speed. I am interested in how fast combat is designed to feel. does each fight take 4 minutes, or are they quick and I can grind through a bunch of characters? I have very smal attention-span, so I am more of a fast place player, but in designing my own rpg ideas I know I try to make interesting system that try to have some realistic complexity to them, thus rather slow. I know lots of people have fun with making combat/magic systems, so i would be interested in learning more about your system and what you were trying to achieve with it.

monstergirl sprites

Ah, I see, I was wondering how you were going to handle character art, very good, nothing too complex to implement.

experience handling and levelups

Would this be necessary? Do you plan to have some story, dungeon areas, or enemies hidden away as a type of incentive for players to play the game and level up? Will you be going in the dungeon to free people that you could use for your town as different upgrades? Could upgrades in weapons/armors be enough to empower a character to a new area. What is the point of a level system, is it to give the players a feel of progression, unlock more of the game's content? if not then level systems in most games are pointless since for the most part battels remain equally challenging as you keep growing, which tends not to do much in terms of good or bad gameplay. The only exception is that with more levels and character building, the game mechanics introduce new rules to increase complexity. too often games just throw this feature in because they think players will like it, but it ends up only killing the pacing of a game. I ask because I don't want you to waste effort on something that never really adds to your game.

other than that, sounds cool!

 

[Hermies]

Very cool when a community gets their heads together to make a game that revolves around their passions. That said I am curious about your community any info would be appreciated.
The first thing that went through my head when I saw the goblin sprites was will you encounter multi class groups of monster girls, or will they be a basic mob and you have to establish a class after you capture them? This will obviously affect game dynamics and complexity, but encountering multi class opponents would definitely make for a more interesting game.

Leveling makes sense in terms of class but I wonder do you intend to have evolutions and or greater or lessor type monster girls? If so then a leveling system makes even more sense I think.

 

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

Thanks for the kind words!

Yeah characters are done in 2d because doing 3d is simply impossible for me, 3d artists are not exactly freely available and are worth their weight in gold if you need custom models... which you do for monstergirls. The body is just not standard.

A monster needs at the very least 3 different poses for combat and a some minimal visual feedback and an avatar, which can be cropped from those 3 poses to save time and money.

A dungeon area contains about 5-10 different monstertypes plus a boss ideally, so you're looking at 33+ custom sprites for one area to give an idea about the scope.

And we are aiming to keep adding more dungeons and monstergirls in the future, one of the key design features on the code and assets is that we built it pretty modular, which is nice.

As for character levels, the combat is done with captured monstergirls and you want some form of progression. Partysize is 4 and you will be able to fight against more than 4 enemies at the same time. Actually you can draw a parallel to Pokemon here now that I think about it.

 

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

Very cool when a community gets their heads together to make a game that revolves around their passions. That said I am curious about your community any info would be appreciated.
The first thing that went through my head when I saw the goblin sprites was will you encounter multi class groups of monster girls, or will they be a basic mob and you have to establish a class after you capture them? This will obviously affect game dynamics and complexity, but encountering multi class opponents would definitely make for a more interesting game.

Leveling makes sense in terms of class but I wonder do you intend to have evolutions and or greater or lessor type monster girls? If so then a leveling system makes even more sense I think.

We were discussing class evolutions to reach different combat skills but that isn't set in stone yet and I will get to it when we have the base skill system up and running. Specific monsters have innate abilities and modifiers to their base attributes... a Kobold will never be as strong physically as a Hobgoblin, etc. A class system may be adopted later to add another layer of char progression but that's where I would put the evolution if I had to choose as game designer. Easier to balance in the long run.

The community is touchfluffytail dot org, I have no idea if I am allowed to use links yet.

 

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

I will give a few more answers that I missed tomorrow and will also drop in a few links that should explain matters further. Maybe I should record some actual combat footage from the game, it won't look phenomenal yet but it will give a good idea how it feels like and what I want to achieve with it.

 

[Hermies]

To be honest I really don't have much knowledge about games and coding, I have some time playing around with the old "Slave Maker" re-vamp done by C.Mcleod and the old "JackOninetails" on OldHuntsman (which I actually liked a lot despite many bad reviews [of the engine Not the game]). Any way when you look at the volume of images "basically 1 for each action" for the girls then the dialog and interactions written into the code, ( I never got far enough to try to write my own but after looking through many just to get a basic grasp) I came away with a pretty healthy respect for the guy's who stick to it until they get the bugs worked out.

I really don't have much to offer in those regards, But I love Monster Girls and have played enough RPG's ( at the risk of showing my age I'm an original D&D player here, when we only had books and no computer RPG games think atari and space invaders

So to be honest I am interested in the story you have in mind and any potential plot. In the terms of a RPG story line I may have some ideas that you guy's could toss around or pick apart.

So I plan to visit your community some time in the next couple of days and maybe get a better idea about your game, so I'me not just being annoying.

 

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

Here is a gif of a combat test running. I am busy tying different scenes together so the game feels less like different cut up areas and more of a proper flow. Once that is done, there will be a youtube recording of a fight with sound effects, more updated effects and such.

 

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

Since I had feedback on this before, things to note:
The delay when clicking buttons will disappear, this is currently for debugging.
Sprites don't have any animation yet, that's simply because the other poses aren't drawn by the artist yet. That will change as soon as I receive them.
The status text will be reworked on top so that it is easier to read.
The action buttons right now are placeholders and there will be a different menu below later. Keep in mind it's still alpha.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Liking the bit of narration mechanic, I could see you are already keeping longer term ideas in mind, but getting the fundamentals working asap, good work!

 

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

ASAP isn't the word I would use when we've been at this for a year. I mean what I said when I wrote that we created this pretty much from scratch.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I mean asap in the letteral sense, 'as soon as possible,' as in, it looks like you are focusing on making sure the fundamental mechanisms are working (including a few nice features and tuning) before you implement your full system (ie extra dialog or whatever). Ignoring that you have also been implementing all the other game systems, and the 3D stuff, which I am sure has taken a significant portion of your work time.

 

[SnowDrakE_TFT]

Bloody hell. Before I started this project I had no idea what Quaternions are or how to use spherical linear interpolation. 3d coding is just a bad dream.

Works like a charm though!