Unreal Engine Drifter Prince - Development / Discussion Thread

[Corvo Bianco]

Hey, everyone. I was told this is the right place to start a thread about the game I have in development. Before I start, let me apologize for my English as I am not a native English speaker. I am an experienced developer who makes games for a living. During my day job, I make free2play games for a large corporation, during the night, I am trying to make something I would genuinely enjoy as a gamer. While I love traditional mainstream games, my passion lies in adult games niche
I've been working on this project almost for a year now. Still long way to first alpha, which is planned to be released by summer 2020.

The trailer!


Anyway, I have some stuff to show for starters

First of all, the

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from the game can be found on Pornhub. I can't insert this video into F95 post, so I have to make it a link.





The game is very story focused with some explorations, survival and looting elements. I am going for realtime 3d in Unreal Engine for the best visual quality I can possibly achieve. The dating and sex scenes are going to be fully animated in 3d. On top of that, I will be making a VR version of the game as I believe this is a particularly interesting medium for adult games.

Another key feature you would be truly interested in is particular "emotional magic", which allows you to manipulate girls' emotions. But be careful, push the feelings too hard, and you will have to face emotional breakdown. Push sadness, and your partner might burst into tears, push anger, and your partner might get wild and dangerous.

Will be fun

The point of this thread is to make weekly progress reports. It would help me to stay accountable, and hopefully, I will be able to build some interest around the project, even if it is just 10 people following the "Drifter Prince."

Another goal I pursue is an educational one. I use UE4 for this game, the engine is a lot bigger and more complex than RenPy or RPGM you all know and love. I would like to give people a glimpse of game development in Unreal, maybe explain some concepts and give an overview of some topics you never think about as a gamer. Should be fun, I hope

And lastly, it is lonely working by myself, so I'd like to interact with like-minded people. So let's talk!

Some other images I've posted weeks later:

 

[mickydoo]

My dream in a year from now is to make game in unreal, I used to know how to use it but that was 10 years ago, it has all changed since then. I wish you luck and will follow along.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

My dream in a year from now is to make game in unreal, I used to know how to use it but that was 10 years ago, it has all changed since then. I wish you luck and will follow along.

Yeah, Unreal has changed quite a bit since UDK, however they are doing a lot of work to make it more user-friendly. They also regularly publish tutorials and streams to get you going with the engine, which is nice and I appreciate the effort.
Good luck to you too with current and future projects

 

[Egglock]

Would be interesting to see where you take this project. Though the issue is, this engine like this isn't something dev's like to dip their toes in, due to how complex and time consuming it is. None the less, glad to hear you're dipping your toes into some deep water.

Sadly the UE4 community is a bit lacking in terms of helpful tutorials and guidance. There are only a handful of people who go deep in these topics but don't actually show the practicality use of them. Or maybe i'm just too stupid to understand it. Either way, if you are in need or advice, opinion or need trouble shooting, I'm more than willing to give mine. Though don't expect any thing of AAA level. I know only the bare minimal to get by with the engine.

 

[somebodynobody]

I have to wonder what kind of dating will exist in a survival game.

Unity is a pretty good engine to work with, a lot of devs though allow for lots of memory leaks which hurts the engines name. For people who want a slightly friendlier engine try godot.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Would be interesting to see where you take this project. Though the issue is, this engine like this isn't something dev's like to dip their toes in, due to how complex and time consuming it is. None the less, glad to hear you're dipping your toes into some deep water.

Sadly the UE4 community is a bit lacking in terms of helpful tutorials and guidance. There are only a handful of people who go deep in these topics but don't actually show the practicality use of them. Or maybe i'm just too stupid to understand it. Either way, if you are in need or advice, opinion or need trouble shooting, I'm more than willing to give mine. Though don't expect any thing of AAA level. I know only the bare minimal to get by with the engine.

Thanks for the offer, man, I will keep it in mind!
This project definitely is a challenge. These days I have to spend like 50% of time actually developing the game and 50% of time researching and learning new stuff. But it is what it is.

I have to wonder what kind of dating will exist in a survival game.

Unity is a pretty good engine to work with, a lot of devs though allow for lots of memory leaks which hurts the engines name. For people who want a slightly friendlier engine try godot.

I actually work with Unity at my day job, however UE4 is my secret love, I enjoy it a lot more in the matter of fact

As for the dating, I will post more details some time later, though I must say it will definitely have simplier mechanics than people might imagine, because I have to carefully balance the scope of the game, or I won't be able to handle the project of this complexity.

 

[somebodynobody]

Wow I parsed over the U and engine and figured unity but I did look at your video which of course shows something unreal like. Sorry about that.

Damn I haven't used Unreal since 2.5 I think it was, it wasn't friendly back then but I heard it is much friendlier now.

Good luck.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

I find it quite interesting that many people have worked with very old versions of Unreal. Very curious.

Anyway, this is the time to post my first weekly update. This week was saturated with various events. Most notably I finally started talking about my project on the net I love the positive reaction I get, it is definitely motivating!

But lets talk about the stuff I have worked on this week.

LOCATIONS

Currently most of my effort goes into this new location. It is a rocky wasteland that is located relatively close to a city the player starts the game at. The location will serve as a source of resources, and will also hold some story events.

Last week the level finally left the whitebox stage, and for two weeks already I've been populating it with objects. When we are making game levels, the first stage is called whitebox or greybox or a blockout, and is made of basic cubes. This way you can understand the level’s topology and plan your work ahead. This is a very cheap way to understand which direction you are taking the level. In game studios it also allows you to display the idea to producers and other people in charge in order to get a green light for further production where things quickly get very expensive.

CHARACTERS

We soon are starting work on 2-nd female character. Having concept art with character design in my hands, I found a 3d artist who I think can handle it. This week we are sorting some formalities like tech documentation and a contract. Hopefully next week the artist will get his hands dirty with the work

Keep in mind that character production cycle from concept art to final rigged (ready for animation) model in the engine takes around 3-5 months depending on how busy I am with other tasks. This means the updates on this will be very infrequent, sadly.

ANIMATION

I have imported my first fully working animation sequence into the engine. It might seem like no big deal, but it is an important milestone for me because my character rig works fine and I am actually satisfied with it. Essentially it means I can in fact just start making animated scenes.

COMICS

Last but not least. I wrote a script for intro comic the player will see when he or she starts the game for the first time. It is very important to start the game with something interesting, something that pulls the player in. I am letting the script sit for a couple of weeks, then I will revisit it to be sure it still feels good

Making everything in full 3d is very time consuming and pretty much impossible for solo dev like me. I have decided to carefully balance 3d scenes and 2d comics to deliver the story in a fun, yet relatively cheap way.

This is it for now!

 

[alt_advancement]

damn, the blurred out 3d model from the youtube video looked extremely hot! UE4 and real time 3d are my current favorites. Depending on what route you go for the dating and sex part (plus the animations), this could be the game I've been searching for! When are you putting this up on patreon/subscribestar?

 

[Corvo Bianco]

I'm glad you enjoyed the teaser, alt_advancement I have a

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page, however I am not really looking for donations just yet simply because I have at least 6-8 months of work before I can release first alpha.

 

[alt_advancement]

The city shot is very cyberpunk'ish (actually reminds me of the upcoming game cyberpunk 2077)! This project looks very promising! Please don't burn out!

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Yeah, burn out is a real deal. I appreciate the reminder to watch out for it

 

[Chikimaro]

The idea is good but a half year for a few level design and 1 character its a little bit too much, else good luck and the hard part in developing a game on UE4 after my own experience is bug fixes.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

The idea is good but a half year for a few level design and 1 character its a little bit too much, else good luck and the hard part in developing a game on UE4 after my own experience is bug fixes.

Kind of, yeah. I hope I will pick up speed as I get more experience.
It's like I had to learn rigging for my 1st character. Should be faster and easier to handle rigging for 2nd one, obviously

 

[Chikimaro]

Kind of, yeah. I hope I will pick up speed as I get more experience.
It's like I had to learn rigging for my 1st character. Should be faster and easier to handle rigging for 2nd one, obviously

it depends on how fast you model your character, why don't you simplify the task by using Daz3d ? it have hundreds of characters that can be edited, you can Export and Import DAZ Characters - Rigging - Animations and Breast Morph into UE4 easily

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Daz characters are simply not my cup of tea. I don't particularly like how they look, including both model and textures. Fixing them to my liking and also making them look good with Unreal skin and hair shaders is way too much work for minimal gain, it is easier to just make a new character from scratch.

I also prefer to have control over my characters' rig. For instance, I have custom rig and blendshapes for scapula to emulate how bones move under the skin. It's simple setup but adds a bit of realism to it. Or another example is I have a set of blendshapes to move eyelids with the movement of eyes.

 

[Chikimaro]

intersting, if you can manipulate how the scapula works is something really cool, but it's not going to be seen until the sex scenes except if you're planning to make the character upper body naked, and about the characters everyone has his own opinion and i think daz is easier and they are not that bad (https://f95zone.to/threads/novak-for-genesis-8-male.33129/ - https://f95zone.to/threads/ela-for-the-g3-and-g8-females.31164/ - https://f95zone.to/threads/nicolette-hd-for-genesis-8-female.32879/), you can do it the way that you like specially if you want a total controle over the character, i also want to know what are you going to use to model them (Blender - Maya - ZBrush - 3DS Max - ...) ?
anyways you picked up my interest and i'm really wanting to see how it will turn out.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

They are not bad, of course, but for me personally there is something offputting to them. Probably uncanny valley? They look too realistic for their own good. My characters are a touch stylized, making them less prone to the effect of uncanny valley.

I use Maya LT for rigging. As for modelling I hire a character artist to do the work under my guidance using provided concept art. They use Zbrush for sculpting and some other tool for polygonal modelling, I didn't bother to ask as it is not important Whatever works, it's the result what matters.

 

[Chikimaro]

i see, i can imagine what your charcters looks like, i would have prefered you to model the charcters by your self because its always better and you can do it the way that you like than hiring characters artist but if they use a provided concept art they could do it.
well, i wish all the luck.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Thanks

I wish I could model by myself, but there is no way one person can master so many disciplines you need for this kind of game. I already do broad range of totally different tasks, and you know what's the biggest problem? No, it is not to learn something. It is to retain the skill. The more different skills you have, the faster they degrade. Human brain limitation, I guess.