Unreal Engine Drifter Prince - Development / Discussion Thread

[krys69]

Yeah, you've got the right idea
At first you will be able to unlock new locations to explore. They are relatively small separate levels. Later on I will create more open world-ish locations, but got to build some systems first before getting to that. It isn't easy thing to do from optimization point of view, so it will take some good planning and researching before I can even start working on that.

I do not know if this would be helpful but you can make like a different talent/specialty tree (think of civilization series tech tree or some other strategies, rpg's (Fantasy Life on 3DS) and including porn ones , or if your seen the anime called "Rise of the Shield Hero" and how his talent/specialty tree works) that would keep a track of MC's progress in different categories for example: start with basic talents such as gathering(tier 0 - basic stuff "FOOOOOD"), fighting(tier 0 - fist is all you got and its all you can use for now), read & write(tier 0 - basic letter's and word reading and writing), explore(tier 0 - basic ability to look for stuff and finding stuff), pleasure(tier 0 - simple masturbation to self), meditation(tier 0 - MANA you heard about it but little is known about it), spirituality(tier 0 - you heard about spirit world and creatures that occupy it but not much more is known at this time), talk(tier 0 - O SHIT YOU CAN TALK), creature & bestiary knowledge(tier 0 - can you eat them or can you fuck them hmmm....... dont know that just yet) and so on.......Just to name few.
Each talent would progress when used and once requirements meant that talent would get to next tier that can unlock new things such as:
1) expand the abilities to new talent's, by growing the talent/specialty tree even bigger by allowing even more options when more new branches appear as options, for example:
a) gathering(tier 0): nothing new just basic food pick up from ground,
b) gathering(tier 1): ability to identify which food on the ground is more good and which one is not so much, unlocked wood gathering(tier 0 - basic wood that's loose on the ground), rock gathering(tier 0 - same as wood), fish gathering(tier 0 - catch fish bear handed),
c) gathering(tier 2): ability to identify which bushes have eatable fruits & nuts and than be able to pickup food from them,
d) gathering(tier 3): ability to identify which tree's have eatable fruits & nuts and than be able to pickup food from them
2) permanent perks that manifest them self as additional bonuses that MC receives once conditions are met for each talent/specialty tier, for example:
a) gathering(perk 0): nothing new just basic food pick up from ground at specific location's - 1(amount of what ever food)/1(how many times can be done in a day)
b) gathering(perk 1): nothing new just basic food pick up from ground at specific location's - 1(amount of what ever food)/2(how many times can be done in a day) - reach gathering(tier 2) to unlock
c) gathering(perk 2): nothing new just basic food pick up from ground at specific location's - 1(amount of what ever food)/3(how many times can be done in a day) - reach gathering(tier 3) to unlock

If you like and if it helps you in any way I can try to expand on all of this little bit more, but before doing so let us know in what direction you want to expand the MC development.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

krys69
Thanks for taking the time to share your ideas. I will keep those in mind when I will get to gathering and craft mechanics, thought it won't be very soon as I have to implement various other features before I can even start with these. Too much work, too little time

 

[krys69]

krys69
Thanks for taking the time to share your ideas. I will keep those in mind when I will get to gathering and craft mechanics, thought it won't be very soon as I have to implement various other features before I can even start with these. Too much work, too little time

No problem, if I have some time I will try to make a visual example of the thing I spoken of so its more clear and easy to use as an example.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Every little detail matters. Made this material for the gemstone, and I think it looks badass

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Hello again. Another weekend means another weekly progress report

Not much stuff in terms of screenshots, but the work is being done!

LOCATIONS

Making last location for this year. Once it is finished I will have enough locations for a tech demo and first playable alpha. And I won't worry about playable space for a good while after all

During this week I made a blockout for a city location using only cubes to better plan and understand the size of the location, its topology and player pathing. While it looks very simple, a lot of thought was put into it.



ANIMATION

During last 1.5-2 weeks I've made over 2000 frames of hand keyed 3d animation. I actually now have enough animation to create first fully working erotic 3d scene!

The animation happens to be a huge time sink. I feel like till the end of the year I will spend roughly 60% of work time on this aspect of the game. Shit's tough.

CHARACTERS

Making various materials for characters, especially for clothing and jewelry.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Hello again. I am here for another weekly progress report

This week was a bit hectic, and I didn't have as much time to work on the project as I would've liked. But to make up for that I am going to post some concept art for the first character you meet in the game Hope you will love her just like I do!

LOCATIONS

Most of this week's free time I've worked on the City location. I am half-way done with object placement, hope to finish this task by the end of next week.

ANIMATION

I did a bit of polishing work on the animation I made last week. I will need to do some corrective blend shapes (or morph targets as some people call them) to make the mesh look better during extreme poses.

CHARACTERS

As I promised, here's some concept art for the first girl in the game. I know some of you like Catgirls, and do I have a treat for you!



And here are some WIP ideas we used before we came up with the final look.



If you liked it, come follow me at

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to see more stuff like this

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Game development is all about solving problems and overcoming various issues. Being highly technical field it requires a lot of knowledge and experience. When you lack them, you might hit a roadblock that sucks in the time like a black hole.

This week I didn't have any means to produce new content, mostly because I was trying to solve an issue with animation import and setup in the engine. Long story short, my models in the 3d editor are fine, but once I import them to the engine they get horrible mesh deformations. Spent a lot of time looking for different solutions, and I am close to finishing the case, but the time is lost, hehe.

Another issue that popped up this week was with Version Control (which is kind of a backup system that allows you to store different versions of files, so you can revert back to those if needed). I found out my setup is broken, and when I reverted some files they reverted to an extremely old version I have saved more than a month ago, so I would've lost crazy amount of work if I didn't have another manual backup on an external HDD.

I almost had a heart attack when I opened my project and this was what I was welcomed with



instead of this:



I think this is a perfect reminder to all of us developers to have multiple backups at home and online. Make backups, and make them often. Spending 1 hour a week managing backups is better than losing hundreds of hours of work.

Game development is like 20% creative work and 80% routine, often extremely tedious. If you lose your creative work, it sucks, but you can do it again, because it is fun. If you lose that tedious portion of work, it is demotivating when you realize you have to do it all again.

So backup your work if you don't want to lose your will to live

Aaaand here's some fine concept art to finish this update on a highly positive note!

Spoiler: WIP of that costume just for fun :)

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[Corvo Bianco]

I won the war against technical issues I had last week, though I've lost a few battles and had to surrender some things for the greater good. Anyway, I managed to fix broken imported models in the engine, and I also fixed Version Control problems, it should work fine now.

The character is working fine in the engine now, and I made a fun little video to show you how it looks


Next 3 weeks I plan to spend mostly on game design. First of all, I want to finish coding timed missions on the world map, and then make some content for them to test how everything fits together: game design as a whole, preview images, descriptions, localization and currency balance.

Oh, by the way, you might have noticed, I have decided on the name for the game, it officially goes by the

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now

 

[Chikimaro]

if you asked for some help you would have won the war a long time ago , also you said you're planning to spend 3 weeks on the game design only i would recommend to finish all the game mechanics first and to leave the design to be the last part , btw your model looks super hot, he made a great work for sure.
All the best.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Thanks, mate

I did, in fact, had to ask for help from the community when I ran out of options myself Got some good advice that helped me to solve the issue.

I will probably take more time to sort out game mechanics, but we'll see, it is hard to say for sure now. Got to do some work first to see how it goes.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Hey, it's the end of the week already!

The next few weeks won't be inspiring as I will be busy writing game design documentation and some backend code to support various game mechanics. Some of these tasks are incredibly tedious for me, but the show must go on Even though I don't have anything particular to show, I want to keep this devlog going, as it helps me with the discipline.

Anyway, this week I wrote design docs for:

• In-game inventory and loot system
• Loot queue UI
• Quest tracker
• Two basic quest mechanics
• Sex scenes in Standard Edition - this is a game build most people will use.
• Sex scenes in VR Edition - as the name states, it is a VR build.
• Game design of Magnum Edition in broad strokes. This is pretty much the same as Standard, but with graphics cranked to a maximum. I will make it as a separate build because the file size will be massive, and I don't want people to download it unless they are sure their PC is up to the task.

Other than that, I made an updated contract to use when I buy a character artist's services.

Oh, and I have a cool story to share. A couple of days ago, I got an email from a server hosting provider I keep my Version Control system at. They said my server was involved in a big (like 30Gb/s big) DDOS attack, so they disabled it, and I had to redo my whole setup yet again. My luck, amirite? With the help of my friend, I made the new setup more secure, but damn you script kiddies for wasting my time.

This is it for now! Till the next week

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Huh, the week has ended fast, too fast.
Did a lot of stuff though, pretty happy about the amount of work I managed to do

We have finished the 2-nd character model, which I won't show just yet Had to spend some time setting it up in the engine. I also adjusted the textures and materials for both our girls, so they look consistent.

Ah, what the hell, going to show a little teaser just for fun (you can click the image to see full res image):



Other than that, I have revisited the storyline document for the first episode (essentially, it is the first alpha) and made various edits, big and small. Now it has better story flow, more exciting quests, and a couple of fun (at least on paper) NPCs to interact with.

I did some world map coding, but not much. Mostly fixed a number of bugs.

And lastly spent some time trying out free demo for

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software. It is a tool designed for game writers that helps to structure your documentation and branching dialogues. Watched some tutorials, made test projects. It really suits my needs, but the default UI text is small, white on nearly black, and you can't change it. Way too hard on the eyes, so back to Scrivener we go.

And as usual, feel free to follow me on

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[Corvo Bianco]

Posted today at F95 discord, thought I should share the gif here as well
Realtime, hand-animated + morphs.

 

[fidless]

Game development is all about solving problems and overcoming various issues. Being highly technical field it requires a lot of knowledge and experience. When you lack them, you might hit a roadblock that sucks in the time like a black hole.

This week I didn't have any means to produce new content, mostly because I was trying to solve an issue with animation import and setup in the engine. Long story short, my models in the 3d editor are fine, but once I import them to the engine they get horrible mesh deformations. Spent a lot of time looking for different solutions, and I am close to finishing the case, but the time is lost, hehe.

Another issue that popped up this week was with Version Control (which is kind of a backup system that allows you to store different versions of files, so you can revert back to those if needed). I found out my setup is broken, and when I reverted some files they reverted to an extremely old version I have saved more than a month ago, so I would've lost crazy amount of work if I didn't have another manual backup on an external HDD.

I almost had a heart attack when I opened my project and this was what I was welcomed with

View attachment 406776

instead of this:

View attachment 406795

I think this is a perfect reminder to all of us developers to have multiple backups at home and online. Make backups, and make them often. Spending 1 hour a week managing backups is better than losing hundreds of hours of work.

Game development is like 20% creative work and 80% routine, often extremely tedious. If you lose your creative work, it sucks, but you can do it again, because it is fun. If you lose that tedious portion of work, it is demotivating when you realize you have to do it all again.

So backup your work if you don't want to lose your will to live
[/SPOILER]

You don't need to spend any time making backups when there's free software to do it for you automatically
I use EaseUs Todo Backup myself, it works great. Runs in the background, you can set up multiple schedules to multiple HDD/SSD.

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Oh, sounds good, I will check it out, thanks

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Hey, another week report is here

I spent some time working on the city level and made a

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to showcase what has been done in terms of environments during the last few months.

Most of my free time this week was spent on game design documentation:

• Hub location, where you can meet the characters and talk to them. Something like your ship in Mass Effect.
• Designed a datapad, small puzzle you have to solve to open some loot caches.
• General game design of the VR version of the game.
• Remade the grinding aspect of the game to be fun and enjoyable.
• Designed the dialogue system and in-game comic system.
• Designed the encyclopedia where the player can read the lore.
• Wrote descriptions for world map missions.
• I spent a lot of time thinking, and finally redesigned the approach to the sex scenes. I will talk about it in detail sometime later.

This is it for now. The next week I will be busy with the writing as well

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Hello, another week has ended, and another week report is here

First of all, I've finished the City location for now. I will need to add loot containers to all levels later, but other than that, the most significant chunk of work in terms of world design is done.





After a break from the story, I realized some quests are very bland, and I also need to adjust the overall story to add more depth and some twists. This is a perfect time to do this before I invest in making additional 3d content and 2d comics to support the story.

Overall most of the time was spent on the documentation and the story:

• Updated the lore, including the characters' backstory, to give them more depth.
• Made a basic draft for story dialogues to be displayed while the player is roaming and searching for resources.
• Worked on the game design document. Refined a few game mechanics: encyclopedia, 2d dialogues system, comics, made several UI mockups.
• I have started learning UI animation in UE4, so I will be able to give some basic, yet lively animation to 2d comics.

I am planning to continue working on the documentation and the story during the next few weeks. I feel this is very important to get these done before I continue with anything else. It won't look exciting in weekly updates, but the work is essential

By the way, recently, I've started using Grammarly to help me fix mistakes in my articles. Does it help with the quality of my writing?

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Hey, one more week has passed I was busy with documentation and writing, so I don't have anything to show. Anyway, this week I have worked on:

• Better game design for dialogues and quests. Had to redo some documentation for those mechanics, but now I am confident in them.
• Updated the story and quests to better work with new mechanics. Still, I need to lay them down in a proper way before I can hand them out to a comic artist. I want the main story evens to be displayed using interactive comics, hence the comic artist.
• Updated the lore with new ideas and story twists. Have some awesome stuff to use later in the story
• Revisited my plan for the next few months, and it stands: the alpha will be ready at the end of spring 2020.
• And last but not least, I have watched some tutorials and practiced making animated UI in Unreal, so I can do some fancy animation for my interactive comics.

This is all for now Got to rest a little!

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Hello there! One more week of doing stuff has ended

I was busy writing during all my free time, and couldn't fit anything else into my schedule, so no screenshots again. However, I am happy to say that I have written 100% of the story content and documentation for the first demo and around 50% for the second demo.
Some bullet points on what I managed to finish this week:

• Texts for all missions on the world map.
• A few lore entries for the encyclopedia.
• Texts for all dialogues you encounter during the first demo.
• Finished writing story comics for the demo.
• Wrote some documentation for when I hire an artist to draw the world map and the comics.
• And last but not least, I have translated all of that to English, which is not my native language. My writing kinda sucks, but this will be enough to give the material to a writer to fix / rewrite.

Next few weeks, I plan on working on visual content and on the code. I will also do some research for the VR version of the game. I am still not sure how I will approach the MC's body in VR, and how interactive the experience will be.

Anyway, this is it for now. Thanks, and see you around

 

[Corvo Bianco]

Just for fun, here's some concept art research we did a while ago when we were trying out various alien / monster girl ideas.