Unreal Engine Kalyskah [v0.25.9] [Nobre Lobo]
- Nov 4, 2019
- 573
- 730
You'll need to be patient. They're currently working on optimizing the game to improve performance.
[News] The game has some problems, and here's how we'll fix them
Hello everyone, Corintio here!
Today I have a long post for you, so grab some coffee and take a seat because we'll go through the reasons why so many people are currently having performance issues in the game and how we plan to fix those issues in time to finalize a release on steam at the end of the year.
So, I'm not sure if many of you know, but our Patreon page has been around for a long time. It all started when we were making games as a hobby, not a profession, for the team's former members, who are currently working on their dating game, and myself. I was still in college, didn't have too much knowledge about what we were doing, and this made us go on to try and error route for a long time until, somewhere around the beginning of 2020, we released version 0.8, which was an incredible milestone for all of us: We knew then what we wanted, and it was to create an open-world RPG that would blend a lot of great mechanics together, that we've seen, but with the plus of showing what other big games of the genre don't: Erotic themes. =)
But still, we were learning, and this caused issues like the following:
Despite all the issues, we could still tell the story we wanted and build the world around it. Despite being simple and even a bit clunky, we have a combat system that can still be fun to play. We have spells and graphics that can keep up with the current times and the fantastic help of our patrons to keep moving forward, keep studying and improving the game!
Why and what is the plan?
We aim to create a page of the game on steam as soon as everything is stable so this won't backfire on us. We learned so much during the years, and we were able to bring people to the project that are highly competent and experienced in game development, and these people pointed out the issues and helped us build a plan: To go back to the open world and fix the accumulated problems. To do so, we are creating a new landscape using the same Height Map (geography) of the old one, but now on a scale that fits the industry standards, and with the correct procedures to cut it into several slices that will be loaded only as the player traverse them. This will bring some exciting changes:
Version 0.20 is the milestone for that. It won't be done this month and probably not by next month either. The actual implementation of the world composition is not the most complex part; the most challenging part will be working on the level design to fit things on the new scale and reviewing the cutscenes. For the first, we are counting on Ricardo, the latest member of the team that filled the slot Luke opened, and that will be solely focused on working on our vegetation and forests to fit everything that should be in the new landscape. For the cutscenes, we're bringing Iung back to help on reviewing them all to fit the new scale.
Meanwhile, Oye is reviewing Kalyskah's rig, so the quality and anatomy of all our sex scenes will be heavily increased moving forward. And I'll be working together with Henri to add polishment to all the unstable systems.
How can you help us?
This whole thing will be a big crunch, so we can get back to the storytelling as soon as possible; if you are interested in helping us work faster and release this earlier. This is a lot of work, and currently, neither Henri nor Ricardo can work on the project full time. If you can help us with your pledge, I might be able to either increase their payment so they can dedicate more time to the project until this task is done, or I can hire more help to work on the days when they can't.
Optimization = Optimism!
We face two issues on the project right now that is always brought up whenever we make a poll or a question: The first one is the number of bugs and the bad performance, and the second is the amount of content. Both are much more entwined than some may think: The more we need to go back to fix issues, the more time we lose that we could be adding more story content; The slower the engine runs, the slower we can work on new cutscenes; The better the performance, the bigger the audience we can reach, which means that it increases the chances of growth on our Patreon, increasing our budget. So with all that in mind, I think you can understand why this whole process is making me very optimistic!
Release this month
This month we'll release to our neonate-tier patrons the new negotiation system, where bandits will approach Kalyskah if she gets too close and try to rob her. She'll be able to bribe, intimidate, seduce or use her charisma to get out of the situation, among other minor fixes. It also contains some new threesome animations like this one:
(realised that I should have posted this here as well, now it might help to clarify things for NukaCola)
Hello everyone, Corintio here!
Today I have a long post for you, so grab some coffee and take a seat because we'll go through the reasons why so many people are currently having performance issues in the game and how we plan to fix those issues in time to finalize a release on steam at the end of the year.
So, I'm not sure if many of you know, but our Patreon page has been around for a long time. It all started when we were making games as a hobby, not a profession, for the team's former members, who are currently working on their dating game, and myself. I was still in college, didn't have too much knowledge about what we were doing, and this made us go on to try and error route for a long time until, somewhere around the beginning of 2020, we released version 0.8, which was an incredible milestone for all of us: We knew then what we wanted, and it was to create an open-world RPG that would blend a lot of great mechanics together, that we've seen, but with the plus of showing what other big games of the genre don't: Erotic themes. =)
But still, we were learning, and this caused issues like the following:
- The scale of our open world doesn't follow the industry standards. When I talk about the scale, I mean inside the Unreal Engine. The landscape has a size of 0.49, while it should be 1. This quadruples the vertex density that the landscape has, which also quadruples the maths of everything from the sunlight hitting the ground and calculating the shadows onto the number of vertices the player's video-card have to render;
- We are not using the world composition system, which is the very thing that most open-world projects done in Unreal Engine should use; otherwise, the players will always have the whole landscape loaded on their PCs no matter where they are;
- The current rig Kalyskah has doesn't blend very well on the knees;
- Every parameter of our AI, position and behaviours, are run in real-time instead of sent to a manager who abstracts the data and deals with it in the backend, removing inactive and unused actors from the level;
- The structure of classes in the game has a mixture of asset packs we bought to have a starting point with what we developed on top of it to make them work in the way we intended.
- Extremely bad shader complexity in the open world:
- And many other more minor issues accumulated with the whole ordeal formed a snowball causing a scenario where many people have infinite loading screens, their PC fans screaming while Kalyskah is walking around the map, or can't play the open-world at all!
Despite all the issues, we could still tell the story we wanted and build the world around it. Despite being simple and even a bit clunky, we have a combat system that can still be fun to play. We have spells and graphics that can keep up with the current times and the fantastic help of our patrons to keep moving forward, keep studying and improving the game!
Why and what is the plan?
We aim to create a page of the game on steam as soon as everything is stable so this won't backfire on us. We learned so much during the years, and we were able to bring people to the project that are highly competent and experienced in game development, and these people pointed out the issues and helped us build a plan: To go back to the open world and fix the accumulated problems. To do so, we are creating a new landscape using the same Height Map (geography) of the old one, but now on a scale that fits the industry standards, and with the correct procedures to cut it into several slices that will be loaded only as the player traverse them. This will bring some exciting changes:
- The playable area will be twice as big as it currently is. This might sound like a big step but think about it: Right now, we have areas where we plan to run story events, but in between these areas, there isn't much space for us to introduce procedural events, like bandits patrols, characters that can approach to interact with Kalyskah asking for help, etc. So the paradox is that our current landscape is empty outside of Millhaven, not because it's too big but because it's too tiny. Until we have the story events happening on the towers and ruins we have prepared, we can't add small pieces of content to make things look and feel alive… we have a whole world on standby. With a world twice as big, we'll be able to leave the story places untouched whilst adding bandit patrols and other things that are already programmed or that we already have voice acting for that simply didn't make it through yet because of the lack of space.
- Loading times will be heavily reduced, and the player will be able to freely transition between the dungeon and the open world. Having a better way to manage our NPCs, they will be able to transition between these areas. This will cause massive performance improvements since when they are not rendered, they can simply be deleted from the world to stop consuming memory.
- The system requirements to run the game will be heavily reduced! This is the most significant update of all. Currently, the game takes way too much ram, CPU and GPU. Once we introduce the new system, all this will be heavily reduced.
- Scalability: with the new World Composition activated, we'll be able to smoothly transition to chapter two of the game once the time for it comes, without ever going back to touch chapter 1.
- Fewer crashes and glitches: Whilst rebuilding the AI, we'll take a look at the whole class structure of the game and clean the code we don't use or don't need, merging components. This will increase our control over the code and better pinpoint where and what is causing issues.
- We'll have a more finished version of the landscape and, finally, be able to have a mini-map to help with navigation.
Version 0.20 is the milestone for that. It won't be done this month and probably not by next month either. The actual implementation of the world composition is not the most complex part; the most challenging part will be working on the level design to fit things on the new scale and reviewing the cutscenes. For the first, we are counting on Ricardo, the latest member of the team that filled the slot Luke opened, and that will be solely focused on working on our vegetation and forests to fit everything that should be in the new landscape. For the cutscenes, we're bringing Iung back to help on reviewing them all to fit the new scale.
Meanwhile, Oye is reviewing Kalyskah's rig, so the quality and anatomy of all our sex scenes will be heavily increased moving forward. And I'll be working together with Henri to add polishment to all the unstable systems.
With that in mind, we imagine that it might take us between two or three months to finish everything and release patch 0.20 to the general public. And whilst we are at it, our patrons will have access to playable demos where they can give us feedback and see all the improvements we'll be bringing to the table.
How can you help us?
This whole thing will be a big crunch, so we can get back to the storytelling as soon as possible; if you are interested in helping us work faster and release this earlier. This is a lot of work, and currently, neither Henri nor Ricardo can work on the project full time. If you can help us with your pledge, I might be able to either increase their payment so they can dedicate more time to the project until this task is done, or I can hire more help to work on the days when they can't.
Optimization = Optimism!
We face two issues on the project right now that is always brought up whenever we make a poll or a question: The first one is the number of bugs and the bad performance, and the second is the amount of content. Both are much more entwined than some may think: The more we need to go back to fix issues, the more time we lose that we could be adding more story content; The slower the engine runs, the slower we can work on new cutscenes; The better the performance, the bigger the audience we can reach, which means that it increases the chances of growth on our Patreon, increasing our budget. So with all that in mind, I think you can understand why this whole process is making me very optimistic!
Release this month
This month we'll release to our neonate-tier patrons the new negotiation system, where bandits will approach Kalyskah if she gets too close and try to rob her. She'll be able to bribe, intimidate, seduce or use her charisma to get out of the situation, among other minor fixes. It also contains some new threesome animations like this one:
(realised that I should have posted this here as well, now it might help to clarify things for NukaCola)
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- Apr 26, 2022
- 110
- 563
Hmm I think your goal of re-optimizing the game makes sense and is probably the only viable solution to continued development on this project.
Additionally, I expect that before development of this game is actually done, there will be many many more times that you will find you have to go back and re-optimize many aspects of your development workflow in order to scale more as the project grows. This is a natural problem that many, if not all developers eventually run into.
That being said, I think patrons get pretty tired of supporting a project that has little forward momentum in terms of content.
I'm not sure how viable this suggestion is, but would it be easy to incorporate concurrent development on a visual novel of your planned storyline/cutscene scripts with this game? It wouldn't have to be anything fancy, just a ren'py visual novel using stills from the game and with choices that match dialogue choices players currently have in game. Obviously this would lack the charm of this game (3d world, rpg, combat system, etc) but I think if it doesn't slow down development on the main project, it can be a neat little extra to give to patrons in order to make us feel that we are getting a little extra 'bang for our buck.'
If you do decide to do this, I would just caution very strongly on having it morph into a bigger project and take away from your dev-cycle on the main game. I would make sure it's communicated very clearly to your patrons that it is nothing more than 'bundled content' meant to demonstrate your ideas and including it is only meant to be a thank you to patrons for believing in your vision, as opposed to an indication that you are changing course.
- Nov 4, 2019
- 573
- 730
Ambitious and high-quality games require time and budget, especially when being developed by a small team. Compared to many other games pirated on this site, the devs of Kalyskah have been pretty straightforward. They're doing a good job, not bullshitting around or milking things, so people just need to be patient.
Furthermore, this is an action rpg with good storytelling and combat. To make some VN out of it would speed up the player's progress and spoil the story. I'd rather wait to see things done right. Besides, the devs shouldn't waste time and money on a side project that may eventually go nowhere. Thinking like that leads into scam territory like the bullshit Eromancer pulls.
Sorry but i disagree with your opinion, there's so many novel game alike right here but very few with action rpg genre ! Optimizing the flow is the correct move from this point. If you don't have good foundation you will break all the progress. I suggest you look at development hell or try to look at feature creep, it will make the game unbearable. Look at cyberpunk and all the bug it has, when many of their top talented dev leaves. Optimizing first then the content will come.
- Apr 29, 2017
- 585
- 555
There's already a lot of VN games here, or as I call them - clickers. It's basically reading a comic. Boring. There are also many devs that start making Unreal/Unity games but none of them seem to be using their engine to its potential. Super simple combat systems and nothing new really. At least here there are actual RPG elements and we hope with time it will be a full-on RPG game. Everything else I've seen is just RPGM with better graphics till you get to the next event to trigger. These devs are not only working on a good story but now they're adding dynamic events. Now that's a proper RPG game. Currently the only one I support on patreon.
There was a small part of me in the past that was actually considering using screenshots from the world + and parts of the cutscenes to make a parallel game as a visual novel so people with more modest PCs could play it. But then when I realised the complexity that would be for us to do that, we decided that we wouldn't do it because the same effort could be put into boosting the speed of development for other cutscenes or mechanics of the game. Also, now that we are thinking about the optimization of the game, I do believe that several people that couldn't play the game before, will be able to play it once everything is done. So the need for my idea can be discarded.
I know Eromancer and we talk regularly, he puts a lot more effort into Pure Onix than most people see. All his audio tracks, models, animations and UI are 100% done by his team. He's a very polite person that has been helpful and offered us a lot of great advice. He and many others have been so great with me for the past years and they are people I deeply admire even though our games are targeted to different layers of audience in the NSFW territory, it hurts my heart to read this.
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Uhh may I know who made that amazing profile picture of yours? Thanks :^There was a small part of me in the past that was actually considering using screenshots from the world + and parts of the cutscenes to make a parallel game as a visual novel so people with more modest PCs could play it. But then when I realised the complexity that would be for us to do that, we decided that we wouldn't do it because the same effort could be put into boosting the speed of development for other cutscenes or mechanics of the game. Also, now that we are thinking about the optimization of the game, I do believe that several people that couldn't play the game before, will be able to play it once everything is done. So the need for my idea can be discarded.
I know Eromancer and we talk regularly, he puts a lot more effort into Pure Onix than most people see. All his audio tracks, models, animations and UI are 100% done by his team. He's a very polite person that has been helpful and offered us a lot of great advice. He, Kaliyo (Roundscape), Hentai Writer (Future Fragments), Bearcore (Third Crisis), Mythos (Sorceress Tale), Adeptusteve (Wild Life), Architect (Claire's Quest), Lord Arioch (Seeds of Chaos) and many others have been so great with me for the past years and they are people I deeply admire even though our games are targetted to different layers of audience in the NSFW territory, it hurts my heart to read this.
It was David Balsamique, but so many years ago that it was before he became one of the biggest NSFW content creators in patron:
You must be registered to see the links
The breasts size and eye colour is different than her canon apperance but here is the full picture:
- Nov 4, 2019
- 573
- 730
I'm sorry if we disagree on this. I've been following the game for a while and there's tons of info in the Pure Onyx thread here at this site. He's definitely been milking things. The game has had an abysmal amount of progress over the last three years especially considering the amount of money they get through Patreon. And that's not forgetting the fact that he and his team initially garnered so many supporters for a game they have since abandoned.
Bearcore is another one I find fault with. I was a supporter for a couple years but I left their discord and stopped pledging for multiple reasons. One of them being that they too milk things. Like Hrein Games, they keep adding filler content but the actual story and plot of the game has barely moved.
I understand that you can get some technical advice from other content creators, that's fine. But you're the single one I continue to pledge to the most because your game is great and you don't bullshit around. It's assuring to see you don't follow their bad examples in how they manage their projects.
You shouldn't make such contacts public.... (Or even have such contacts if you market yourself as an honest dev) There is a lot of evidence of the man being a scammer and milking patreons. And I, personally, do believe that evidence and so do many others. Admitting communicating to Eromancer (and regularly at that) puts your own reputation into question imho
I believe that game development is complicated on its own. When we can talk with other developers to exchange experiences, this helps us get some clarity and increase our knowledge. Committing mistakes or not, I believe every individual has something to teach and something to learn. The art they pull is fantastic! So I look up to it, which motivates me to improve mine as well. The same applies to many things I see people out there getting right.
I learned a lot from you people by coming here and engaging in healthy discussions, just like I learned by talking with other developers. I don't know what caused people to have this opinion about him personally. Still, I think it's best to get back to the topic because it's hard for me to see people talking about another developer like that and I hope you can understand that. So leaving this topic just to discuss the game and the great ideas that people here can give sounds like a good plan to me =D
I learned a lot from you people by coming here and engaging in healthy discussions, just like I learned by talking with other developers. I don't know what caused people to have this opinion about him personally. Still, I think it's best to get back to the topic because it's hard for me to see people talking about another developer like that and I hope you can understand that. So leaving this topic just to discuss the game and the great ideas that people here can give sounds like a good plan to me =D
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[News] Progress on world map
Hello everyone!
I'm here to show you some progress we have had so far with the
I've put a lonely Kalyskah here where we'll be transferring the starting area, and in the background, you can see how far Millhaven will be:
No reason to say that this will give us tons of space to play around with modular events while you are exploring the new lands. Bandits, animals and Vampire hunters are just a few of what we have in mind. But I rather not say too much more to avoid promising something that will take too long for us actually to implement on the game.
What is the planning that is going into it?
A lot. In order to have the new world being done by industry standards, we first checked what is the flow of the game currently have to create the list of priorities of the landscape we'll need to get done first so the game will be playable again as soon as possible. Also what we would need to adjust to make the dialogues more accurate.
And then, to make sure that the game would still look familiar, we started to list the places everyone should see from a distance. Let's call them landmarks. These landmarks will have LOD (level of Details) for several view distances, so if the player is far, they will be a blocky thing without too many details, and as they get close, the detail amount will increase.
LOD's are things we already have for houses, rocks and some characters. Still, on this review, we are bringing it to a whole new level instead of creating them just for individual asset pieces! We are grouping all the assets on the landmarks and creating the LOD from there, which will highly reduce the number of vertices for each of these significant buildings.
Whilst I wait for our team members to advance with their tasks, I've made a
Hello everyone!
I'm here to show you some progress we have had so far with the
You must be registered to see the links
.I've put a lonely Kalyskah here where we'll be transferring the starting area, and in the background, you can see how far Millhaven will be:
No reason to say that this will give us tons of space to play around with modular events while you are exploring the new lands. Bandits, animals and Vampire hunters are just a few of what we have in mind. But I rather not say too much more to avoid promising something that will take too long for us actually to implement on the game.
What is the planning that is going into it?
A lot. In order to have the new world being done by industry standards, we first checked what is the flow of the game currently have to create the list of priorities of the landscape we'll need to get done first so the game will be playable again as soon as possible. Also what we would need to adjust to make the dialogues more accurate.
And then, to make sure that the game would still look familiar, we started to list the places everyone should see from a distance. Let's call them landmarks. These landmarks will have LOD (level of Details) for several view distances, so if the player is far, they will be a blocky thing without too many details, and as they get close, the detail amount will increase.
LOD's are things we already have for houses, rocks and some characters. Still, on this review, we are bringing it to a whole new level instead of creating them just for individual asset pieces! We are grouping all the assets on the landmarks and creating the LOD from there, which will highly reduce the number of vertices for each of these significant buildings.
Notice that there is a place there saying "should be scary swamp". This is because there's a character in the game called Natasha, who, ever since the start, was supposed to be a crazy necromancer that lives on the creepy swamp that no one dares to set foot. Before, we didn't have the space to make the vegetation switch from a forest to a swamp in a way that would look natural... so to make the forest creepy, we added a camera effect + fog. Now that we have more space, we can better portray the initial vision of the witch's place, and this is something I'm very excited about too!
Whilst I wait for our team members to advance with their tasks, I've made a
You must be registered to see the links
so our patrons can help me decide on what to work on in the meantime.
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Will this game get on steam one day ? This game is wonderful but I really lazy, I don't want to redownload every single update . If this game get on steam, I could support it easier
. If this game get on steam, I could support it easier
- Apr 26, 2022
- 110
- 563
Same here - well not the lazy part...but I would buy it.Will this game get on steam one day ? This game is wonderful but I really lazy, I don't want to redownload every single update
I've bought a few VN's on there just to support the dev.
I think it's polished enough for early access.
Will this game get on steam one day ? This game is wonderful but I really lazy, I don't want to redownload every single update
You can have it auto-updating in a similar way to steam if you get the public demo on itch. But we'll have a steam release at the end of the year, after the optimization patch and a few other polishments are done.