Unity Lethal Fantasy (Giantess, Rougelite) [Game Dev Diary + Alpha v1]

[LadyEbony]

Lethal Fantasy
Overview:
Stuck inside a village amongst anime giantesses, survive and gather loot. Gameplay/fetish focused, no-sex game.

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Screenshots:

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Controls:

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Genre:

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Installation:

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Previous Versions:

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[LadyEbony]

Alright some nerd talk starts now. I have to decide on the art style and the Unity render pipeline for the game. This is what the visuals look like with the assets I am using. Please ignore Flandre, she's not going to be the giantess. (That being said it seemed relatively easy to throw any MMD character onto Unity. Makes me wonder of the possibility of importing any model for the giantess as a feature).

Spoiler: Screenshot

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By itself the visuals are fine. Nothing eye catching but your eyes should be on the giantess, not much the environment anyway. That being said, I will have to eventually sample between other 3d asset packs and their art styles are going clash eventually. I want to try and avoid this so I've been playing with some shaders to see what I could do. TBH, I'm a bit of dumbass when it comes to shaders so I'm throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what fits.

 

[LadyEbony]

This is the HDRP with a dithering effect and some outlines. This may seem familiar to you as it is inspired by what Lethal Company actually does.

Spoiler: Screenshot

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The skybox may look like a .jpeg file to you but it's actually the dithering post processing effect. The color range is being reduced from the 16.7m combinations to just 4096. It does make the town and overall environment look more desolate. I did have an idea where objects in the distance (such as the sky and the giantess) would have a higher color range so the skybox looks less .jpeg but I have yet to try it. The outlines also look nice too. But the giantess still looks kinda bland imo.

 

[kilabound]

what specs will i need to run this?

 

[LadyEbony]

This is URP with the toon/anime shader. It looks more anime what more can I say.

Spoiler: Screenshot

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It is certainly a lot more vibrant and cheerful, and the giantess looks a lot more pretty, at least to my tastes. I personally have no complaints but I also really liked the desolate looking village with the previous dithering effect. I'm probably going try and combine both effects tomorrow.

I mentioned URP since I was trying some other shader effects such as stylized shadows, but then I realized that I would lose HDRP's volumetric fogs and some of other HDRP's features. Those fogs alone are so worth it so I'm probably switching to that. Performance wise I've heard that HDRP is dreadful, it killed City Skyline 2's performance I heard. But I'm also stealing another Lethal Company technique by actually rendering the entire game as half size, then upscaling it. It's why the screenshots may look a bit pixelated.

Anyway that's the nerd talk over.

 

[kilabound]

what?

 

[LadyEbony]

what specs will i need to run this?

There is no playable demo for a fat while. I want this game to run fine on an okay computer so I'll be focusing a lot on optimization stuff. My experience with giantess games (such as GlitterInvitation, love the game though) is that they tend to run like ass so I want to avoid that.

 

[kilabound]

thanks and good luck!

 

[LadyEbony]

Turns out that HDRP is a real pain in the ass to do any shaders that's not a shader-graph. I found resources for replicating fog in URP (the only reason really that I wanted to use HDRP), so I'm sticking with that.
Final visuals. Wasn't feeling the dithering effect so ultimately I only added outlines.

Spoiler: Visuals

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Works for both day time and night time lighting. Maybe night time lighting could use a tune-up but that's easy enough to fix.

Spoiler: Day time lighting

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Spoiler: Night time lighting

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I'm an absolute dumbass with shaders. Spent too much on a lighting bug caused by my own faulty code logic.

 

[LadyEbony]

Giantess walking around the map is such a major part of the game. At normal gamer scales, it's fine if the walking animation is not perfectly in sync with its feet movement. But at this 100x scale, those small imperfections would lead to a massive (pun intended) animation weirdness, especially since those feet are gonna be a hitbox. As such, I wrote some code so the feet would dynamically move and rotate based on the giantess' position. It's not perfect but I think I got the rough draft working for now.

Spoiler: Walking Animation

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[LadyEbony]

Building destruction, as in turns out, is a much bigger pain in the ass than I first envisioned. If I had no care in the world about optimizations or if this feature was a minor part of the game, then I could have dumped some premade code library like DinoFracture or something. Like those libraries aren't bad or anything but I know the math behind it is just slow.

That's what my entire weekend was spent on, figuring out if I could modify the 3d asset pack I'm using to be more friendly for brief, mass physic simulations. And if I could do modify the assets in a timely matter. Well yes to the first question and kinda yes to the second question.

Anyway, I also added some sound and particle effects, plus some stomp decals. I only set up one of the buildings to have proper destruction (and truth be told I only set up the roof). The rest of the "destruction" was my first attempt to see if, having objects near the stomp zone fly off while objects in the stomp impact zone being deleted would work. For smaller objects probably, but for houses not really.

Also purposely speed up the time scale so the sun rotation/light changes over time would be visible.

Spoiler: Destruction Demo + Sounds

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[LadyEbony]

Setting up DunGen tiles, takes time. And setting up the models to fall apart, takes time too. I do notice a bit of lag when destruction effects happen but the profiler tells that it's mostly the UnityEditor's fault. I'll check that out later.

Optimization is at my forefront. The asset pack I'm using has different LOD models for performance reasons, and I'm expanding on that so the lower LOD models also use simpler destruction. It's the small things that may help out in the long run. The profiler also told me that most of the time is spent initializing gameobjects, which makes sense since I'm spawning 200+ unique gameobjects for when a roof is being destroyed. Pooling the objects is probs a smart optimization there.

Anyway, two webms for my current process. A lot of the destruction bits and pieces are being simplified so I can get a demo out sooner rather than 2 years from now. I can always improve on the destruction later when time allows it. You know I forget to add the house destruction audio to this, damn it.

Oh and the giantess can be at any scale. The 2nd video is her at 200x instead of 100x.

Spoiler: Progress Vids

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[LadyEbony]

I'm sticking with castle walls as the "dungeon's" walls. Destruction effects look better and I can use them to cull objects to improve performance. I probably messed up the UVS for the castle walls for their destruction counterpart, they look weird. Also added some grass to fill out the empty space.

Not liking the performance drops when objects start to be destroyed. I expected this to eventually happen, gonna have fun finding the solution.

I will spend one more weekend on the dungeon generation before I move on to something else, probably the simple gameplay loop. Anyway progress vid.

Spoiler: Progress Castle Village

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[Hiyo65]

Looks good I'm so hyped for this!

 

[LadyEbony]

So I've been working on improving the performance. Didn't work on the dungeon generation much besides adding more grass (because my performance boosts allows for more grass lol).

Anyway, GPU Instancing and pooling the box colliders for the roof tiles, grass, and wall pieces increased the fps from 30 to 60 when the giantess is destroying buildings near you. And I expect the fps to be better on the actual .exe (haven't tested yet lol). Considering the giantess wouldn't actually be that near you much (kinda hard to stay alive if too frequent) or destroying buildings that much in general (kinda hard to have a playable map otherwise), this is probably acceptable for now.

I can go back to my original update plans another week. I'll be doing some simple gameplay next weekend. Don't expect too much giantess-ism stuff.

Your boi also forget to record the audio for the progress vid.

Spoiler: Better Performance Progress Vid

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[LadyEbony]

Sorry no update this week. Life was busy last weekend. I tried to get a simple stomp animation working so I had something to show, but I reached an impasse with the MMD4Mecanim script that I was using. It's probably time that I convert the .mmd model to a regular .fbx model. Anyway sorry again no update.

 

[LadyEbony]

Busy weekend again. Hope it clears up next week.

I have been using my limited time to redo the giantess' foot IK system to like, actually work with other animations. So now, she can properly stomp. I also gave her a proper walk animation too, though the one I gave her is probably too exaggerated. Either way, I can give her any animation now.

Which leads to a new idea I realized. My original idea was for the giantess to mostly destroy buildings outside the map/playable space. This is so the map could actually be playable and not completely destroyed in 2 mins. BUT let's be real, it's a lot more exciting if she was on the map. So instead, I will add animations (i.e. stomping, sitting, etc.) for the giantess to waste time in between her walking around.

I also tried to do some skirt stuff but not much luck. Probably skill issue ngl.

Spoiler: Stomp

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[Fksand]

sounds good, cannot wait to try it!

 

[LadyEbony]

It's not giantess stuff, but it had to be done. The riveting gameplay of grabbing and depositing items. Also did some other stuff like changing the smoke particles to something more stylized, adding back the time of day lighting stuff, fixing some shader stuff, etc. A lot of small polish stuff.

Gotta add some more sounds. Even something as simple as walking sounds adds so much.

Oh ya at the end of the video is some weirdass, annoyingass bug with the destructions, and of course it occurs seemly randomly. I'm gonna have a field day finding that bug.

Spoiler: Riveting Gameplay

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[nice2becrushed]

Holy damn... it really sounds interesting!