Others No Trace Of Luck [Pre-Release] [Development Thread] [Godot]

[DuniX]

AI is Wizardry.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Latest Update:

• Added the next phone conversation
• Added the beginning of the system which will progress the story into the 'rest of the game', and not just that, this system will mostly be how you interact with various mechanics in the game and choose what you're going to do.

I'm not uploading this version because nobody is going to download it anyway. Next version will have an upload.

Bugs fixed:

No more crash when selecting the 2nd available phone conversation


Screenshots:

The 2nd screenshots shows the button which is what will allow you to progress further.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Latest Update:

• Made the 'activities' button functional, this enables the continuation of the story after completing both phone conversations. Currently these both lead to placeholder events.
• Compressed some excessively large images, reducing load times and upload size

Latest Download:

You must be registered to see the links

Screenshots:

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Bonus Update:

- I reworked several art assets to make the game overall look better
- Fixed a small bug where the text message window would not be fully scrolled to the top of the screen when selecting a 2nd phone conversation
- Redid the character art in the text bubble to match the character in the scene

Latest Download:

You must be registered to see the links

Screenshots:

New phone default background:


New text messages background:

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

PLANNING & DESIGN POST

This post does not contain a code update, but rather some design work I am doing as I plan for the next phase of the game.

The next upcoming phase will feature a dating minigame. The dating minigame will consist of a branching series of discussion topics. You will be required to sufficiently progress through the topics, without either 1: failing the date by making bad choices, or 2: failing the date by not progressing the relationship far enough.

The dating minigame will consist of 4 phases. Not all dates will utilize all 4 phases. Some dates may branch extensively and some may be relatively linear with very few choices.

Your reward for completing the dating minigame will be:

• CGs unlocked
• Story progression

If you fail the minigame, you will be required to restart it until you can proceed.


QUESTION PHASE

In this phase you will

• Ask the character a question relevant to your current topic. You will have a choice between a series of topics, but certain topics will be considered too spicy if you havent progressed the relationship far enough and may fail when asked

TOPIC PHASE

The topic phase will dictate the category of questions, answers, quizzes, etc... as you progress through the next part of the date. Similar to the Question phase, your ability to successfully raise a certain topic for discussion will depend on a number of things and may not be successful, or may result in the failure of the date






ANSWER PHASE

The answer phase happens when you are asked a question by your date. Your answer may affect the choices you have that follow. These answers generally will not have a single "right" or "wrong" answer but rather will be considered right or wrong in the context of the date and your current relationship





QUIZ PHASE

Quiz phase is similar to Answer Phase, except Quiz answers generally do have a single correct or incorrect answer. These too will be used to progress your relationship with the character and affect the options available as the date progresses.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

After the dating mechanic is complete, I will consider this to be version 0.0.1 and will release as a new game on f95

 

[groonan28]

not into AI games, although i also think that hard work/effort must be recognised and this seems that is taking a lot of work to make, great job mate. really hope that some day the AI works properly with animations, can not imagine what could be done with that , also for the good of humanaty of course......

by the way, the download file is recogniced as dangerous, just letting you know

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

not into AI games, although i also think that hard work/effort must be recognised and this seems that is taking a lot of work to make, great job mate. really hope that some day the AI works properly with animations, can not imagine what could be done with that , also for the good of humanaty of course......

by the way, the download file is recogniced as dangerous, just letting you know

Thank you for the kind words.

AI is advancing extremely fast these days, even the tool I was using before here: https://f95zone.to/threads/no-trace...development-thread-godot.204911/post-14041553 is already outdated because better tools have been released.

In 1 year, we're going to start to see full complete AI animations with perfect consistent art style etc... It's going to be a great time for porn games (and other stuff probably)

I think the reason the file shows as dangerous is because it has only received 3 downloads and is not recognized. I don't think there's anything I can do to fix that, besides get more downloads.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Art Update

I've heard a lot of feedback on AI art and because it is so controversial, I decided to go back and re-work the character art in the intro to ensure it is very high quality and consistent. I think some people will only give the game a chance if the art looks really good in the beginning.

I probably won't put this level of effort into all art in the game, just for this intro sequence. Especially considering the intro sequence is only like 5 minutes long. I made all of these assets for a 5 minute little sequence and they probably wont be used again.

No code update because these are not yet implemented in the game.

Here is the old character art on the left. You will notice a number of major inconsistencies between these pieces:

1. The logo on the shirt changes almost every time
2. The length and style of the jeans changes significantly in some images
3. The body type changes pretty significantly in some images, especially in the images pictured in the 2nd row here

[------------- OLD ------------] [----------- NEW ------------]

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Love is in the air, here's the latest update:

Dating Minigame!

The very first, very alpha version of the dating minigame is complete and playable. Things to know about it right now:

1. You must complete both text message conversation to access it
2. Everything about it is a placeholder
   1. images are all placeholder and wont be used in the final game
   2. all conversations topics, sounds, and dialogue are placeholder
3. One of the 2 topics is not implemented
4. The date will never end, BUT there are 5 cgs to view (placeholder CGs but still kinda cute)
5. There is a bad-end which crashes the game, can you find it?

I am open to any feedback on it, even in this early stage. The list of things I need to complete before considering it 'done' is huge, currently the list is 24 items long.

Also the character art in the previous post is still not in the game yet, I just didn't get around to replacing the existing art yet.


Get the latest version here:

You must be registered to see the links

Gif:


Screenies:



Bonus: here's my planning document I used while figuring out how to create this branching / flexible dialogue system. It is very professional:

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Also I removed the 'A Poker Story' tagline on the title, now the game is officially just titled 'No Trace of Luck', because quite honestly the poker is the most shit part of the game and is mostly just filler.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Trying to get art style set up for a potential new character, not quite there yet, don't really like this style, needs a little work

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

New MC character art has been added to the game which I talked about here: https://f95zone.to/threads/no-trace...development-thread-godot.204911/post-14258080

Overall I think it looks much much better

Download:

You must be registered to see the links

Screenies:

 

[jaden_yuki]

I have a question, are you familiar with LoRAS? do you use them to generate your character's images? what do you think about seaart.ai and civitai? do you use huggingface spaces to build a GUI for inference? do you mind sharing your script?

The AI Journey (lots of art)

I doubt anybody will ever read this whole thing but some people might scroll past it and enjoy the images so I'm going to post it.

This is journey to solve the problem I mentioned in my previous post: I want to use Animagine for CGs in my game, because it looks amazing, but it gives a really big challenge generating NSFW art. For this reason, I dove deep into the world of AI.

My Goal
I needed a process that will allow me to generates images that 1: Look artistically consistent with Animagine, and 2: It can't give me a huge fucking hassle generating NSFW art.

My prompt:

• Generate my character, in a coffee shop, leaning forward, with a downblouse.

I chose this prompt because a downblouse a relatively complex image. Not too simple. But also not too crazy. If a model can't do a downblouse, it won't be useful for anything else in the future.


Reference Art(Animagine 3 XL)

All the rest of the art in my game will be generated using Animagine. So I need my final output to look similar to Animagine art. This is the Animagine image I will use as a reference:

View attachment 3632144


First Attempt

I spent a ton of time trying to understand Stable Diffusion. There are 2 versions people use. SDXL and SD 1.5. SDXL is newer and better (Animagine is based on SDXL) but 1.5 has a much bigger community with more plugins. So I decided to start with 1.5. I used a model called Counterfeit 3 which is based on 1.5.

I put in my prompt, and here's what I got:

View attachment 3632147

Wow. Holy shit. I almost quit immediately. It looks fucking horrid.

I did a ton of work adjusting the prompt, adding plugins, etc... And I got it to output something I actually liked: View attachment 3632153

And I wanted to test out more complex prompts, such as having her be embarassed and cover her chest:

View attachment 3632157

It worked pretty good. I was happy with it. But there's a problem here. It looks absolutely nothing like the reference image. Also, the backgrounds are really ugly compared to the reference image. The background is also ugly and yellow and every image I generated seemed to have this same dull background. I almost stopped here and just decided that this would be good enough.

Enter Pony

But then I started to read about Pony. Pony is an SDXL model (not 1.5). SDXL can produce higher resolution images, and this can fix the ugly backgrounds and overall result in higher quality art with more detail.

That sounds pretty good. So I loaded in Pony and generated an image:
View attachment 3632161

Holy fuck this looks awful. Absolute barf. You can see the backgrounds are much higher quality, but the actual character art is so so terrible compared to the reference image. There is no way I could use this.

I did a lot of work on the prompt and locating plugins, and I got something that looked pretty ok:
View attachment 3632162

But it still just really doesn't look like the reference image. Also, this image was by far the best out of many really really bad ones. I wasn't feeling too confident on Pony.

But I had an idea. I was using the name of a particular character to generate these images. However, you can see in the reference art, the actual character isn't that noticeable. If you know who it is, you can kind of tell, but the hair and stuff really are pretty different.

So my idea was to stop referencing this character directly, and just try to reference "An anime girl with short brown hair." This is what I got:

View attachment 3632166

Honestly this looks pretty good. But it is not consistent with the reference image. Completely different art style. I could probably accept this, but I wouldn't be happy about it.

Pony Checkpoints

That's when I learned about something called Checkpoints. These are models that were trained on top of another model. Usually somebody does this to keep most of the original model, but produce a stronger style (eg: more Anime-ish rather than more Lifelike)

So I downloaded a few Pony checkpoints and got to work.

The first one I downloaded was called Autism Mix:

View attachment 3632169

The art style for this one is really beautiful, and it looks really good, but it is not consistent with the reference image. Also, the other images generated for this one had issues. Overall I might have used this one if I didn't find anything better.

PD For Anime

Then I found one that sounded really promising. It was called Pony Diffusion for Anime (PD For Anime) and it is supposed to be a checkpoint of Pony but with a strong anime art style.

I gave it a try:

View attachment 3632172

This looks both really good and really bad. It looks good because it is the closest thing to the reference image yet. It has an anime style face with flat features. It also didn't complain about the downblouse. But it also looks terrible because the colors are just awful and oversaturated and burnt.

I did what I could to reduce the saturation, and ended up with this:

View attachment 3632173

It looks better but really still not acceptable. Also the backgrounds seem to have lost all detail.


Confetti

I found one called Confetti. I started it with the "Brown hair girl" prompt rather than referencing my specific character. This is what it gave me:


View attachment 3632177

This looks actually pretty good. Stylistically it's great and it's very consistent with my reference image. Also, the backgrounds have pretty good detail. I like this one, but I did not like how I've completely lost the original reference character. There's no way you can tell which character I'm referencing from this image.

So I tried adding the character's name back in to the prompt:

View attachment 3632180

And it just looks really really bad. Just not what I'm looking for. At this point, I'm considering sticking with "brown haired girl" and just losing the character reference. But I have a few more to try


7th Anime PD


View attachment 3632183

This one actually looks awesome. However the art style still doesn't match very well with the reference image. And this model also generated much more of a "painted" style overall, resulting in some of the other images that it generated just not looking great.

I also noticed there is no nipple in the downblouse here. This usually means the model is fighting me. I can't remember exactly if that's why I scrapped this one. I do still like this style and would use it if I could get nsfw generation to work without pain.


Mugen

At this point it's like 3am and I'm tired and this is the 10th model I've done. Each model requires a lot of work and adjustment to try and get it at its best. So I load up this new one called MugenMix or something like that.

View attachment 3632187

Wait... wow. That looks extremely similar to the reference image. It kept the character reference almost exactly to the reference image. It looks a little bit burned and oversatured but I can deal with that.

I need to figure out if this is the one. So I tested the NSFW filter with something more explicit:

View attachment 3632191

Wow. I really like this. It gave me zero problems generating NSFW art. But it still has some issues. First off, the face doesn't match the reference image very well. And overall it still looks oversaturated. I did a lot more refinement on this model and came up with this:

View attachment 3632194

This looks really good and it's almost certainly going to be the model that I use. Not perfect, still kind of shiny and oversaturated, but much better than every other model.


Something New - Animagine + Pony Mergers

Then, in the early depths of the morning, something catches my eye. I see a model called Reponygine 3. I read that it is a merger of the Animagine 3 model with Pony XL. Could this solve all my issues? Animagine has the art style I love, but Pony is much less strict about NSFW artwork.

This could be it, I gave it a try:

View attachment 3632205

And I generated another:

View attachment 3632210

This second image was very important. Some models are really bad at understanding complex instructions. "Removing bra" gets completely discarded by Animagine, and other models also struggle with it. This model understood it perfectly and generated this image on this first try.

This looks visually really good and really consistent with Animagine. But it had 2 major issues: the first is that it kept generating lolis. My reference character is a full grown adult and so this would not work. The other issue is that it really just lacks detail and the lighting is unimpressive.

So That Was It

Mugen generated some great art, better than everything else, and that's what I decided to go with... wait. What's that?

Refiners

This is when I discovered what is called a Refiner. A refiner is a special step in the generation process where 1 model generates the first part of your image, and a 2nd model completes the image.

This is exciting. Can I use Mugen to generate the NSFW concepts of the image, and then force Animagine to actually fill in the art? This might be a way that I can literally force Animagine to draw NSFW art, because it needs to complete what Mugen started.

This requires weighting the models. Eg: Tell it what % of the image Mugen should generate first, and then Animagine will finish off the rest.

I give it a try:

View attachment 3632221

This looks good. But not great. The face does not match the reference image, and it looks a little too 3D. I decide to tone down the % of generation for Mugen and given Animagine more time:


View attachment 3632223

WTF IT ADDED A SHIRT. This is what I'm talking about. Animagine just does not want to generate NSFW art. It literally added a shirt into the image even though my prompt was just things like "Topless, no shirt".

This was annoying, but if yous top for a second and look at the photo, you notice 2 things. 1: The background art looks great. It has the quality of Animagine's backgrounds.

And most importantly 2: This looks extremely close to the reference image. Scroll ALL the way back up to the top of this post and you will see it is almost an exact match. That's exciting.

So I start tweaking things. I need to give Animagine as little time as possible to put a goddamn shirt into the image. I need to get Mugen to generate almost the entire thing, but leave just enough for Animagine to fill in the face details, but no shirt.

And I finally get it. The perfect mix:

View attachment 3632230

Perfect facial match to the reference image, perfect art style match, beautiful background, and fully NSFW. This is it. I finally got it.

It's not perfect. Actually, this image generated with no nipples. Just blank tits. I had to use another step in the AI process to generate the nipples (called Inpainting). And that's a little bit concerning. Because it means I will still be fighting with the AI in the future. However, I can always fall back to Mugen alone if needed.


Thanks for reading (or just scrolling through the art), I hope you enjoyed it.

Updates to the game will proceed in the next few days. None of the art depicted in this post will be a part of the game.

This post is not an update (see the previous post for the update I released only a few hours ago), I just wanted to provide some more info on my AI process when I have been working on for the last few weeks to get better and produce better art.

I primarily use 3 tools for generating art. The first one is Midjourney.

This tool is a simple one, put in a prompt, and it outputs an image. You have the option for "varying" the image if it is close to what you want but not 100% correct. Sometimes I vary an image many many times before I get what I want.

Midjourney produces excellent, really beautiful images. And it has very strong 'prompt adherence' which means it will actually understand complex prompts with many actions in them.

The problem with Midjourney: It just does not give enough control. If you want an exact facial expression or hand positioning or very fine-tuned control over an image, it is really hard to get it with Midjourney.

And it is 'PG-13' only. No nudity allowed.

What Midjourney is great for: 2 things

• Generating images that don't require exact structure. Eg: landscapes, settings, etc... I use it for pretty much all images that don't focus on a particular person as the character

• And 2, it's great for generating a base that is very close to what you want, but not perfect

View attachment 3763007



And so my 2nd tool I use to solve the problems are Midjourney is called InvokeAI.

Invoke is a full studio for generating images using Stable Diffusion. It gives almost unlimited control over the outputs.

The problem with Invoke:

In Midjourney, you literally type in some text and click 'generate' and you're done. It's easy. In Invoke, there is a lot more work to be done for each image. You get a lot of control, but it comes at the cost of higher effort.

And the 2nd problem: Stable Diffusion can produce amazing artwork, but it can also produce really ugly results. While Midjourney is beautiful every time, Stable Diffusion has a wide range and can easily result in ugly, burned images. There is a lot of time spent looking for models, looking for other tools to enable all the functionality and art styles.

When Invoke is great:

• When I need absolute control over an image

• When I need nudity

• When Midjourney generated an image with great structure, but the art style does not match the rest of the game (eg: see the above screenshot of Midjourney, there is a series of multiple different art styles. Some will not match my game) I can use Invoke to change the art style.

View attachment 3763062


See an example here where Midjourney output this image:

View attachment 3763079

It looks great, the structure is perfect and the facial expression is top notch. But it just doesn't match the rest of the game. And also, it just doesn't look that good.

So I can use Invoke to manually change the art style of this image, which I did. I changed it to:
View attachment 3763092

Which I think looks a lot better and more consistent with the rest of the game and especially with the environment that this scenes takes places in within the game.


3rd Tool: HuggingFace Inference

This last tool is kind of a special one, I won't write too much about it. There is a website called Huggingface which hosts a lot of different AI models. Huggingface has the ability to "inference" against AI models. Which means they host and run all the actual generation on their servers, you just give them a prompt.

If you read my previous post on AI art, you know I am using the Animagine 3 model to produce my character art. Hugginface hosts this model for inference.

And so I have a special script for this website which basically takes 1 prompt (and some variations of the prompt: eg, I might vary the emotions etc...) and basically runs a Huggingface inference as many times as I want. I often set this to 500+ times to generate images.

So I basically use this tool to generate huge amounts of images in the hope that I can get a few that I actually enjoy. This gives me ideas, inspiration, and sometimes actual usable artwork.

See this example where I basically wanted to generate a "casual night" with one of the characters. I used Hugginface Inference to output hundreds of this prompt so that I can get some inspiration on how I want it to look:

View attachment 3763147

what changed between one point and the other? did you always use InvokeAI?

Trying to get art style set up for a potential new character, not quite there yet, don't really like this style, needs a little work


View attachment 3876734 View attachment 3876735

it looks awesome to me

 

[jaden_yuki]

That's a good idea, I think it's definitely possible. I did a test here with a feature called 'regional guidance' which basically allows:

1. A main prompt which generates your background
2. A 2nd prompt which only applies to a small part of your image (which you can use to place the character)

And it came out with a really beautiful background, but the character still has a lot of issues (really long legs, and white hair for some reason):

View attachment 3770543


Here I will try with normal inpainting, I start with a beautiful background:

View attachment 3770547

I draw a shape to represent how the character should look:
View attachment 3770552


And it does work pretty good (a little bit weird, because it is trying to match my drawing, which wasnt very good):

View attachment 3770557


It definitely works. It would require a little bit more work to make the character look less deformed. But I also want to be sure I don't put too much time into 1 single image, since I am just 1 person I need to split my time between the game development vs the art.

Good suggestion, I think it looks good.

allow me to bring a more complex problem

ambient consistency from multiple angles
see an example:


View attachment 8_H_SCENE_REC_RIDING_1.webm

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Hey all! Long time no see!

I haven't been posting regular updates due to real life job fucking sucks. But I have definitely been working on the game, and have a huge new update that I will be releasing shortly.

For now, I wanted to share what I have for the dating system. Remember I described this system back here: https://f95zone.to/threads/no-trace...development-thread-godot.204911/post-14240523

I've now mostly implemented it how I like it. I still think it is lacking in terms of user interface, but I'm not a user interface expert, so I mostly just did the best I could.

I'm not uploading the latest build right now because I am still finishing up the last pieces of it, and I want to make a post detailing ALL the changes, which there are many.

For now, here's a preview of the completed dating system and some of the new content I've added