Others [RELEASED] "Help me, Brave Sir Knight!" - A Godot dev diary (previously just "sharing my great idea")

[papel]

>>

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(was damn tired, thought i posted here shortly after there)

Finished migrating the player's textures to RemoteTransform nodes and deleted all references to the old textures, both in code and in the animations. Everything working as expected (color and texture changes also work fine), aside from sex animations. Sometimes, when starting a sex scene with an enemy, the player will show "on top" of the enemy, like a piece of paper on top of another, thus hiding most of the desired action, so that's something I have to fix.

Did a small tweak on the princess' body, the navel and middle ab line should now be more properly aligned with a "real" body

Next thing, I added breasts and some skimpy clothing. Definitely not something a princess would wear, but likely something she'd be forced to wear as a captive.

With that, I've finally moved into her face and hair. Got a bit carried away with the eyes and mouth options, the krita file is now listing a bit over 120 layers. First, I drew the line work for a fuckload of different parts, then I began giving white+some shading to actually export them. I'll have to reposition most of the eyes, too, as I messed up my own workflow by making each in significantly different positions. I also need to draw a decent eyebrow for her, preferably something to go along with the hair? Anyway, I thought about bunny ears and other types that would show over the hair, but then I'd have to make the back ear a separate image, so, out of laziness, I decided to ditch that idea for now.

Linework quality is all over the place, pending downwards, mostly. Anyway, putting the white BG + shade on 10 eyes + ~8 mouths + 5 ears + 3 hairs took a while, which was followed by many minutes of exporting them as .png files. It's very likely I'll have to come back to a few of them to properly align with the face, as at least 2 eyes seem too close to the forehead. Between drawing, "coloring" and exporting I've spent around 3 hours. I've also reused the player scripts for customization and did a quick/dirty apply for the princess, which works enough to check out the customization options

 

[papel]

* Spent some time organizing the princess' Krita file, I'll probably release a copy of it and the Kobold when I release the first version of the game, so anyone can draw stuff for their own game and maybe distribute.
* Drew 2 more hair styles for the princess, one short (kinda inspired by Cure Black, might give it more length) and one that covers the eyes. The latter doesn't cover the ears, so it ends looking odd.
* I've set up a number of human colors for the princess' skin and hair, so the player can decide whether they'll want "inhuman" (elf, orc, furry-adjacent, whatever else I come up with) princesses or not. Skin variation below - hair variation is black, light-ish black, brown, redhead and blonde

I've also started feeling kinda directionless again, since I was drawing more stuff than actually needed and simply messing with customization options despite not needing to, so I've made a proper tasklist to work on:
[PRINCESS]
* Fix her hands
* Fix her idle animation
* Fix the layer order of her being carried animation (send the back arm behind the player)
* Tweak the being carried animation
* UI for her health (only show while she's being carried)
[OTHER]
* Draw 2 spears for the Spike Trap - ED3: Partially done. Drew one, with a metal tip. I did enjoy making the animation do a little "shake" once it fully extends
* Make an arrow shooting trap
* UI for player health
* Design an actually playable stage 1 - ED3: Partially done, the stage has about enough to "get" what you'll be seeing going forward. Should be trivial to clear under 2 minutes the first time around.
* Separate stage timer from Global (total) timer, so it can be reset properly - ED3: Done
[BIG SEX ANIMATION]
* Draw the fucking pieces already (been "promising" this for over 2 weeks now)
* Animate at least "From Behind" and "Mating Press" positions

[RANT TO SELF]
Regarding stage design, one thing to keep in mind is to also keep it simple. I don't need all enemy types, I don't need all the traps, I just need enough to slowly present the challenges. Present a challenge with little to no stakes, then amp it gradually. One failed jump makes you backtrack a bit, the next one forces you to backtrack more. Two jumps later, one where failure is a death.
[END RANT TO SELF]

I probably won't have much time to work on these things today or tomorrow (weekend fun, gotta unwind!), but it's good to list them out so I stop doing "whatever" and regain focus. Keep an eye on edits to this post.

EDIT1 - Been designing the first stage, messing with the enemy spawner, and came a cross a bug that I've yet to solve. Spawned enemies become invisible if you grab (rape) them. Trying to figure out how and why that's happening, because checking the Remote scene (a debug vision of the nodes), nothing has been modulated to Alpha 0 (full transparency), nor has anything's visibility been turned off.
- Turning on collision shapes for debugging, the entity completely vanishes, as if i had just called a destroy() or queue_free(), to completely remove it from memory. It's "as if", but since the node is still showing up, it's not being "destroyed properly". The most direct fix is never allowing the player to grab a spawned enemy, so this never happens, but I'll be damned if I don't figure out what the fucking fuck is going on, especially because it fucking used to work in previous versions.
- On spawn, it's also affecting other enemies already present. Jesus, what the fuck is going on
--- I've figured one of the problems, which was causing collision boxes to change shape (this was a problem because one of said boxes was the line of sight of the Archer kobold), was caused because the CollisionShape2D were not "Local to scene". Not sure if this is the "right way" things should be, but it took a lot of time for me to figure that. Still working on the "disappearing" problem above

EDIT2 - Well, turns out the problem was the fucking position. After testing with a different scene/spawning methods, I've saw the kobold in the "wrong" place. Being spawned, the enemy's actual position is a sum of its own + the spawner, something I had previously fixed but apparently commented again because of some problem or another
-- Anyway, the actual fix was changing this line, that positioned the kobold:
>> position = player_node.position + player_node.eoffset.position
into this
>> position = player_node.position + player_node.eoffset.position - get_parent().position
PROBLEM. FUCKING. SOLVED. My fucking god, that made me go in circles needlessly. Worst of all was having to deal with the collision thing not working, but at least I've found a way around that.

 

[papel]

Didn't do much today, worked on the design of stages 2 and 3, mostly. They're all a mess, visually speaking, but they have enough stuff in them to work as actual stages. Nothing to write home about. Stage 2 is more vertical and Stage 3 has two "paths", one that should be faster, but way more dangerous, and another, safer (no pits of instadeath), but slower. You can probably speedrun it all in a bit under 3 minutes.

I hope to get to fixing some graphics tomorrow, I think a v1 pre-alpha-demo-beta-early-access-preview will arrive before the month's over. Dunno if it's because I've been working on it for a month now, but it's not feeling -fun- to play. It's very barebones, maybe future spices (power ups, sex animations, general polish, etc) can make it more interesting? Gonna worry about that -after- an initial release and I get some player feedback.

 

[papel]

Fixed the princess' hands, now it looks decent. Couldn't help but make yet another hair style.

Finally began working on a large from behind body. It's nothing to write home about, but it'll do. My main beef with it right now is the shin, it looks more like a really big foot than anything else



Also sketched a missionary/breeding press position. Gonna work on a finished body tomorrow.



With the from behind, although somewhat incomplete, I've took to trying a test animation, a pussy insertion. I'll need to make a new cock with thicker lines to fit in better. I didn't bone anything yet, I've just moved the loaded sprite nodes up and down, scaling a thing here and there. I'll also need a different mask to apply here, as I currently have a rectangular one, and I'll need something curvy



To everyone that's following these posts of mine, do tell how badly i fucked up this from behind part, besides the shin. Seriously, I can use all criticism here to see where I can try to make it better. Try, because I can't guarantee I'll manage to make it look better.
I also keep wondering whether these large animations be worth the hassle. I sure hope I can make them worth the time and effort.

 

[papel]

Didn't work on it today. I've also been noticing that my hard drive seems to be reaching a failure point. Thankfully, I've been doing backups whenever I finish working on it, going back to the beginning of the month, so if the worst happens, at least this won't be lost.

Basically, it seems that my hard drive isn't managing to keep up with the actual read/write of my daily use. For instance, Godot often hangs when I open something or load a new image file, something that also happens in the compiled test game - it loads player and princess parts from the disk, so I had it hang more than once. This also happened in RPG Maker games I've downloaded, where a texture or image would take a long time to load, over 3 seconds, despite being relatively small (sub 100kb)

These slowdowns, while annoying especially given their frequency, weren't too bad. The problem began today when some programs were simply refusing to start at all, namely Godot, Blender and Krita. They very briefly opened a command line window, which closed in less than a second, and the process was nowhere to be seen in the Task Manager. My HDD usage was at 100%, due to steam downloading game updates, and those things took forever to finish, too. Steam kept chugging for around 8 hours to fully download and patch around 20GB of games, and I couldn't "work" in the meantime. To make matters worse, after restarting my computer, messing around with Godot a bit, it silently crashed after I tried to open an existing scene.

I'll probably set up my reserve laptop to continue working tomorrow, as my main machine isn't exactly reliable atm.

 

[papel]

Managed to get some stuff done today:

* Made the princess' idle animation less wonky
* Made a proper death animation for the princess
* Added a toggle and working selection for player helmet
* Created and added UI to indicate player and princess health
* Created clickable button to bring the pause menu during gameplay

<- the UI. Nothing currently animated, but it does its job. The princess' health gets semi transparent if she's not on the screen

A number of weird flicker glitches are happening on the player animations. If you left-right too fast while with the helmet, you can pause the game and see the helmet on one side and the head on the other, as well as the torso facing one direction and the arms the other. No fucking clue on the cause yet. Case in point below:



Another weird bug is causing a function that only happens when the princess gets out of the screen to fire repeatedly while she's flickering from invulnerability after being hit. Had to make a check for the "is_invul" variable to make it stop, but seriously, some stuff is just beyond weird

 

[papel]

I found a really neat bug that completely fucked up my whole customization part, hooray!
What happens is: on an exported project (the thing players will play), the game simply doesn't load player and princess' hairs, noses, eyes, etc.
It took a LOT of time for me to figure it out, but the "problem" (the png files aren't exported, they're converted into godot textures and stuck in another folder) was that I was checking specifically for the .png, which no longer existed. Obviously, I spent hours sifting through github and reddit for people with similar problems

Luckily, thankfully, I could still check for the ".import" files, so changing just some 6 lines of code fixed everything.

* Made the graphic for the entrance/exit
* Made the graphic for a "Kobold nest", so the player knows where enemies spawn from. - This also led to some previously placed spawners no longer working. Gotta love this kind of things breaking for what feels like unrelated reasons. Anyway, the fix was enabling the "Autostart" flag on them all. I still need to add some sort of minor animation to indicate when it's been destroyed. Since I didn't make it as separate layers, I'll probably have to take a easy way out, make the image tremble a bit and fall under the floor or something.

Check the graphics here

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- or check via my

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- I also explained better the problem with the import and the fix there

 

[papel]

* The problem with my spawners from the other day: the total number of nodes changed, and my code checked for a specific number of nodes before spawning. Basically, since the new graphic added one extra node, the code no longer worked.
* A couple of new clothes for the princess, one rag and one frilly dress in 3 colors -

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* I've also made some kinda good looking tiles, gonna put them on all stages now -

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* I also made an extra head for the princess, but it looks... Well, like shit, since all head parts expect a thin head shape. Here's what they look like -

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* Currently taking a look into sound effects and music, as thus far I've completely ignored both. Only after spending around an hour on Mixkit I saw the piece in their terms that "You must not (...) use an item in the context of adult content". Fucking hell... Freesound has some stuff, but the professional sites/services offer consistency, so sounds don't sound like "randomly downloaded off different sites".

So, besides Freesound, here's some other places that offer royalty free sounds, if anyone reading through this happens to be looking for that:

• Artlist.io (through free trial)
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[papel]

* You can choose player customization from the main menu and it'll apply once you start playing. Customization will also remain between stages. Hadn't made it work like that before, which was a big oversight on my part. Once I get a proper config.ini type file to save/load configurations, that should be easy to load
* Fixed a bug that would lock a player in a hit-death animation if an enemy kept attacking
* "Finished" all 3 current stages. They should all offer a fair challenge the first time around, but nothing hard. Stage 3 has an "easy", long path and a "hard", shorter path
* Drew the big position for doing a mating press. The head shape looks off and I haven't finished it, but I think everything else is looking damn fine. Except the feet, sorry, podophiles.
* Drew a new cock that should look better in the big scene. Still need to draw a "from below" version + balls, which will be used with the mating press

Bugs I'm currently aware of:
* Mashing the attack button will sometimes lead to around 3 seconds of no attacks happening - Can't consistently replicate
* Quickly pressing the GRAB button while 2 enemies are overlapping may get one of them stuck to you in their sex animation - Easy to replicate, still trying to figure how to fix it. I'll probably add a cooldown before the player can start another rape

For all intents and purposes, I am confident enough to release a demo -right now-, BUT, in matters of h-content, there's only 2 positions using the in game models. So, I'll ask the few of you who are following this thread whether you want to start checking the game ASAP, or if you'll want me to finish at least 1 big animation, which will likely be the mating press.

React or reply to this post if you want it ASAP, just stay quiet if you're patient and want to wait. Some 3 reactions and I'll upload the project on itch.io, then link it here. I don't want to make a full "game release thread" before I add 2 big animations, as there's very little content right now. Also, while I downloaded a shitload of sounds, I still haven't added any to the game, something I hope to do tomorrow. I'll need to edit a couple of them to properly fit into the game, too.

-

 

[papel]

* Added several sounds all over (player attack, enemy attack, being hit, touching the floor), now it feels more like a game instead of a hastily put together demo. Still needs music.
* Drew a different piece for the "on fours" big animation
* Drew a new undercock to be used with the big animations. Still needs the balls

One thing that slowed my sound progress a lot was my HDD failing (turns out I didn't migrate to my other computer) coupled with me insisting on using OggVorbis instead of MP3 for the sound. Converting the files takes much longer than it should because of the fucking hard drive. Hell, even moving the converted pieces into my project's folders stuck for a whole damn minute on 98%, just because.

Also, despite me talking about consistency, the sounds thus far are not exactly consistent. They're serviceable, but one could easily tell that something sounds kinda off here or there. A full release right now weighs 86MB. Not bad, considering the executable alone is 68MB.

Adding sound also made me find some small but annoying bugs with how my animations change. If the player gets hit while running, the sound won't play. Took me some 40 minutes to figure out the problem within the code, as I have redundancy when changing animations from there and forgot about one of the functions.

Tomorrow I might get to work on the big animations: save the separate parts, bone and animate them.
-

 

[papel]

Here's to hoping the attached dwebp plays properly, it's 9mb. Takes about 2 seconds to "start" proper.

If it doesn't, here's a direct link -

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So, I think the animation for a mating press is looking real good! I still need to make a proper mask for the cock so it appears to go inside the pussy proper, not to mention a minimal shading to give some volume to the body. I'll definitely reuse this position for anal, too. I took some time to use AnimationTree, then I realized (again) why I wasn't using it in the first place: you can't change the playback speed (speedscale) willy-nilly, so no option to speed it up or down.

I'm also confident that the other position will work great, too. I'll also have to take a look into my little kobold gals, as these big animations use human proportions. Hopefully, fiddling a bit with scaling will be enough.

View attachment 2023September29-LawngreenSeaurchin.webp

 

[papel]

Good news, everyone! Big sex scenes have finally been added!

I still need to make a head for the mating press position, I'll probably cut corners and make it a "no customization needed", face thrown back so you only get to see the chin and a slightly triangular shape. I'll also add a few scales to make it look more like the kobold in question. Also, on the green kobold image below, you can see that the small game model is all wonky in regards of what to draw on top of what. Even weirder, it draws correctly if you zoom in, but bugs out zoomed out. Why the fuck did it become a problem -now-? Fuck if I know

Given the lack of sync between the animations, I'll make the big animation's sounds play and remove whatever I set up on the smaller game models.

Still need to draw the balls for the player, maybe add some extra light on the cock seen from above (on the green 'bold). Also something to show in place of that arm over the head to use as a display of whether the player can grab an enemy, probably just a simple hand or gauntlet. And some breasts for the kobold gal's game model, they're still boobless there.

Another thing I definitely should look into is adding some collision between fainted enemies, as that seems to be the main reason behind the bug I've found previously, of finishing a scene and the enemy staying stuck with the player.

Mating press animation -

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On all fours animation -

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While I am very close to looking at this and saying "ok, this is good enough for a v1 release", I don't think I'll have enough time tomorrow or sunday to deliver it. Stay tuned, tho!

 

[papel]

Very small progress these past few days, and expect further progress to be slow this month. Work is really biting my ass, so I can't dedicate as much time as before.

Anyway, I've managed to fix a bug that'd cause the player to randomly be unable to do anything after an attack. The culprit was an animation key. I've drawn a kobold head for the laying/mating press big animation, but haven't finished it properly yet. I've also created 3 pieces of top clothing for the kobold enemies to wear, give them nicer looks.

Once the head is done, I'll probably release V1.



Clearly, I'm a master of ahegao (not)

Plans for the princess will probably wait a V2 release. I'll work on adding some logic to get a different reward based on how many enemies you raped before finishing the stage, getting the best one by not raping any. I might also add a bit of logic to make the player recover 1 health when he first rapes an enemy, so there'll be mechanical reason to do that, a double reward!

 

[papel]

After, what, 2 months?, the very first release of the game is now available!

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If you find any bugs, be sure to comment here or at the itch page above. Have fun!

Some of the final fixes I've made before this release:
* Music added, got them from OpenGameArt
* Fixed a problem that would repeat the "hurt" animation after a first hit
* Trying to figure what's triggering a problem that causes the player to remain stuck in a running animation, but unable to move, jump or attack. Happens after being hit and the only fix is being hit again - Possibly fixed, added some extra checks on the "get_hurt" function that controls what happens when the player is hit.
* Also trying to figure why the fuck the credits text adds one extra empty line after every line of text in the exported game. Checked on a dummy project, it's not happening there. - It started working as expected for "no reason". Seriously, wtf

 

[papel]

An explanation to why nearly everything uses an enemy nest/spawner: Godot currently has a bug with SkeletonIK (InverseKinematics), which my models use. It doesn't affect gameplay or the animations, but it spams the log window with errors, even in the editor.

• Fixed facial features of the mating press not resetting properly (i never stopped the timer node), which could lead to weird facial expressions during the insertion
• Added some code to the kobold, creating a "gallery version". She won't attack and will always play the same sex animation, helpfully stated on the platform she's on.
• Added anal animations for the two positions. Currently it chooses at random, but I can set enemies to only receive one or the other
• Added a cock transparency button for the big sex animations. It won't go invisible, but will get very transparent
• Small fix, turning on the "show helmet" option before starting the game will now work
• Small fix, the cock of the big animation now properly copies the color of the player skin. If you changed the skin color during gameplay, it wouldn't apply.
• Small fix, sometimes the princess' health would only show 1/1 health. Should always show her actual max now.
• Added a ranking once you finish a stage. Right now, it only takes into consideration how much damage you took and how many enemies you've raped. Took a grand total of 15 minutes, so why the hell not, eh?

The princess' drawing is still a WIP, I'll probably go with either cowgirl or reverse cowgirl position with her

 

[papel]

* Finished the first princess' reward animation, cowgirl riding;
** An anal variant will have to wait, as it seems Godot has a bug when you try to apply masks (textures with a "subtract" material blend) to stuff that's above Z level 1, it just shows a fully black shape.
* Added a gallery version of the stage exit, it plays the animation when you reach it;
** You can also change the princess' skin color in this gallery mode view, though it will only apply once you restart the animation;
** It does have a UI bug, if you pause the game, mouse clicks don't register on the pause menu. Keyboard still works for up/down and confirm buttons. Still trying to figure out how to fix this. It's not the Z index, I've even set the pause menu's Z index to 20, non relative, and it still doesn't capture mouse input properly. Moving the nodes around fixed it, leaving the player node as the last one makes the menu work again. I *really* hate how Godot doesn't offer an easy way to define GUI input handling order.

Tomorrow I'll probably add some details to the kobolds' large animations, mostly scales on their bodies, and see if I can fit an option to change between anal only -> vaginal only -> random hole sex animations

 

[papel]

Release 2 released

Now it's time to figure out what to work on for the next release. Off the top of my head, I can only think about graphics:

* Make a proper series of body parts for the player character;
* Make decent looking tilesets;
* Make backgrounds;
* Add an effect to hits that land;
* Add a death animation for the bat, as right now, it just disappears;

I could also use some extra female groans, moans and grunts to use with the sex animations, that'll require some time looking for free sounds around the 'web.

Another thing that I definitely should look into: saving stuff into a file and loading it on game startup

On another note, the face of the kobold in the mating press animation is something that I definitely want to and will rework, but sometime in the future because, as is, it serves it purpose.

 

[papel]

• Working on the config file save/load, it's good that godot has that set up in a very simple manner. Tedious, but straightforward work. As a side note, I love just how much stuff you have to make global in games, programming professors must hate that.
  • My god, how I hate how Godot handles keybinds. You can define a bunch of keybinds for a single action. You cannot change a specific keybind. Say you have UP, W and Space for jump. You can't "find and replace" W for another key. You either remove it and add something later, messing up the array order, or you don't do shit. -- Anyway, it's working, it saves and loads keybinds, but it also messes up the keybind window.
  • In a way, I think the "best" solution for dealing with this is having one named action for each keybind you want to give. For instance, instead of "jump" with 3 different keybinds, have "jump_1", "jump_alt" and "jump_controller", always leaving each action with a single key. Won't do this for the current game, but i'll keep it in mind for a future project
• I've also found a small bug that happens on slower machines: a lower framerate makes the knight jump way higher. Had to change a bit of the jump code and it should now work properly no matter the FPS.
• Fixed an old bug that was causing the hscene to clip some parts of game entities. Turns out the "clipping" to keep the animation within the window was "overflowing", and the nodes that I use as cutout masks were expanding. The fix was making said masks' images smaller, the originals had a lot of empty space.
• Fixed the both (alternate) option, to alternate between anal and vaginal for each sex animation, now it works properly
• Fixed a bug that made the player unable to attack while invulnerable after being hit
• Added a death animation for the bat. Little bugger will rotate and fall

 

[papel]

What an annoying week at work, barely any time to do anything with my game.

* Added a hit animation/effect to better show that the hit has registered;
* Added a new icon to identify that you can grab an enemy;
* Added some background graphics to stages 1 and 3

My artistic ability with tiles and backgrounds is still, at best, 3/10. I'm spending way too much time on this to get nowhere, it's really fucking annoying. I made a brick background for stage 2, but it "stole" all the visual attention, even with a low contrast. Ugh.

EDIT: Spent some time reworking the knight's armor/body. I think it's looking neat. Won't have time to do anything tomorrow, but I intend to make 2 other armors, one more like chainmail and the third more like full plate. Also, yes, I suck at making proper metallic shading/lighting. Future me will do something about it someday.

 

[lumley_gg]

This is a good devlog. If you are still having an issue with the knight's jump on different framerates, make sure you are not calculating its physics with

_process(delta)