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

[papel]

This is it for today, kinda germanic/gothic looking full plate. Feeling real lazy to make an "inner" thigh, might end up just mirroring it. Still haven't added this or the previous armor to the game proper, gotta export the pieces and reposition them around the bones.
-- <- mirrored thigh

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)

It's been fixed. Turned out that I was doing some math ignoring the delta and that was causing the extra long jump. I ditched my local variable and used delta as the timer instead and all turned well.

 

[papel]

Ok, changing armor is now working as expected. I apparently messed up the length of armor 2's leg and arm, so some minor adjustments will happen. This is more visible on armor 2 (below)'s knee joint, there's visible empty space there

Also, the first armor lacks a "penis exit", so when you're raping an enemy, the cock shows over the fauld. Gotta make a small opening there, give it a tasset (those protective side skirts).

Right now, I'm trying to figure why the game is loading the default values and overwriting the config file on the game startup, instead of properly loading it.
The problem was that the options menu saves whenever it becomes invisible. It was starting the game as visible, thus, due to how Godot loads stuff, it'd end up changing its visibility, saving, then loading other stuff that would eventually load the config file (which was already overwritten at this point) - I still need to fix the config not loading the proper armor set or the chosen helmet, they always default to the first one - Fixed

With some luck, R3 will be released tomorrow, with these small visual fixes to the armors, plus other stuff.

 

[papel]

Release 3 now available, changelog here and on the OP of the release thread, too. It's basically a compilation of the stuff I fixed in the previous days

 

[papel]

Somewhat expectedly, my hard drive had a small failure yesterday, doing a full disk verification on boot, and made me lose a bunch of files, most of them unrelated to the game.

One of them was my WIP of a new enemy, an orc gal. It was still kinda ok-ish and needed some work, but was a decent starting point, if nothing else, already all limbs drawn and just needed some rework on the torso. I also lost the right boot of the plate armor. Luckily, it's just the same boot in a different position. Didn't seem to lose anything else. All code is still fine, which is the most important part. My last external backup was from october 25, so at least the loss wouldn't be too big. I need to take a day to install the SSD I bought and transfer all my shit to it to avoid further problems like this.



EDIT: Yup, motherfucker just had a nearly complete failure. Copying my shit will take a while, as it's capped at 36MB/s. Good thing I made a new backup ASAP after the post, as I probably lost more stuff.

 

[papel]

Been quite a while since I've posted in this thread. The things we do to keep a paying job.

Anyway, starting next week, I might have some extra free time to finally get back on working on the game. The things I'll work on for R4, in no particular order:

1. Cumshots
2. At least one new enemy (orc gal), possibly two (gnoll or catgirl), complete with sex animations
3. On screen controls for Android
4. New stage designs

As is, I suspect the controls for Android will be the easiest, if the in game pause button is any indication of work needed. Just add a toggle in the options to make it show/hide and maybe look if there's a way to detect the OS to automagically make it show, which will also hide the "Quit" button in the web version, which "crashes" the game there.

On a side note, the problems with jumping that I accidentally added to R3 should be fixed. They were FPS related and as of the moment of this writing, I don't remember exactly the reason why the fuck it was happening in the first place. Gotta check the code again and pray I properly commented that part.

Stage design is something that I'll probably spend some time testing in and out. It's something that will always leave some people frustrated, one dude on itch complained that stage 2 was "impossible". Personally, I think that was just a skill issue, heh.

Another thing is that Godot 4.2 landed some days ago, so I'll be going straight to it. Checking the changelog, there wasn't anything new regarding skeleton animations, so, for the time being, I'll have to rely on workarounds for the infinite errors it can throw (as I related back on post #35 here).

EDIT1 - Godot has a TouchScreenButton node that does all the heavy lifting for touch controls, which is great. The buttons work perfectly, I just need to draw some proper graphics for each action. Godot also lets me set them to auto hide if the screen is not touch enabled (tested by emulating the mouse as touch). Awesome.
I also found out that I can indeed figure the OS, with the aptly named OS.get_name() function. So, starting on R4, the Exit button in the main menu should no longer appear on the web version of the game.

EDIT2- Apparently, godot 4.2 broke something in my kobold archer's animation. She'll do the whole thing, but it won't animate the bow itself, nor shoot an arrow, which happen by calling a function on the first frame of the animation. It seems that it was something about the blend time between animations that was eating up the call within the node.
I fixed it by making the function call on the code, instead of the animation node. Made the icons for the mobile control

EDIT3 - Good news and bad news. The good is that I managed to export to android and successfully tested on my galaxy s8 running lineageOS 20 (Android 13). The bad is that I can't find a way to make the game use OpenGL2, so a considerable number of devices simply won't run the game at all. Godot 4.x apparently ditched OGL2 and only uses 3 and up for compatibility mode, preferring Vulkan otherwise.

EDIT4 - Moved some options around, added sliders for opacity and size of touchscreen buttons. Also made it so that menus are larger when played on Android or web browser

 

[papel]

Just a WIP of the orc gal. Her face is going to take a while to look decent enough for my tastes. I'm not too worried about limb position at the moment because each will be its own separate file and I'll be able to freely place them

 

[papel]

Haven't done much to the game because, take a wild guess: i've been addicted to fucking palworld. I know, fuck me. I'll see if I can finish the orc and add her to the game by the end of february, at least. So that's work on animating her + creating the sex scenes

 

[papel]

Finally finished the orc gal. Only took me, what, 2 months? Pshh, easy peasy. I also decided to make her a muscle goth. Dumb idea? Totally. Questionable quality? Definitely. But I love it!
Now to save-export the separate pieces, animate, etc. Then, get to work on the big sex animation, still thinking of a position, prolly something easy and quick-ish

 

[papel]

Slow'n steady. Animations with the skeleton/separate pieces are done, including one missionary pose. Might still do one more for a melee attack, currently the orc gal only has a throw animation, gonna add a javelin for that. Next step, all the coding, aka lots of copy-pasting from the kobold. With that done, making the larger sex animation

 

[papel]

So, having some trouble with my orc animation right now because of my own code working against me.

The problem: checking which sex scene to play happens both in the player AND the enemy's scripts. This is terrible because instead of having only one place to look at in order to fix, I have to keep checking two. How is this biting me in the ass? In the form of me not creating a "sex_on4s" for the orc gal. Since that part is written in the player script, I either work on a fix there, or create a proper "sex_on4s" animation for the orc, or create a dummy to stop some of the errors.

As if that wasn't enough, I also have to contend with this shit:


Yes, the face, hair and breasts are on the wrong side. Why? Because fuck if I know, Godot apparently hates working with bones. Keep in mind, this kind of error happens all the time with the orc gal in the editor, though a simple advance on any animation fixes everything's positions.


That's from the editor. Why in the fucking fuck that happens? Turns out it's because I'm being "lazy": the textures for the hair, chin, ear and face are all separate nodes, child nodes of the head shape. This means that, in theory, dealing with the parent node alone should replicate every position and rotation to its children.

This, however, becomes a problem because I'm not doing that straight on the textures, I'm doing that through a "RemoteTransform" node.
I'm not using these RemoteTransforms on the kobold enemy, but I'm using on the player and the princess, and the player's head textures can very easily "glitch" if you move left-right fast, the head takes 1 extra frame to get in place with the rest of the body.
- Now that I actually know the fucking cause, I also understand why this is happening: Godot draws stuff on screen going from the bottom of each scene upwards. Child nodes are always drawn before the parent nodes. Due to the RemoteTransform, ONLY the parent node will be affected, a change that won't travel down until the next frame. Why, however, it's not properly updating while fucking the orc gal as shown way above, I still don't know.
- See, remote transforms were supposed to help in order to properly align the draw order of textures: you put the remote as a child of the bone, then just point to the actual texture, which will ideally be ordered elsewhere, so that it's easier to rearrange what piece goes on top of what, like breasts show on top of the torso, boots show on top of the shins, etc. But Godot's entire draw order is one of the most infuriating aspects of the engine. As I said above, it draws in a reverse vertical order, whatever's at the bottom of the scene's node list is drawn first and on top of other stuff.

Another annoying bug that popped up is that after fucking the orc, she'll remain stuck to the player.

On the bright side, she's properly attacking, being hit and disappearing if she dies instead of fainting.

 

[papel]

Fixed the position of breasts and face not aligning, now everything is good. I removed the RemoteTransform nodes that were dealing with the problematic pieces and things got fine.
Also fixed the orc being stuck to the player after he's done fucking.
Another thing fixed is the draw order of the animation, all parts are showing with the proper "this should be on top of that".


Kinda decent animation. Still lacking the larger sex animation, it's currently loading the kobold. I might give a different variation on skin tones and hair colors, but as is, the only thing really missing from the orc is a working ranged weapon, everything else is fine.

One thing that's annoying me is that, sometimes, starting a rape of the orc will put her in her "faint" animation instead.

 

[papel]

After fucking forever, I've finally come (HA!) around and made the cum animations for the current sex animations with the kobold gals, just not for the in game sprites. I've made 3 short, 5 frame animations for cum, but they're very meh thus far, it's something that I really need to get better at. Flying gooey liquids are completely new to me. Might make a couple more animations for this.

On a side note, I just found out that my game is using ~470MiB of video RAM. That's an eyepopping number to me, and I found out that the main culprit is the total area of certain body parts. Right now, all of the princess' body parts are the full 1050x2109. While some of the PNGs only take a few kilobytes of hard disk space, whenever each is loaded in game, that's a whopping 8.44MiB of RAM! The 20 pieces that make a princess are needing over 160MiB of RAM and the game in general is using ~40% of my GTX 1070's performance, which is NOT ok to me.

I suspect I can easily bring down that use to ~50MiB or so, possibly less, the problem will be repositioning each part, since their respective centers will change, although I suspect most people playing won't see much of a difference, as I doubt anyone is actually getting low framerates or seeing their graphics card, or integrated cards, suffering.
This might be a problem for mobile though, so this is something I might have to check and fix sooner or later.

 

[papel]

Because I can't set my properties straight, I've actually fixed that thing of the princess' big RAM requirements, usage went down to ~320MiB, so that's 150MiB reduction! Repositioning her wasn't as troublesome as I thought it'd be, but I'm a lazy asshole, so I'll bitch about any extra work whenever I have the chance. There's still a lot of room for further reducing RAM consumption, as the big animations aren't optimized in the least, plus some pieces of the player also use the full area of the image I've worked on Krita.

To give you an idea of usage, the cowgirl position with the princess (that you get for winning a stage) has 18 separate pieces. Each is taking roughly 6MiB, for a total of ~108MiB. I suspect this usage will be, at the very least, halved, possibly cut down to 33%, or ~35MiB, once I resize the images that compose it, freeing another 70MiB. The 2 sex animations with the kobold sum 43 parts taking 2.44MiB, so another 105MiB that can possibly go down to ~35. Supposing this math of mine is right, the VRAM usage will go down to around 180MiB, coupled with the game proper's other 170-ish MB of RAM, would mean low specs have a better chance at playing at 60fps.



On the content side, I've added expressions to the orc gal, as shown in the pic above, plus sound effects to when you hit her and when she dies. I've also managed to play around a bit with sound pitch, so each kobold girl might have slightly different pitches when moaning. I haven't figured a way to make the pitch apply per node (entity), so I have to mess with the game's audio bus, which means that it changes all sounds that play through it
-- Some explanation: by default, a Godot game only has the Master bus for all sounds. You can add more buses as needed, though I suspect most people would keep it at 3, sounds, music, voices. In my case, I have a couple extra, as some sound effects need a permanent effect in order to sound crunchier, and the player's voices don't need to be effected with the girls'.

One thing about cumshots, they're "static", in that after cumming, the knight will resume fucking, which bounces the kobold up and down, but the cum will be stuck in place. It's not the end of the world, but I know some people will notice and point it out.

Anyway, gotta draw the big animation for the orc. Time to look for inspiration and not get carried away

 

[papel]

Royt moyts, did two good things today:

1. Added a mannequin to the Options menu (only works while in a stage), so you can better see the customization of your knight
2. Added health restoration from raping enemies the first time. There's a small shield icon that will hover to indicate if you've already fucked her or not
3. For more details on them, check my
   You must be registered to see the links

The orc sex animation is very far from done, I just barely sketched the position. Maaayyybe tomorrow I'll have some time to work on it further.
One thing that I'm considering is releasing all these changes as R4, with a big "PLACEHOLDER" while fucking the orc gal, so that R5 comes with that + another monster girl, as I believe I'm nearing a "final" release in terms of content.

I really need to work on the stages, especially 2 and 3's layout, plus their tilesets.

EDIT: Gave the android version a try. For some reason, the game loads with 10 FPS set in the options. FUCKING HOW? I have literally set up a fucking bit of code to AVOID that kind of shit happening! In any case, testing on a Redmi 6, the FPS was around 31, even after fixing the stupid fucking "10 fps" default Godot is insisting. That low FPS seems to be directly related to the loaded textures, so I guess all that VRAM saving will pay off here.
Edit2: First, fuck you, Godot. Second, I've managed to fix the stupid low default FPS by never loading a value from a file and simply setting it to 60 on the Global's _ready function. Third, I've probably fixed the low jump at low FPS, so the game should be beatable even playing at ~25 FPS, no more impossible jumps.

 

[papel]

After months of sitting around doing anything but the animation TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, the orc fuck animation is finally coming along! That's right you fucking pervs, you'll be fucking GOTH ORCS SOONtm



Given the separate pieces, I ditched the use of bones, since they were just extra steps for essentially no gain in speed or simplicity, as proper node parenting ensures that each piece attaches to another like they would to a bone. The good of using Krita and exporting layers as separate images is the ease at moving and rotating them around within Godot, so even if my original drawing had them in a "wrong" place, fixing that is trivial. What was annoying, though, was that I had to separate them in 3 different CanvasGroups:

Above, the upper leg without the mask cutting off the line.

This is because every sprite within a group gets affected by a mask. This is something I've talked about at the end of post #15 in this thread. A mask is what you need to use in order to "cut" or "hide" a texture. So, if everything was part of the same CanvasGroup node, one mask would affect EVERY other texture node above it. Making a canvasgroup inside a canvasgroup fucks up something, as Godot renders a big white rectangle. In my case, I have one group mostly for the textures, orc, one for the upper leg, as the ass line curve would otherwise go over the pussy, and one for the cock itself, without which it wouldn't "enter" the pussy or the ass properly. Looking at it now, the whole idea of these big animations was to reuse graphics for a variety of enemies, but here I am, effectively drawing a new one for the single new enemy, and will probably do that again with the 3rd enemy. This was clearly something I fucked up, though I can only blame myself for not making the kobold sex poses better. Essentially, I could separate legs and hips in one animation node, torso and breasts in another node, pussy and ass in another node, etc, then mix and match accordingly, or have each of those as a separate scene altogether, making the animations modular. Well, something to keep in mind for future projects.

Another thing I find worth mentioning, using AnimatedSprites for the changes of open/closed pussy and asshole is much cleaner and easier to deal with than fiddling with different nodes' visibilities, something that would've made my life much easier for the kobolds' facial expressions. Again, something for future projects, and the next enemy, which I'm considering what to do: feline belly dancer/assassin, wolfgirl ninja, kemono cowgirl something. Well, I can take my time on that for whenever work starts on R5.

EDIT: Good news, it's working! Adding the scene to actually play when you grab the orc was tricky due to my 1337 coding skillz, which means my spaghetti code was getting in the way. Essentially, I never prepared for anything other than the 2 big sex animations, code wise, so I had to add a new variable to the two enemies' scripts, properly set said variable, check it in the other script that checks which scene to play, double check all the checks (if statements), add a couple missing visibility toggles and done!
Oh, I also wasted around 10 minutes trying to figure why I was getting a null pointer, until I realized that the big orc scene/script didn't have a specific variable I was using on the other 2 animations. One "@onready var aniplay" later and all was well. I still need to finish the animations, there's no proper cumshots, nor sounds.
A lot of Godot simply doesn't work without Global variables. Object Orientation was a lie.

 

[papel]

Some download numbers of the current release 4, 14 days in, just because:

Browser plays -> 2547 (assuming that half are repeat players, that's still ~1270 unique plays)
Android -> 725
Windows -> 117
Linux -> 14

The number of browser plays is very high, as I expected, but the sheer amount of Android downloads is mind blowing to me. For comparison, Windows' Release 3 had 942 lifetime downloads after roughly 7 months. I am somewhat curious as to how many of those browser plays were from Apple devices, especially as I have no way of releasing an iphone app (and no way in hell i'll pay for their developer license) and am too uncaring about apple users to make a mac release

1 Week later edit:
I forgot to check the downloads from F95. As I suspected, most people here will download the windows version:
Windows: 333 (gofile) + 167 (pixeldrain)
Android: 27 (pixeldrain)
Linux: 4 (pixeldrain)
I also just noticed that gofile deleted the linux and android uploads for some reason. The fact that nobody pointed that out on the main thread shows that people either didn't bother and downloaded from another source, which I find more likely, or they didn't try those links.

Also, small tweak to the pause menu, it now hides the "Quit game" button when playing on the web. Not gonna upload this yet, even though I suppose more than one player accidentally pressed it and had to reload the page on itch.

 

[papel]

Finally did some work on stage 2. I ditched the entire previous design and made a new one, still has some verticality, but it's not such a slog as the first design. 4 girl enemies, 2 bats, some spikes, no respawning, may take roughly 1 minute to complete and doesn't feel unfair, hopefully. It certainly feels smaller than stage 1.



The tileset is still ugly as sin. I've also removed the Skeleton Modification from the kobold, now I can place any amount of non-respawning 'bolds without the editor throwing infinite errors, an issue that's still open on the godot github.

A minor thing I also fixed was saving the touch controls to the config file, which it wasn't doing before. It should also start as fully transparent on windows/linux the first time you play or if you remove the config file. On to reviewing stage 3.

EDIT - Hmr, I guess stage 3 might feel like an asshellish difficult spike with my current rework, though the upper part should be easy enough if you kill all enemies, getting back to the start won't have much platforming.

 

[papel]

Alright, R5 is out, all stages except for 1 received significant redesigns.

My to-do list right now:
* New shield enemy, that is invincible from the front - possibly bear or cow
* New ranged enemy that throws a chakram or something that flies in a C curve - possibly feline
* Make a decent main menu screen
* Make proper graphics for the control scheme on the main menu
* Make better looking tilesets (note to self, tiles have to be 50x50 in size)
* Make better looking level backgrounds
* Find one new music to use for stage 3

 

[papel]

Shield cow coming along. I'm thinking about making the eyes black with red pupils or something to make her look more demonic, or just redoing the eyes altogether. This chubby fuckmeat will be invincible while the shield is up, but very vulnerable from behind

 

[papel]

Some news: I've joined up for a NSFW Mini Jam on Itch.io, but ended up not finishing on time. I can probably finish the game afterwards, I did end up with an interesting way to draw characters using Godot's polygons.

Tomorrow I'll be doing a big exam, I've been dedicating significant time to studying for it, so by monday I might return to "normal" and finally finish the cowgirl enemy above.