Unity Sklaw - Development Thread

[IndolentCat]

Hi, I'm IndolentCat(long time leecher and lurker), I'm developing a Slave Training game called Sklaw. I'm committed to this so we decided to start a development thread to share progress and keep myself motivated.

I'm currently looking for an artist, specifically a character designer. You can DM me for more info!

Spoiler: Personal Motivation and Background

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Now going into the game, I'm going to mix different aspects of the design of games like SM and Jack(for short) with my own spice, all in a classic medieval fantasy setting (with an ancient civilization that was more advanced). The scenes will be animated with bone based animations, in a Strumpets sort of angle, they will be somewhat interactive with the player being able to influence the training results with actions accordingly to the girl state/personality. The MC and the slaves can be female, futa or male. The player can train two slaves at once and fulfil random requests from a board at the town or try to please NPCs that can have particular request for better money and/or rewards.

I won't go into detail about the story, but a part is the cliche story where the MC has to settle a debt, so s/he's somehow forced to get in the slave training business.

The roadmap is divided in two main parts, although some things could mingle if I see while developing that we need some features from part 2:

1. The main slave training loop, that means: Day to day basis of getting a request, getting slaves with the potencial, training, get paid. Rinse and repeat. This means the town, shopkeepers, NPCs important to the story and all training related scenarios and upgrades.
2. The battle/dungeon exploring. This will be important because in the dungeon the player can get upgrades and "blueprints" to get new things for themselves, the slaves or the training efficiency. While this is on development or if the player is not interested (I know some people dislike turn based combat), there will be a tavern to send "heroes" into the dungeon to retrieve things, for a fee of course.

The coding is done from the ground up because this was always intended as a learning opportunity for me. I'm just using a couple of assets from the store, and I plan to do the rest myself, so it might be slow at the start, and I know the scope is big, but I intend to develop it completely.

The current status (jan 2024) is:

• A GDD is partially done, is still missing details, specifics on player progress, girls' personalities and the battle system. A script of the game introduction is already done.
• I'm needing a character designer/animator because I can probably use the current doll as placeholder and development but not for anything that goes public.
• 3 main backgrounds are done: the throne room (there's a pic on the thread), the Slaver's Guild reception and the MC house entrance. All made by me on blender with free to use or purchased assets.
• On the Unity side, I have the last attempt at an original doll to help me see what I'm doing.
• A schedule screen is 80% done to plan the day ahead, assign training activities, supervisors, etc.
• A dialogue system is very close to being finished, needing just some testing and real use to fix bugs, I have a node based graph to see the dialogue trees and I managed to do our first training scene with animations and interactions. Now I'm working on story dialogue, commands and "cutscenes".
• There's the groundwork for character creation: skin color, breast size, hair style and color, eye color and type. Is missing the gender selection because there's no male for now.

As soon as I can work steadily and get the story intro done, I'll be sharing a video and setting up a Patreon, hopefully with and artist already. Development will be slow but steady, at least while I'm not getting financial support.

 

[osanaiko]

Sounds interesting! Good luck and please keep updating us with your progress !

 

[IndolentCat]

Sounds interesting! Good luck and please keep updating us with your progress !

Thank you! We will have a weekly update at the least.

 

[IndolentCat]

This week was a bit slow on the coding because I was sick during most of it. I managed to rework some things in the dialogue system and I added conditions for things to happen or not happen during scenes. Some bugs were killed in the process.

panda83 is slowly progressing with our female(and futa) doll, I'm hoping that we can share her first animations in one or two weeks.

We took some game design decisions while discussing mechanics and they will soon be added to the code base.

We decided to allocate a day of the week for research because panda83 is very new to lewd games and none of us are writers so we want to get some pointers from other games and manga. This will probably not impact the development as it is a busy day anyways.

Our first milestone will be a demo of the main loop of the game, for people to test it and iterate over it if there's good feedback.

 

[IndolentCat]

The last week was more focused on game designing. We added things to the GDD, defined how Love/Fear mechanics are going to play out. Now we have to set on a few personalities for our demo.

For the most part, the coding was centered around making it easier to add dialogue and actions in the future and solving some dead-ends that we had while trying out our training scenes.

As for the art, the face details took most of the time. We plan on making face expressions, so we need a bunch of brows and mouths to cover a good range of them.

We are getting close to start experimenting with the doll rigging and animations, it can go bad because it's the first time we do this process from scratch, meaning we would have to fix some things here and there before attempting to rig again, but we hope to share some screens of how it's looking in the coming weeks.

 

[IndolentCat]

We had a slow week but we still made some progress:

A lot of work was focused on the database of the game, i.e., how and where we are going to store the dialogues, items, etc. This is so it doesn't become a clusterfuck of assets and we know where is what.

panda83 was mostly learning and trying to get the hairs right, we plan to do a bunch of them.

This coming week we plan on getting more work done on the training system and getting the doll ready for rigging.

 

[IndolentCat]

Last week was pretty decent.

The training system is coming along, we added an idle action for when the player forgets, doesn't or is not able to schedule training for the slave. It will also serve for when the assistant is supervising. This includes some basic calculations of stats and skills growth.

We did our first attempt at rigging the doll, it went better than expected, as I'm writing this things are being corrected for the second try. If nothing out of the ordinary happens we should finally be able to share how that's looking on our next update.

The current week effort will be on finishing the basic training daily cycle, that is, carrying the schedule from start to finish until the next day. On the art department all the efforts will be at rigging, dressing and doing some hair growing treatment for the doll.

 

[Tompte]

A suggestion regarding the question in the poll: I would consider doing both!

I've experimented a lot with that particular problem in my own game. At first I wanted to only show adjectives because it felt more natural and user-friendly, but I found it wasn't as user-friendly as I thought. There were many cases where I needed numbers so I could compare them, or to just measure my own progress. It really depends on what the player wants to know.

I took a page from CK3 and use a lot of tooltips to convey extra information.
For instance, in the main UI I display "Intelligence: 12" but when player hovers their cursor over it, a tooltip will say "Intelligence: 12 (Clever)". I felt that was a good compromise. You could also do it the other way around, showing words up front and the number one level down.

For progression values (numbers that only go up) a simple percentage is sufficient.

 

[IndolentCat]

A suggestion regarding the question in the poll: I would consider doing both!

I've experimented a lot with that particular problem in my own game. At first I wanted to only show adjectives because it felt more natural and user-friendly, but I found it wasn't as user-friendly as I thought. There were many cases where I needed numbers so I could compare them, or to just measure my own progress. It really depends on what the player wants to know.

I took a page from CK3 and use a lot of tooltips to convey extra information.
For instance, in the main UI I display "Intelligence: 12" but when player hovers their cursor over it, a tooltip will say "Intelligence: 12 (Clever)". I felt that was a good compromise. You could also do it the other way around, showing words up front and the number one level down.

For progression values (numbers that only go up) a simple percentage is sufficient.

Your UI looks so good! I'm taking notes. I do have a tooltip going around already, I could repurpose it . I like the suggestion, cause it bugged me sometimes when I couldn't really see how much progress I was making in JoNT, but I get the design decision of making the player guesstimate the time the skill would need. We'll have the pool for a long time, specially after we can produce screens and do the most voted at front, and the other optional/on tooltip.

I played a lot of Whore Master back in the day, I'd definitely play your game.

 

[IndolentCat]

Some people are keeping up with our journal so let's do an update.

If nothing out of the ordinary happens we should finally be able to share how that's looking on our next update.

Well... Something happened. We had some art data lost by accident and it took some motivation from panda83. She's redoing some fixes and reworking some things that didn't look how she wanted so we'll have to move a graphic update to one or two weeks, but we'll deliver, we haven't stopped working.

The training system is progressing, we made some changes on our dialogue editor to add some flavor to the slave answers. Now I'm working on some changes to the game design that I hadn't get into code and we had pending.

We also made some experiments on Blender to help making backgrounds which are looking very promising.

Sorry we couldn't produce some shots, but we will.

 

[gidd]

It's been a month. Still waiting on those shots.

 

[IndolentCat]

It's been a month. Still waiting on those shots.

We are so sorry, life happened hard. We are getting back on track this year. I won't promise any dates for now but we haven't abandoned.

 

[Eagle1900]

We are so sorry, life happened hard. We are getting back on track this year. I won't promise any dates for now but we haven't abandoned.

given the time elapsed since your last visit here, I was wondering if there was any news, or is it all to be considered abandoned

 

[IndolentCat]

We just had a rough year. We haven't abandoned but we're not having the time to make meaningful progress. We, or at least I will be coming back to the project during jan or feb. Before I stopped posting we had some backgrounds done, placeholder art for the females and a bunch of programming done. There were experiments with physics for the boobs, hair and clothes which were satisfactory, even on phones. We are missing a couple more backgrounds, some basic clothes and a whole bunch of writing for what I would want to release as a demo of the main game loop to ask for feedback. It might take like 3-6 months from the point I come back.

This is the slavers guild reception, is wide so the camera can pan around it. The requests are to the left, a basement to the right.


The throne room not finished (as in the background through the windows is a placeholder)


And I have the main character living room but is not cleaned enough to show it. I don't draw, so, the backgrounds are being done with blender and free assets or assets that I got over the years, that way if I need for instance a chair, I don't have to worry to draw it on the right perspective cause blender does that for me. I'm trying for them not to look too alien with the 2D characters.

Is good to know that people were interested on it as a concept, so yeah, we'll try to keep you more updated once we come back.

 

[DiviDreamer]

I think more important to look at this problem in game context,
it may or may not look good as numbers or ranks, tho' ranks may look more immersive imo.

 

[IndolentCat]

Alright, as promised, I'm back on the project. I've been going through the last things that were done, we have a barebones character creation scene and random character generation. I don't want to show the base character until is 100% done and is the one we are going to use for the game. I'll be making drafts of the backgrounds we need for the start of the game and working on the intro sequence (The script is done, just needs to be added to the game). Hopefully by the time I'm done with that, the base character will be done, and we can focus on adding the content for the demo.

We'll be doing updates here every 2 weeks. For some reason even though we worked most part of the first half of last year, we didn't post any update, I guess because we haven't been able to get the character right, but it won't happen again.

 

[IndolentCat]

These two weeks I've been working on more backgrounds, we decided to ditch the throne room we had because it was too different to the other ones we have or had planned. I made a new one which is almost finished and now I'm working on the last one we need to make the intro.

We won't have significant progress on the characters until March so I'll be working on everything else in the meantime.

WIP

 

[IndolentCat]

Alright, I'm late this update because I had back pain the last week. I'm close to finish the house entrance which is the last background for the intro sequence. It needs a little more dirt on the floor but otherwise is finished, we'll add day/night variations. From this point I'll work on the intro sequence to see if the dialogue system we implemented holds up or needs new features.

 

[IndolentCat]

Trying to get back on track this week, I've been working on improving the Dialogue System and getting the intro sequence started. I'm doing all of this from scratch as a learning experience, I could have used the battle tested system from the Asset Store, but I decided I wanted to torture myself instead.

So far, it supports: linear dialogue, options for the player, different outcomes based on character stats and/or slave personalities and commands to: move characters and things around, start animations, emotes, etc. Still needs a bunch of work and more commands and communication to be fully featured but that's what I'm hoping to improve while doing the intro draft.

Pic of the simple linear dialogue tree of the beginning of the intro.

Our WIP/placeholder doll. A reminder that our artist is just starting so be gentle. Work on her should be restarting next month, we'll be redoing most of her.

 

[IndolentCat]

We took a break this period because there was a lot going on, but we got into checking Stable Diffusion and we might add it as part of our workflow to enhance the backgrounds and help with designs, we are still doing all the bases from scratch like I've been posting, just polish or inspiration. But, first we need to see how plausible and how much work it is.