The patched script is working fine. Thanks!
I really like this game because of it's story.
However, there's quite some room for improvement when it comes to the animations.
- Way too many close-ups
- Human eyes aren't single focus cameras which blur out everything else that isn't in the main focus. The animation rendering should focus on how human viewers usually see.
- More focus on the action itself and not on body parts wich aren't in the main role right now.
If you want to show feet then maybe make a feet job scene. And it isn't funny if an arm blocks the view onto where the main action happens. Maybe chose another angle in such a case.
- Maybe also focus more on how human bodies move naturally. Push actions are usually often a bit faster than pull actions. And breasts are soft body parts and therefore don't have a static movement together with the whole body. Even asses are also partially soft body parts which move a bit differently compared to the rest of the body. And usually human heads don't seesaw synchronous to the asses.
- Also the animation should visualize what the characters talk about. When they talk about deep penetration then animating a short penetration makes no sense.
Honestly, I think the animations in Spaced Out were somewhat better as they are now in the way how they were directed at least. Don't focus that much on the quantity of the animations. The quality of them is often even more important. Better a few good animations than a lot of mediocre ones.
This critique isn't meant as a rant but as a honet suggestion on how to improve the game.
Thanks for the input. Those are all valid points, but let me tell you the reasons for most of them. The game is not my main source of income - the $ amount is public on Patreon, so everyone can check and see roughly how much I get at the beginning of each month. So between my family, my daily job which pays for my bills and the food on my table and the game, I can spare around a couple of hours per day for the game usually when the kids have already went to bed (it may come as a surprise, but making the game is not exactly "family-friendly" activity
) In those couple of hours I need to write dialogue (English is not my native language, so it's not that fast), setup scenes and animations, communicate with the fine people here and on patreon, etc. Also I'm not a 3D artist (or any other kind tbh), so I'm using poses that I buy on renderotica. Some are fine, some are... not so fine. My point is - they all need to be fixed. After I fix them, I start with a single static pose, I have to do the other keyframe(s) to make the animation. Daz is horrible at this. Locking the position of a body part is considered not so much as a 'lock' by Daz, but more like a 'suggestion' - they move around, twist, turn - they do pretty much everything except staying in place. So posing a single animation takes around an hour to do and in the end it's still not good enough because when you have two people with four limbs there is clipping during the animation. With the tight release schedule (two weeks for content-only update) this means I have to 'squeeze' more animations from a single file, otherwise the update will end up with like 10 animations or so. So I need to have 4 or 5 angles for every animation. The style of the animations and the game in general is that you don't see the MC's face. When you combine this with the furniture in the room limiting the available angles, the fact that the pose is not meant to be used in exactly this room, so if you want to have the hands on the desk, the feet are either floating in the air or buried in the ground, the clipping on hands or hair which needs to stay out of the view, the only solution is closeups.
The focus part - again the limiting factor here is the time I have to make each update. Moving focus around means longer animations, because otherwise it leads to nausea on short animations (1-3 seconds). Longer animations mean longer rendering time for each and I'm not running a server farm at home, so I can't render more than one animation at a time. If I have to spend 10 hours rendering a single animation, this means that the two weeks I have for making an update will lead to less content in it.
Blocking the view and teasing the player is part of the game. Not every shot needs to see the 'action'. That's at least my personal opinion on the matter.
IMO natural movement and Daz are mutually exclusive. As I said I'm not a 3D artist, so I can't make shape morphs, etc. - I do the best I can with what I can. Breast movement is somewhat doable because it's posing and not morphing the shape, but naturally squishing the ass (e.g. on doggy) is beyond my abilities.
The dialogue in the sex scenes is one of my 'pain points'. It's the last thing I do and it's usually done on the day I release the update.
"Spaced Out animations"
? Were they a thing? It was just a couple of images with transition between them. Animations in Daz became viable only after they released a DLSS denoiser which could remove the grainy noise and have a frame good enough for animation with just 100-200 iray iterations. Spaced Out was done before this could happen.
Sorry if I took away a bit of the "magic" how these kind of games are made. For me the experience of starting my own game was like a visit to a meat processing facility by someone who enjoys having a steak. I've seen things that can't be unseen
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