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Eulogy | Explicit summer memories
🕑 Added 2023-09-24 04:27:58 +0000 UTCAlright, folks, I think enough time has passed and we can start talking and dissecting this project, As most of you may know by now part of my becoming a creator has to do with games, one of the tiers rewards even says so, [Demos and exes of thing I may do].
So the seed has always been there, I have dabbled and dipped with some Engines before, GMS, Unity, Flash, as part of me just messing around with the computer and so on, I never really tried something more solid but one project. The idea to make some interactive/game-esque winner was already on my mind for some time, in fact, I think the one I wanted to make was the Ralsei X Kris on the Swan Ride...but! That one never won, so there was no interactive something to be done.
Regardless I had toyed with the idea of how it would be, basically, it would have been on the final part of the scene, where the ride ends and there's a photo to be taken, you see the normal 4 options, some "Corruption" would have happened and the options would have changed to 4 different sex poses.
Seems simple enough right?
WRONG
I mean, yeah, it seems simple but when you break it down it becomes a bit more complex:
- Option picker
- Shader (Corruption)
- 4 Different "Mini scenes"
- An outro
What all this means is basically I would had needed to find a way to start the scene, transition to a picker option, when the option ended go back to the option picker, write some sort of shader for the corruption part, and make the "You got a picture of Kris and Ralsei doing X to pose"
At the time I was subestimating how long it would have taken me to do this...
I thought perhaps a week or two would have been enough, and who knows, maybe it is doable on that timeframe, I doubt it a bit more after the experience with Summer Memories, Why?
Okay, let's talk about Goals and Projects.
Usually, when I'm learning something or working on a new thing I lay out goals along with Milestones to render something as feasible, working, and complete. With summer memories it wasn't different, originally the goal was to have a very simple working interactive scene, even less interactive than what we actually got in the end.
You see, the original goal was to make three features:
- Make Noelle follow Kris on command
- Replicate as closely as possible the talking system from DR/UR
- Introduce clips or animations after certain conditions
With these 3 conditions ready the idea was to just take her to different spots on the map and see the clips/Animations, No interaction with NPCs, No "Quests", no Music or Sound Effects. It was just a very simple interactive work. Not even worth calling it a game...
The first feature that I worked on was for Noelle to follow you on "Command" An early idea was to Proceed her into following you, frankly I didn't have much trouble making this feature, but it had some unintended bugs because the way I write code is not the proper way to write code. You see, what I did was basically tie Noelle's walking animation to the player while she is in the following state. This makes it so that while you press your direction key she will show the same direction as you...the problem is that when she enters the following state she will literally fly toward you until she is in the "Following" range, which is hilarious but, I couldn't figure out how to solve it. What did I do?
G E T C R E A T I V E
I made her so the command only activates until you interact with her, basically making a chain of commands for her to enter the following state, which makes it so she moves just a bit, still without the moving animation, it's very notable, some of you surely found that weird.
But! It worked. She followed you on command, and with that feature on the check, I was able to work on the other features, you see, I gave myself 2 weeks to work on these 3 features, and I told myself if I wasn't able to have this proof of concept in 2 weeks I needed to pivot into making the prompt just a normal animation.
But there was a problem...the more I spent thinking how to make it into something playable, the worth of time investment I saw that it needed more things. If I was already doing some kind of talking system, it was worth adding a couple of NPCs, which also opened the possibility to add objects and interact a bit more with the world like in the games.
That's when the trouble began to arise, turns out dialogues, and the system to make dialogues is very fucking hard. Storing dialogues or delivering and pairing it with a facial expression, it easily took me a week to be able to code something decent, hence why it has the following problems:
You can press Z while in dialogue The dialogue doesn't have a wraparound so if you put more dialogue it just goes over the textbox There is no cap for the sound, so if the dialogue is too long it will keep making the dialogue sound You can only get one dialogue per instance instead of a series of dialogues
*Sips coffee*
The problems I noticed at the time drove me insane for that week
I had to keep my mojo in check and the mantra for this kind of work is "If it works, it works"
I decided to just get creative again and play around those problems, hence why characters only have one dialogue, until something happens! Like Noelle following you now everyone has a
n e w dialogue
But I had to keep em short because of the sound and the bounding wraparound, so I had to rewrite some....but, I had something more solid, I was able to deliver dialogue and Noelle followed you around at command. It was shaken up nicely....Surely nothing could go wrong, right?
RIGHT?
...To be continue
