Dev Journal: Swing Between

So far, it sounds like folks are enjoying the upgrades v0.03 brought to Project Wild One a lot, and I’m glad for that. It was a beast of an update to get through, and I’ve been picking up the pieces after it since I finally put the seal on and shipped it out. This is something of a transitional period in development, and I’m hoping to make a smaller update with a few easier things in it next.

Let’s talk about where we are with Project Wild One in a broader sense, then we’ll get into a little bit of the specifics of right now.

My initial build of PWO was basically one huge thrust into making a sort of scaffolding for an actual game. You can sort of see where the game is going to be, but it’s more the suggestion of a game than a proper game to enjoy. There’s a lot of things I want PWO to be, and I’m not even sure how practical it will be to chase after all of these ideas, but I’m leaving it open-ended enough that I can explore as I build and gradually narrow down my final vision into a game that is the best compromise between all the things I want a real erotic game to be and my own limitations as a developer.

Naturally, this has meant a lot of pushing my own limits to see just what I’m capable of, and forcing myself to learn and expand my skillsets. Which is great! There are so many things I’ve been afraid to attempt or haven’t given myself the chance to try, and PWO (and the other projects we’ve experimented with, for that matter) have given me great chances to grow, experiment, and produce new, interesting things.

The third update was a great example of that. I had to push myself to develop a lot of new techs for myself and get them all working together, and I had to grow as a programmer and better embrace object-oriented programming and optimization rather than just cobbling together something simple that barely works for my goals. v0.03 is a huge achievement to me, because to me it feels like the first piece of the Real Game I want to make is finally in place. The system still needs a lot of adjustments and expansions, and you could write almost infinite content for it even before any of the future pieces are added that will open up even more content to be written, but it’s a huge milestone and something that everything from here will be built around.

As I’ve mentioned, the next big upgrade I want to work on is the AI system. The AI for NPCs is already pretty complicated, honestly, just to parse out the sheer number of actions it can take, but as you’ve seen, it’s still pretty dumb in terms of actually trying to interact and feel like a person. The big jump I have in mind will definitely be a huge project of its own, but I’m hoping it will also be a huge leap in making this project feel special and unique from other games. Right now there’s a lot of overlap between what PWO is doing and a dozen other projects, but I don’t think anyone will feel like that if I can get this system working how I’m hoping to.

It’s hard to even say what the next big project will be after that, but I know that I’ve got tons of things I’m excited to explore and start implementing, and for a while there were even so many things on my plate for what to tackle right now that it got pretty overwhelming and I had to take some time just to sort it all out and write out some notes on what will require what to be built first and how big a priority each goal will be. I’m going to save the lurid details of what’s in the pipe for the next supporter dev log, but I’ll talk a little here about the bits I’m looking at in the short-term and have started working on.

Immediately after v0.03 went live, I shifted my focus to a lot of little things that were getting pushed aside, and similarly, I’ll talk more about those in a minute. More recently I’ve moved on to doing what I can to get ready for the AI upgrade. So far I’ve identified a few prominent, smaller upgrades that can be finished on their own before AI to make the big job simpler, and the first step on that is an overhaul to how the GUI is handled.

The v0.03 update had a very simplified version of this already: you can “see” time moving each time you press a button, with stats changing and new actions adding to the log tick by tick until it’s your turn again. I did this partly to improve the game’s performance: the game literally pauses to “breathe” between turns, which lets Unity free up memory before tackling another run through the AI and such. But it also makes things feel a little more “real,” which I like. The problem is that it also exposes some “gaps” and kinda looks a little janky at times, and it still doesn’t do a great job of explaining how time actually works in the game. I knew that I wanted a better solution for that, and it will especially be necessary for the other prominent upgrade I’m looking at implementing soon: changing player perspective.

I’m not sure what exactly will be an option in the final version of Project Wild One, it’s hard to even visualize the final game at this point, but I know I’m going to want some version of this tech in there, and this is the time to make it a reality if I’m going to. This opens up several options for changing how things work and flow in the game:

1. You could exert some sort of temporary mind-control over other characters.
2. You could “hop characters” and leave your starting character behind to instead control another.
3. You could permanently control more than one character at a time.

That last one could even be used to play with a sort of poor man’s multiplayer in which you and another player each pick actions for your respective characters, which I think could be pretty fun. For the record, I have no intentions of pursuing “proper” multiplayer: this project is already wildly ambitious, and everything I’ve heard about making online multiplayer work has me very convinced it requires programming knowledge an order of magnitude greater than mine at the least, and possibly a compact with the devil.

But I do think having the option to sort of “couch co-op” some sexy times or maybe semi-play with someone via stream or remote desktop could be fun to work in as an option on the side. That’s all secondary stuff, though. The big thing is, I want to be able to give you control of another character at times. I think it will be a fun option to work in a few different ways, and the things needed to make it happen are in turn things that we also need for the big AI upgrade. It’s all sort of in the same direction, and I’m hoping that it will make a good “partway point” for the big tech developments coming up. That’s important, too: I want to ship updates more frequently with new playable additions, but that’s going to be tough when it comes to all the work AI will take, so I’m hoping to make shorter hops touching on related side techs on the way there rather than making one big marathon going straight for it.

Anyway, the first step toward that will be upgrading the GUI, and that’s what I’ve been working on the last week or so. I want the passage of time to be more visually clear and interesting, and for that matter, I want the game itself to be more visually interesting. This update should help a lot with that!

But that also leads me to the stuff I was muddling through before this last week. Before I figured out all of my priorities for the near future, I was doing some more broad exploration of possibilities for the project as well as sorting out a lot of stuff that’s been pushed to the wayside, and most of all that was related to a side of things I know I’ve been letting slack: the visual component of my games. I’ve been trying to get all my nonsense with commissioning art sorted out and I’ve been brainstorming and exploring possibilities for how to add art and more visual content to PWO in particular. It’s tough because so much can be customized or change in the game that you can’t really just commission art of particular characters in general, let alone having sex. It’s possible that down the road we’ll have more unique NPCs that might be doable to get art for with variants? But right now especially, everything is very… varied. Characters can be all sorts of different shapes and have all sorts of different appearances, even in the “types” we have so far, which may well be placeholders themselves, so it feels like it wouldn’t really be worth it to get art done of generic dragons or werewolves, let alone of dozens of different kinds of furries that don’t have their worldbuilding background very defined yet.

I did hit on one idea I thought was pretty promising as I wrestled with all this, though: simplified icons for actions. It won’t work for me to commission art of your character pounding each possible permutation of a character you can meet in the butt, or vice versa, but I could make or commission thumbnail pictures that are more of a generalized “a butt is getting pounded!” image that pops up next to the description of how you are totally pounding/getting pounded. It might sound a little silly, but I’ve found that when I’m enjoying a game, having even a very simple visual representation that confirms: “yes, the sexy thing is happening successfully right now!” or: “surprise, this new sexy thing is happening!” can have a more visceral and exciting impact on the player than prose alone.

My initial idea for this was to make some very minimalist icons for all the different body parts and include some basic background animations like broad, sweeping arrows suggesting they’re coming together or moving apart, and that would provide the basic information easily enough. It would also serve to strengthen the general gameplay, as quick feedback for what exactly is happening at a glance makes it much easier to play in the long term. I even thought that maybe later, I could add a few unique icons for specific actions so that rather than just having a dick looming ominously over a butt (so that we could easily mix and match for when the dick is instead pounding another hole) we could also have a unique butt-pounding icon or the like.

But as I experimented with the tools to make those background animations, I found it was actually easier than I thought to make animations more complicated than simply making arrows move constantly in one direction. I knew it would be a lot of work to get into all that and I immediately put it aside in favor of things more important to the central thread of developing the game, but I realized: I might actually be able to make some very simple and minimalist icon animations of sexy bits. Not just a still dick with an arrow pointing it at a still butt, but a dick that actually throbs a little, and a butt that wiggles, or maybe even someday, a dick visibly pounding a butt and making it jiggle.

I have no idea if I’d actually be able to make it good at all, even as a super-simple and generic icon sort of deal, but if I could, I think that could go a long way toward making the game more visually exciting and satisfying to play with! The main question would be, could I make them passably decent to look at without having to spend a ridiculous amount of time learning how to actually like… be an artist?

That’s one skillset I’ve generally tried to avoid, as I know there’s a very long leadup where you just aren’t very good before you could reach a quality level I’d consider acceptable for my game, whereas I was already fairly happy with my ability to write, and even a limping, pathetic level of programming is enough to make some games possible, and every step I take to develop as a programmer opens up more possibilities.

So I haven’t actually tried to make an animated icon proper yet, so much as I’ve seen the tools are there to make it possible and maybe even practical, and that’s something I’m putting on the back burner for now so I can keep progress toward v0.04 moving smoothly. If I can make something halfway decent and usable, I think it could be a big upgrade for the game visually, and I think that will do a lot to improve the feel of the game for players and get new players more interested in it. It’s definitely on the list to look into, but it doesn’t get us any closer to AI, so I’m calling it a side goal for now.

For that matter, I’m still not completely sure what all will be going into v0.04. The GUI upgrade is a good first step toward a few different things, but as I said, that’s partly to make it possible to open up options for giving the player control of other characters, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’m also hoping to implement a basic version of a system for importing user-generated content soon. There are a few other smaller techs waiting in the wings besides, and many small improvements I can make that are less about tech and more about design, and it’s still up in the air what exactly will be going into this next update. I just know I want to make it a smaller, more manageable bundle of work after the long slog with the last update, so I might poke at each of my options and just see which should be quickest and easiest to make a reality.

For now, though, I’ve been rambling an awful lot, and I think I’ve given you plenty of teasers for what may be coming to the project in the near future. I still have plans for rounding out Project Voice and hope to put together a Unity version of MVOL, but right now I’m still excited about everything Project Wild One needs and want to get it to a better place as soon as I can, so I figure I’ll save those for when I’m feeling a little more burnt out on it, or at least more happy to leave it as-is in player’s hands for a while.

Thanks for reading all this! I hope you found it an exciting peek into the future of my work. As always, you can get notified when I make these posts and for other stuff I do on my Twitter, or you can set it so you get pinged by the announcement channel on my Discord server (which is also an awesome place full of friendly people). If you want to get that inside info I mentioned on all the things I’m planning in the future, plus stuff like cheats and early access to v0.03 and all new releases, you can support me on Patreon or SubscribeStar. I couldn’t do all this (and release all these games for free) without very kind and cool people like you paying to keep food on my table. And if you like what I do but can’t chip in, don’t forget to spread the word wherever you socialize that you like my work! It helps a lot!

Stay cool out there!