Project Wild One v0.09: In Motion and At Rest

As of this moment, the new content is going out to my supporters! It will be available to more of them in a few weeks, and about a month from now, this new version will go public! Let’s talk about what’s changed!

Animations

The big feature for this update is the jump from “text game” to “text game with some flashy little animations!” I’ve had a lot of ideas for how to make Project Wild One more visually appealing and more graphically evocative, but it’s really tough to make that work when one of the core goals of the game is flexibility– characters can be many different species with drastically different forms, engaged in many different activities. (Even just the furries in the game will look drastically different from each other, but as written, the game could already theoretically support nagas, taurs, micros, macros, tentacle monsters, just about anything with a fairly consistent body shape. Slimes would probably be disappointing until I did some more work on the engine.) But yeah, how do you make any kind of art for a system like that without just slamming out an impossibly large number of pieces that each could only be used in very specific circumstances?

The only answer I can find that works for what I have in mind is to go for something more minimalist and universal– the silhouette. Now, that is only so appealing on its own, but it does open the door to possibilities that would be completely beyond me otherwise. I’ve been thinking about making animations of a minimalist sort for a long time, but it just seemed too overwhelming to get into. This update began shortly after I heard that the program DaVinci Resolve does a much better job of making animation possible. And while I won’t say it’s beginner-friendly by any means, it offers tools with a much deeper modularity, allowing me to accomplish things I never could in any other engine I’ve seen.

It’s been a long and difficult process learning how to make it work for me, but at this point, I’m fairly happy with the results. I’m still deeply anxious about putting my own art out there for everyone to see, since it’s something I have much less experience with than my writing or even my programming, but I’ve managed to get it to the point that it more or less meets my own standards, so I’m hoping you’ll find it worth leaving turned on.

This update did take a lot longer than I’d hoped, partly because I had to learn how to animate from scratch, and partly because I was developing the whole system for delivering these animations. Each character now has a Color Identity– a pair of colors to represent them, and the animations are shown in those colors. I’m layering these animations with transparency so there can be background and foreground animations, and I’ve built my own small engine I can expand as I want for looping each separately, maybe with some variations or the like down the line.

For this update, I focused on making a basic sort of “mix and match” set of animations for the various possibilities with sex. Each piece of anatomy used in penetrative sex has its own animations for being “active” or “passive” on either side of a background that shows, somewhat abstractly, what exactly is happening right now. This lets you track how exactly each instance of penetration is happening in a scene at a glance– each animation will show whose what is paired with what, and whether they’re starting, failing to start, pushing but failing to penetrate, partway penetrating, or all the way penetrating– with different animations for acting on the receiving or penetrating side, plus a couple for the stages of pulling out/off and ending sex. This lets us keep track of the core idea of the action very easily, no matter how flowery the prose may be from one line to the next.

It’s a pretty flexible suite, but I have a lot of ideas for expanding on it. It should be pretty easy to add in backgrounds for vore content soon, and while there’s only one type of mouth or dick right now, it should be simple enough to add variations like beaks or knots down the road for the mix and match set. Past that, I think there’s plenty of possibilities for adding animations for special moments that highlight the action in other ways outside of the mix and match system. Explicit animations for certain pairs of anatomy at certain moments, maybe triggered similar to the Description system where special circumstances can trigger a special animation, like a belly swelling or balls hitting a chin. And I’d like to expand these animations to actions besides sex and vore as well, to add more color and life throughout the game.

Making these animations should be a solid option for adding content on the side when I want a break from whatever big task I’m on. I’m not planning to spend lots of time focusing solely on making more, but I think it’s something most folks can enjoy that uses a different part of my brain. Now that I’ve put in the work getting the basics set up, making more animations should be fairly straightforward. And speaking of that work…

GUI Overhaul

The new animations are designed to be displayed in line with the text describing the action, and that wouldn’t really work with the old text system. I’ve upgraded the main text display to something less ASCII and more modern, with each event in its own little sort of text bubble. Every action now has icon markers for who’s acting and who’s targeted, which incorporate into the animation if one’s available. This should also help with general readability of who’s acting when, and I’ve expanded the new icons to be used in the turn queue and on character plates so it’s nice and clear who’s who at any time.

With this change, I think the game is a lot more colorful and readable. One of the troubles with making a text game more directly interactive is that it can feel very sluggish understanding what’s happening at a glance, and I’m hoping these changes will help a lot with that. I also studied up on how best to handle graphics in Unity now that I’m getting a little more graphically intensive and made some changes that should help a lot with both storage and memory usage running the game to help off-set these big additions.

New Rest Actions

The old Rest action had a lot of issues, and I finally decided it was time to expand on your options for alone time. “Rest” has now been split into “Sleep” and “Forage,” which is each just a little stronger than Rest at its own thing without the benefits from its other half. Now you can focus on just healing quickly with less risk of an encounter, and you can replenish your reserves faster, but with more risk of being found. A new “Rest” has also been added that is more about just taking personal time for hygiene and the like. This helps you manage your Satisfaction just a little, but leaves you open to being discovered.

A side effect of this change is that both you and other NPCs will spend much more time alone and reasonably “discoverable.” I’ve heard some complaints that it’s really difficult to find anyone alone in the game, and this change should help a lot with that, though I plan to expand on “alone actions” in the future as well. Plus, it’s easier now to manage your weight, and NPCs are looking more plump now they have a bit more control over it. I’ve always meant them to have a wide range of weights, and they were always on the skinny side before.

Description changes and additions

I pushed out the last version with Strong and Gentle actions, but I hadn’t had the time to write up Descriptions specially for them. With this update, I’ve added a decent number of Descriptions specifically for these variants! Some should show up very commonly and help reduce the repetition of “basic Descriptions,” while some are written for more specific moments where being Strong or Gentle feels a little special.

Also, folks have been pretty confused with how it’s described sometimes when one Engagement is ending and another is beginning. You might see something like “You line up to have sex! Sex is over! You’re about to have sex!” and it feels like a big mess. I’ve gone through and re-written a lot of the descriptions to hopefully make things a little clearer when a character cancels one Engagement by starting another.

Action Adjustments

If you’ve ever seen characters get stuck in a loop gently trying and failing to have sex with each other, this one’s for you. The logic for how actions resolved when you try to start a new Engagement was getting pretty tangled in layers of subtlety concerning how everyone involved feels about the situation. Maybe your partner is open to having sex, but likes the sex you’re already having and doesn’t want it to stop. Maybe you’re already touching them, maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re being Gentle, and want to stop at even the slightest reluctance on their part. Maybe your partner recently made you an offer, or even tried to have sex with you. Maybe they did, but now they’ve decided they don’t want sex. It was turning into a bit of a mess.

I’ve consolidated the logic for tracking who wants what when, accounting for all the different factors that might influence the situation and making sure every check across every action uses the same logic reliably. Hopefully, this means you’ll see less weirdness with when actions succeed or fail, especially since right now, NPCs really like being Gentle!

Other Changes

This update saw many little changes along with the big ones, and I don’t think the rest need too much explanation, so let’s just do a quick rundown!

• Fixed code preventing NPCs from spamming Howl
• Adjusted NPCs to prefer much shorter encounters
• Adjusted various GUI elements for readability
• Added missing side Descriptions for Grapple
• Fixed 5’12”
• Fixed various minor bugs and typos

The Process

Taking a crash course in animation and building all the systems involved in integrating them into the game isn’t the only reason this update took a while. I don’t like to talk too much about my personal life, but it feels like I’ve been saying “life got crazy and it really slowed me down” a lot, and… well, it was doing that again. And you know what? I decided I’m sick of it. Life can be hard. It can be chaotic, and I kept letting it throw me for a loop emotionally, over and over. I can’t stop life from being crazy, but I can do something about how I handle it.

So I’ve been taking some time to try and address my emotional health. I’ve gotten back on an antidepressant, and I’ve been talking with a therapist. I’ve been working a lot on myself, to try and be in a better place– more stable, and more productive in general. I did have a bit of a rough transitional period that delayed things some as well, but I’m feeling better now than I have in a long time. I’ve been more engaged with my work, more excited to get into it, and generally more productive in a day. I can’t promise everything will be measurably better from here, but I think things are looking up.

I’m sorry development for this game has gone on so long. I still have so much I want to build and expand with it, and it comes as a shock to realize I’ve been working on it for over five years now. But I’ve built a lot of systems into this game that I’m deeply proud of– stuff I’m not even sure “normal” video games are doing. I’m really hoping that as things start to come together, Project Wild One will start to shine more and more with all the work I’ve put into it.

What’s Next

At this point, I’m pretty divided on what the next step should be. This update ended up turning into another big project in its own right when it was supposed to be “a quick little update” to change things up before going back into The Big One, building the Interp-Theory Mind to let NPCs intelligently make choices on what to do and why. I’ve had so many plans for this game held back waiting for that system to be fully in place, and I think it will really form the core of what makes Project Wild One an engaging and special experience in the end, so I’m simultaneously really excited and intimidated by the prospect. But it’s true that working on this update did a great job giving me some space to clear my head and get some fresh perspective on the system! That said, this update did not hit my goals for being “quick” or “little.”

Diving back into the ITM would almost certainly mean another long, slow update. Last time, I built the system to help NPCs better understand the world and what’s happening in it, then I taped that whole thing onto the existing system for choosing actions and shoved it out the door. The next step would be to completely replace the system for choosing actions, and once I start on that, there’s not really any way to stop partway and ship a quick update. It’s all or nothing. But my last few updates have taken a long time, and I know that frequent updates are important to the process when I’m working the monthly support model.

At this point, maybe I’ll try and get my thoughts together and put the question to my supporters. They tend to be very kind, but I already tend to ask a lot of patience from them with all the crazy things I’m trying to pull off here, and this feels like there’s less of a clear answer on the next step than usual. It’s also true that I’ve been getting a pretty strong feeling from folks that I should put together some kind of roadmap for future plans– MVOL was pretty obvious in where it was going (in its way) and early on, even I didn’t know what all PWO was going to be. At this point, a lot of the things that could go in are still “maybe”s and “probably”s, but I have a much more defined idea of what all those possibilities and also the “definitely”s are, so this is probably a good time to get it all put together. Give the folks putting the food on my table a bigger perspective on where the project is, and let them vote on where the next step should be!

Wrapping Up

I still have a lot of mixed feelings putting this update out there. It’s been a long time since I’ve put creative work out there that I felt so uncertain and vulnerable about! But I also think it does a lot to improve the look and the “feel” of the game, and I’m really hoping it will help draw in new players more to see what else shines in this game. That’s always been one of the big mistakes I made with MVOL, I think, and I don’t want to repeat that here.

I hope you guys will enjoy this update! In case you missed it, I’ve officially switched over to BlueSky— you can see the first teaser over there on the new animations, I posted my first experiment with seeing what DaVinci Resolve could do for me. Supporters have had a bunch of previews for all the new animations for a while, of course! If you want to play early, get access to bonus monthly free-writes from me exploring the world of Project Wild One, and some other goodies besides, think about supporting my work! I’m on Patreon and SubscribeStar, and I post all the rewards and updates to both sites equally.

Thanks for your patience and your support! Project Wild One has been a beast of a project, but I’ve already accomplished so much I’m proud of with it. It drives me nuts knowing not all of it is fully apparent yet– I still need to bulk out content and finish adding systems before all of it can really come through for the player, but I know I’ve got something special here, and bit by bit, I know you’ll see it too. For now, enjoy the latest changes! Cheers!