Hello folks!
Happy holidays from everyone at the team, and to celebrate I will continue with the new dev diary format where you get to hear directly from them! So let’s hear what these distinguished perverts have to say about their daily struggle of working on titties and ass for a living.
ANIMATION
Moneyshot
As part of my research on how to further improve handholding content and give the player more contextual and interactive introductions to our characters, I have been retrofitting some smut to test the waters.
I’ve also made a simple 360 viewable loop and hoping it is something you, the players, want to see more of. Since these would take more time than our usual scenes it is something we'd want feedback on before committing fully to them.
Manski
Right now I'm assisting with lipsync, quality control and polishing our completed Pandora animations.
Lipsync for Pandora is manually animated, as opposed to being generated by an algorithm. As usual in our process, I receive audio files containing edited voice actors' performances. I listen to the audio on loop as I animate the characters' mouths as well as their facial expressions. I find working in stages more efficient: first I animate the mouth across the timeline to open and shut according to the audio file. Then I tackle the lip corners to get basic "Ah's" and "Oh's" mouth shapes. Afterwards, I handle the upper and lower lips to further shape the mouth to fit a vowel, consonant, hiss, inhale, exhale, etc. This process is accompanied with gradual addition and polish of facial expressions. All these manual lipsync animations are also providing our programmers with valuable data to eventually develop an automated lipsync system custom designed to work with our models. This should give more variation to the interactive scenes.
Massimo Decimo Meridio
Right now I’m deep into facial animations for Pandora animations - my latest and current one is Taron with one of our large friends.
Since November I've rebuilt 2 animations, one xeno and one footjob, and both went well!
I also created from scratch a doggy style POV animation having 3 actors in the scene, Lily, Killy and Elaisha, and from what I heard, its one of the first of its kind.
I also animated the lipsyncing with the audio tracks in a couple of Taron animations this block. We are now up to 9 Taron animations in total.
So as you can see, I'm fully immersed into Pandora animations.
Yagskie
I’m still chained up in the basement creating gangbangs, so not much has changed in these last 7 years…
Mendez
I've done some re-targeting and animated a little scene idea of my own between a few of our beloved waifus.
I'm currently working on a solo scene for one of our premium Kickstarter backers. Any sword-master should be as intimate with their blade as possible, and Killi seems to have a pretty unique approach…
This is the first time that I'm doing animation for a scene this complex so I'm pulling out all the stops to make it as juicy as possible.
Brunka
Recently I've completed some animations, including a premium of Lily which you had a glimpse at during the last dev diary.
Now I am back on catgirl duty with our lovely feline waifu, Taron. As we finally received the audios from our talented Voice Actress Milly Stern, I can now focus on her facial animation. Starting with some cuddles with tentacles, and continuing with a pawjob, we are on a sacred mission to deliver to you guys even more Pandora content!
Attila von Fock
Every animation I worked on will have a starting pose, which focuses on strong posing, camera angle, and good composition. We try to find the best frame for the shot, rather than try to make it perfect at every angle, so we can create a "movie-like" game animation. This decision helps us to deliver more animation in a short time, and give them the best artistic look as possible. Once we finish the full set of these, we will research on how to expand and improve upon this system but right now we are focused on getting content out that we know we can make.
PROGRAMMING
Hungry JJ
Hello,
Today I would like to share what I have been working on recently. With each main character release usually comes a main quest space combat mission associated with that character. As you may know from a previous dev diary post, this mission will take place inside a large temple. The biggest difference between this space combat mission and everything else is that it will take place indoors as you traverse through the corridors of the ancient Temple of Defilement. The goal was to make this mission feel like no other in the game so establishing the atmosphere is important. This mission will have obstacles that trigger booby traps and or imperium reinforcements.
Prof. Bang Dev
We made a new level for a special PANDORA scene. It's much more complex than our usual scenes in the nice and cozy Captain's quarters, so I had to be a bit more creative when it came to optimization. I think I don't have to tell any one of you that video games are fake. Coming from that logic, everything in videogames is also fake, even the methods to achieving something. Insides are outsides, there's no pipe and we're all in the matrix. Keep in mind we are still prototyping, so it might not make this next release.
Now, because we wanted to have a ship flying in a tunnel, we obviously didn't want to make the actual ship move. So the only way is to make the world move, not the ship. This is nothing new obviously, most games do that, but we here need a lot of optimization to make our girls move smoothly, because we want to use the resources on them, not on the environment. We made it work by cutting the ship to parts, so we only have to render the parts that are on screen, not the whole ship; and made the inside more spacious so there is more space for the action.
For the environment, I used an inside-out cube, made it long enough to make it look like it's a tunnel, added a panning texture that gives the false sense of movement, and moved it with vertex shaders. Vertex shaders are like pixel shaders, but on the surface's vertices. So I can offset vertex positions and make a surface "move" without actually moving the object. It's precise, and as a function can be applied to different materials – they'll move at the same time, in the exact same way. With this method, I made the outside tunnel and everything in it move together, imitating the ship's movement in the tunnel.
The bricks on the walls are just particles, spawning and disappearing out of sight, moving at the same speed as the texture panner does on the wall. Moving lights on the surface of the ship are also just a material trick that is in sync with the actual directional light that lights up some parts of the ship. I also added several little touches, like moving thrusters, flickering interfaces and such to make it more believable.
But I'm sure that y'all will be very busy looking at the actual action in the scene, and I can't blame you.
Mrs. Mankrik
I have been working on creating Gallery poses from Taron's dialogue animations, and customizing physics to each of the poses. You can look forward to some floppy cat ears on her!
I've been working on interactive PANDORA elements too, like grabbing, pulling, stroking and such. For these features, we're making blend spaces, and simulating momentum with code based on the cursor's position. Basically, we're coming up with ways to implement breast-play right now, which is as fun as it sounds like.
We needed three blendspaces for the breasts. One for position offset – it includes squishing and stretching too, as the breasts move on the ribcage –, one for rotation, so they can actually move like there's a hand grabbing them –, and one for pressing and pulling.
Combining these and giving them momentum calculations was not an easy task, and as we go forward we'll have to adjust them for different situations and scenes.
We hope that you'll have at least the same amount of fun playing with them as I had developing them!
Timmeh
A lot of my recent work has been looking into giving users more control over the NSFW content, it’s also an attempt at bringing the story and the recruitment scenes together. These sorts of interactions and camera movements will need to be configured for scenes and characters individually, this does take a lot of time so unfortunately we are not likely to have interactions like this for our current scenes with the release of the next block.
HentaiKouhai
Recently, I've been working on implementing and tuning Taron's abilities. She's a melee character that moves fast, jumps around, and packs a punch with her pounces and scratches. She scales pretty hard as a fight goes on so she should be a beast on later rounds during missions, provided that she survives.
Aside from that, there were also tuning and bug fixes for all of the new units and a very special boss fight that I can’t talk about yet.
Claudine Coquine
For this block I have been working on laying out the shots and posing the characters for the cinematics.
Before the characters are animated, the shots need to be layed out and timed, and the characters posed, ready to be brought to life.
I am also going to be working on how to improve Subverse´s Dating system to make the experience more immersive for you guys.
Samantha Flowers
Hello everyone, it's been quite awhile since you've heard from me! Some of you may remember I started working on Subverse as a simple (not simple at all) casting director. For awhile now, I have since been upgraded to a sound designer and engineer, meaning I must handle both the creative and technical side of audio for the game.
This includes pulling the selects for all VO files, integrating them into our sound system engine's always expanding library (FMOD), and creating sound events where necessary in Unreal Engine.
I'm sure you're all very familiar with my home land: The visual novel scenes! The place where our VA's take center stage in the game! Not only do I set up the sound in this area, but the choice in visuals as well. (Admittedly, sometimes I make a mess and Mrs. Mankrik has to help clean it up.)
Like most technical things, talking about the setup process of it all is easily considered dull for most people, so at this point I can't help but just want to hurry and share the stellar work our cast has put forward. While they're doing the heavy lifting at the front of our sound stage, it's part of my job to make them shine as bright as possible.
I fell in love-at-first-read with Subverse's script, and I know our cast has too, because it really shows in their performance and their drive to make the characters sound organic and real.
After much demand, here is a Christmas special - the much awaited return of blooper reel!
Also here are some images from me.
ART & MODELING
WTX
With most of the mantic dicks taken care of, I spent the last few weeks focusing on some of the upcoming cinematic sets, which include establishing shots for some of the new locations we'll see in the main story.
Portsman
I'm not very good with words. These are clothes for the girls we have worked on, and there's more coming. They're still in the middle of testing and implementation. All these are subject to changes of course.
ErinTheSketchy
The Graphic Design department is on fire and on a mission to please you! We’re finally updating our interfaces and improving their elements!
I'm currently working on loads of small custom artwork for the new characters' icons and UI visual design for DEVA, grid combat, space navigation, P.A.N.D.O.R.A. and more!
So, what should you expect to see? Skill icons custom-made for the new characters, improved interface layouts and new UI elements are the essentials. A+ to everyone who spots them all!
One of those elements is the victory badges that we show after a successful encounter. The badge can be bronze, silver or gold, so we needed three different versions. I designed several iterations and the general idea was to incorporate sci-fi and epic elements to the design. I wanted the final result to have a strong and clean form while also preserving its artistic feel. The badges are made with extra care and every single light and shadow of the stars is digitally drawn to enhance the 3D feeling, even before the technical part kicks in.
As for the visual effect, we added a few shaders to the icons, so they look even more interesting. To achieve the surface shine, we even 3D modeled the badges, so the surface lights can move believably on it, even though the image is actually in 2D.
We also reused some of the hologram effects that we're using in the dialogues, giving it more of a hologram-like look. We're well on the way to elevating most of the interfaces in the game, so we hope you'll like what you see!
Space nav
Grid combat design
New icons
Bronze badge
Silver badge
Gold badge
Interns
Tibor
Following my epic failure and my colossal downfall as the international ambassador of Subverse in East Asia, as some of you might remember I was dismissed from the project lead position. As Alexander Graham Bell once said: "When one door closes, another opens". Well I am happy to report that now I am a junior Unreal Engine developer on the Subverse project.
In terms of career progression it is a rather unusual path as some of the senior developers could be my grandchildren - that’s how old I am.
But I am ready to fight for the project!
To add insult to injury, I am not only a junior developer right now, but I work as an intern. That means my salary is null. Which does make sense from a project resource standpoint as being new to Unreal Engine, exactly zero dollars per month is what I deserve at this moment in time.
Although having said that, I do have over 30 years C, C++, and a quite reasonable DirectX and OpenGL experience. So I expect to be productive in Unreal Engine relatively quickly. I have already started to experiment with a few things and coding some stuff. I am getting familiar with the C++ layer of UE and with Blueprint too. Since I love the team, I like the project, I respect very much our players who support us, I am on a personal mission to make the game better. If I make the game worse, I will be fired again and deployed as the mascot of Subverse to promote high-tech artificial vaginas of Demi on the next adult show in Tokyo. So please wish me luck with my new assignment. Then I can maybe avoid any further humiliations.
My aim is work on the following items in step one:
- Dating system and Minigames: assist with the Dating system and several minigames. These will allow romantic, intimate but at the same time dynamic relationship building between the player and their favorite waifus. We always wanted to do those minigames as we understand there are gaps between the story, the missions and the adult content. By implementing minigames the story will make more sense and we will be able to contextualize many adult scenes.
- Review and re-assess the reward system and the replayable missions. We understand there are design issues with the rewards and there is a room for improvement in the replayable missions.
- Research the possibility of implementing a reputation system (copyright Halfpint ). This system is in an early brainstorming design phase, but I expect quick progress in the implementation phase once we agree on a solid, robust and scalable design concept.
- Work on cutscene loading using some proprietary, new codecs to mitigate the video scattering issue
We are at 0.3 and I am genuinely convinced that we will have a really fun, high quality and enjoyable game once we deliver Subverse 1.0.
I wish you all a happy and peaceful holiday season, and I hope you all can stay safe from this new Omicron virus.
…and that’s all for this entry, my friends!
May your holidays be full of warmth and cheer! Wishing you a new year full of peace and joy!
Fare thee well!
Bis bald,
Till Eulenspiegel