Hello Photographers! Fresh off the back of Steam Next Fest and the first time we have launched a demo for Sapphire Safari, we have had some great success! The feedback has been fantastic, and we have been focusing on building those extra mechanics, as requested by the people who played our demo!
The Sapphire Safari demo has been downloaded over 30,000 times! And our Discord community (join here: https://discord.com/invite/mzNPSRMrbv) ranks have swelled as well! I wanted to spend a few moments addressing the questions and responses given both in the Steam reviews and in forums/community channels.
Question: Why do the Human faces look like that?
Answer: The models themselves are really nice, our team has done a fantastic job with them! The issue people have been seeing is the lack of any real lipsync and detailed face shapes for the lipsync system we have already. There is no shortcut to making this nicer, it just takes a lot of care and time to do it right. Time we simply ran out of before Next Fest started. This is something we want to fix, it will be corrected as soon as we can! However, we do need to address other features and concerns first. Before the Steam Early Access version drops (version 025), we will be tweaking the current system to reduce the issues. A full fix will take a little longer to achieve.
Question: The creatures never touch or seem to never align correctly during sex, why does it look like this?
Answer: The animations in Sapphire Safari for sex are made using Bunets models. Every other creature in the game (humans included) have different sizes and dimensions, so what you’re seeing is the animations attempting to correct it but thinking the models are touching. We will be correcting this using Inverse Kinematics or IK for short. This is done by telling invisible joint locations where they are supposed to be touching during animations (so this hand, grabs this ankle) and then IK will try to correct the location of the joints so the meshes are not colliding incorrectly.
As you can see in this picture we have been focused on getting IK to both act as a repulse and drawing towards mesh, if things are clipping inside mesh (in this case fingers) it will actively push them out until they sit on top, and in the case of floating hands or joints it would pull them towards the mesh until they collide. It will allow us to confidently move forward with our animation pipeline without needing to drastically focus on size compatibility.
Question: Why are there no male creatures in the game? I want the game to have more straight content!
Answer: Mostly because it would take a lot of time to build those assets. Post Next Fest, we concluded that it would indeed be a big benefit to the game to include Male variants of each species. This will require a good chunk of time to complete, it would need new models (duh), new vocal work done, new masculine general poses, and likely other things as well. It would also have to come AFTER the IK work has been fully completed, as we want the Male counterparts to offer more silhouette variety to a species. So the Caiadaly Female is a small classification, the Male version will be a medium size. Consider it officially added to the upcoming feature set.
Question: Why do all the creatures look the same? Shouldn’t there be more variety in how different two Bunets are from each other?
Answer: Yeah, we could do a lot more to make the variations different. As of the next patch (v025) each creature will have an overhauled texture for their variants that add a lot more details to their fur and scales, with patterns and unique markings. Also, we now have a Breast size randomizer in the game options for players to tweak as they like. The options include Standard (breasts as they are designed for the species), Smaller, Medium, Big, and Random. Random is all shapes and sizes, for the most variety. The specific sizes just offer some small variants from their base design. Creatures like Caiadaly, who is flat chested, will not get the option to change her breast sizes.
These were the big questions that most players had during the demo launch, what surprised me the most was how much players enjoyed the game as a whole, since the average play time for the 30,000 people that did play was about 1 hour. Crazy.
In other news, the roadmap has been updated to reflect the new updated goals and features, I want to make it as clear as possible what our plans are so no one can get confused with the direction we are heading in!
Future content is broken up into Phases, with Phase One in current development right now. Each new Phase is a new environment to explore, with additional species and content to be added following the example set in the plains region.
There has also been an update to the system requirements panel to add additional clarification to Sapphire Safari’s needs. The big changes are the exposing of VRAM requirements and a recommendation for SSD storage.
We hope you all have enjoyed your time with the Sapphire Safari demo! The feedback has been excellent, we are eager to get more! See you on March 21st for the release of v025 and the long awaited Steam version!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1526900/Sapphire_Safari/