Hello explorers! Man a whole lot has happened since we released va004 of Sapphire Safari on Itch for our early adopters. The feedback and support have been absolutely amazing and we have been on the top sellers for a while now! The energy surrounding the project has renewed our vigor considerably and we have been hard at work making the next patch.
Before we get started though, thank you very much for your patience in waiting to hear any sort of news from us, it took much longer than I anticipated to get my new house setup, then we had a funeral and lastly, my family and I were hit with COVID, 3 years of avoiding it only for us to get nabbed now. Feels bad man. The rest of the staff has been working diligently though.
So production update time! We have expanded our team with a second programmer! His role right now mostly consists of adding extra features into the game, stuff that we were considering adding in much later once the core gameplay loops have been added. Things like our UX for the main menu and other things.
Main Menu
The biggest feedback we received for the first build was the lack of the main menu, so we got you! Originally it was going to be something really simple but the new programmer has jumped into it with both feet giving us a 3d environment to float around.
This is just the first pass at least, from this menu you’ll be able to look at your photos, your upcoming quests, the new Monpedia function, choose your playable character (male or female), and choose the island destination along with the time of day you want to explore in!
Game settings wise we have all the standard stuff, which should allow for older hardware to tweak settings as they need for better performance. We also will have values in there for choosing how the Futa content works in the game.
- Off.
- Low spawn chance.
- Medium spawn chance.
- High spawn chance.
We are not 100% sure how we will handle the content offerings if Futa is turned off completely (stuff like quests taking a photo about Futa etc), but that is a problem for future us.
Other notable settings are the photo output changes, basically, you can set up how big the photos the game takes will be, options right now allow for matching the current resolution of the game, along with scaling down and up from that point. Naturally taking massive photos will impact the game performance.
- Scaled Resolution
Photo exported at a percentage of game resolution. Exporting at 0.5 is 50% creates an image half the resolution experienced in-game. Warning high values may cause hitching when taking photos.
- Fixed Resolution
Export images at the specified resolution. This may provide images framed differently from what is seen in-game depending on the monitor aspect ratio. Warning higher resolutions may cause hitching when taking photos.
Monpedia
This feature is very exciting to talk about, basically, as of the next patch (hopefully), we will have the first iteration of the Monpedia, an auto catalog system for documenting the wildlife on the Sapphire Islands.
Filling out the entries for a species increases the familiarity which will allow the player to get closer to the Monster Girl and eventually open up interactions with them.
Doll System
Alright here is the big cheese, the whole reason for our move to UE5 and the main reason we had massive downtimes from the original release of Sapphire. The Doll system is our overly complicated interaction system with ultimate customization for interactions with an unlimited number of participants. Let me elaborate…
Each position in our game requires a tone of prep and planning. Since every pose will need to have a tone of locking points created and those points documented correctly.
This next build will include the Missionary position and configuration options for that pose as well, and maybe the Jacko pose as well. Depends on how long it takes. However, each model in the game is capable of matching these poses and the system will intelligently blend these poses together. So if you grab buns leg and pull it to an unrealistic position once you let go of the leg she will move it back to a more comfortable position.
These customizations sit between animation loops and facial expressions. Here are some better examples of this in action.
Also in terms of insertions, we are working on a “rubber” type system to not leave weird-looking gapes. Manually fitting everyone to all Monster Girls would end up being a lot of work so building something more automatic is ideal.
Narrative
This is a really interesting portion of development that should help deliver better experiences to players using our systems and such. The basic idea of the game is as follows:
The Sapphire Islands are discovered, they are teeming with brand new species of animals called Monster Girls who have shown alarming curiosity for Humans. The first team of scientists/explorers head into the islands and eventually stop communicating with the outside world. Your job is to follow in the footsteps of the first team and discover their whereabouts. The secondary objective is to document the wildlife.
In terms of NPC’s here is what we were considering to help deliver the story. Keep in mind the names will likely change in the future.
First Team:
- Bucky: The team's Anthrozoologist. Bucky has a reserved type of personality but is constantly compared to his father's achievements. Wishes
- Claire: The team’s Ethnologist. Very eager to make a name for herself Claire is the type to dive into any opportunity and get her hands dirty in the process.
- Chad: The team’s Ecologist. By the books and professional in every regard. Chad is also the most senior on the team.
Second Team:
- Player Character Oscar (male): A wildlife photographer known for his extreme patience and award-winning photography.
- Player Character Jamie (female): Fresh out of college and ready to make a name for herself.
- Professor Frida: Advisor and handler for the Second Team visiting the Sapphire Islands, she will be running the ship and helping plot the course for the duo of Oscar and Jamie.
Whatever character you choose the other will become an NPC who has their own tasks and roles in the game.
Timeline
The last point I want to bring up in this post is our early adopter release timeline. We want to give ourselves at least a month per patch to do three “sprints” of development with one sprint for testing and bug fixing. This means that each patch should drop at the beginning of each month if nothing explodes. This next patch we are looking to drop around September 1st.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1526900/Sapphire_Safari/
All done, looking forward to your feedback!
Kinky