We'd like to give a warm welcome back to the general public! Since this is the first update of the month, it will be available to everyone.
For those that support us on Patreon, you know that last week we discussed putting together an updated trailer for YouTube that will allow us to dodge the adults-only tag. This black mark unforunately destroys us when it comes to the algorithm and made the trailer very hard to find and display.
Apparently YouTube doesn't like sexy spider-women talking about being inseminated or horny cat girls straddling our protagonist in front of a fire, so we're going to replace both of those sequences.
One will be of Trel standing up on her legs Doctor Octopus style and intimidating Victor during their first meeting. The other will be Sheela standing solo in the jungle looking sexy.
Here's a very rough, unlit preview of the Sheela sequence:
Those abs...my god.
The updated trailer is expected to hit early next week, so we'll post it for everyone as soon as it's uploaded. Then there will likely be a separate update post at the end of the week exclusive to our Patreons.
GALMINE POLL WINNING OUTFIT
One of the perks of being a Ride the Lion Patreon is getting to vote on our sexy outfit polls! As you can see in the video and from the preview pics below, we've completed Galmine's most recent outfit and it turned out really damn good.
We're currently doing some revisions to Kacerie's model, so once that's ready we'll have an outfit poll for her to celebrate!
BIRDERMIC TECH
Also featured in the video is a simple but important environment tech that we've developed. It allows us to give the appearance of having many birds on the screen without severely impacting performance by actually having a ton of 3D models in action.
For those that have read the books you know that this is key because the pelagornis, aka the orange birds, are a menacing presence faced by the tribe all throughout the first book.
You'll fight them several times to defend the cave while your fort is being cosntructed, so this tech gives us the opportunity to make them even more intimidating. We can also control the speed and density of this effect, so we can get exactly the feel we want.
3D TO CONCEPT
Right now we have the entire map constructed in 3D and fully traversable by our actors. However, we still don't have a 100% clear idea of how we want it to look. That means we benefit greatly before making the detail pass by having a solid concept artist show us the potential of these piles of polygons.
What we do is take a video and many screenshots of the important areas and pass it on to our artist, like the one below:
Then they come back to us with an awesome concept like this:
This gives us exactly what we need to add the necessary details. We'll show you an updated comparison once we finish the detail pass on the map, but this will happen later down the line when we look to upgrade from alpha to beta.
PROLOGUE ANIMATION
If you've read the Tamer books (and if you haven't, you can get the first one for free...SO WHY HAVEN'T YOU?) then you know all about the epic pool party with Victor on Earth.
You can also see exactly how it looks in the Tamer Visual Novel, which is available on YouTube for free.
Here's a playlist of all the current visual novel videos!
As soon as the studio finished reading the books we began to discuss if it was viable to recreate this Earth sequence in 3D. We quickly came to conclusion that while we really wanted to do it, it would take a ton of additional assets like over a dozen hot babes in bikinis.
This would be a massive resouce sink and didn't include any actual gameplay or romance scenes, so we decided to pass on it.
This also extended to Victor's arrival on Dinosaurland after the initial alien abduction.
Here he meets shark-man-warrior Heracula and military monkey bro Sergent Kelg right before they get into a big scrap with some deinonychus.
Since we already have some excellent 2D art and an amazingly talented animator that is happy to work with us, we decided to repurpose these visual novel assets and create an awesome 2.5D parallax animation to kick off Tamer!
This will not only look awesome, it will massively cut down on the runtime before players get to the actual game. We didn't want everyone sitting through 45 minutes of cutscenes, so we know this will be the best solution to get the critical prologue information across while still setting a good pace.
And since we have the actual VN available, players still have the option of watching the full introduction on YouTube.
We're going to try and finish this before the end of the year, but it might get postponed until Q1 2024 depending on how production goes and what requires our attention.
WHAT'S NEXT
Next week on our Patreon we'll have the new trailer for the game available. See you there!