Breeding Season Revival

[VintageBass]

Can I have that cow girl? She's so cute and also so sad, I want to cheer her up and make her happy!

[HaremManic]

Have I announced anything about throwing my hat into the ring?

If I just want to say that:
One I will create a monster girl battling game that rivals pussymon, I'm almost ready to go public with it under a new name
Two I will make a breeding game as ambitious if not more ambitious than breading season within a reasonable scope so it can actually be made.
Three I am bad at checking the day or time so I'm not sure when or how often I'll update. If you have tips on keeping people informed please PM me.

Thank you

[evildumdum]

Have I announced anything about throwing my hat into the ring?

If I just want to say that:
One I will create a monster girl battling game that rivals pussymon, I'm almost ready to go public with it under a new name
Two I will make a breeding game as ambitious if not more ambitious than breading season within a reasonable scope so it can actually be made.
Three I am bad at checking the day or time so I'm not sure when or how often I'll update. If you have tips on keeping people informed please PM me.

Thank you

The more games the better. Best of luck to you.

[ValturNaa]

Sounds like fun. I've been looking to build a monster battling game myself along the lines of pokemon/pussymon but haven't figured out the personal spin I want to throw on it. So many possibilities but I'd love to see your take. As far as keeping people updated, the only suggestion I can give you is to keep track of a specific day in the week and try to keep people updated on that day. I also have a horrid sense of time, and I typically do things whenever I feel like it. Breakfast at 3 pm, lunch at 10 am, and so on. All depends on when I woke up that day and how invested I am in what I'm doing. I tend to alternate between super engaged and bored to tears. There have been times I've written on a novel for sixteen hours a day, and there are times when I spend weeks in such a sour or sad mood that I don't get anything done at all. That usually comes when my ambitions so far outstrip my abilities that I spend days making zero progress.

That said, I hope you'll follow our project also. I think we're coming close to being ready for a demo release, and our goals are very similar. Our product may or may not be what you like, but at the least I hope you'll give it a try.

[pornomancer]

Breeding season seemed like a great game, but I thought the number of pairings would have become mathematically impossible to manage after a short while. It just wouldn't have been able to cater to the variations possible. Other games don't seem to manage that in a good manner either.

[ValturNaa]

That is a problem, and one we are attempting to find solutions for. It's a complicated issue, and I for one would love to discuss professional-level animation tricks for such animation systems with people who know what they're doing, whether that be a teacher in a class or a talented animator. But even without that, we'll find a way. Whether it's a good way or not. For now we're restricting ourselves to just a few types while we work out the larger animation system.

[GoRepeat]

Breeding season seemed like a great game, but I thought the number of pairings would have become mathematically impossible to manage after a short while. It just wouldn't have been able to cater to the variations possible. Other games don't seem to manage that in a good manner either.

You just need swappable base parts so multiple animations can be reused without too much obvious repetition between characters.

[ValturNaa]

Swappable body parts...that sounds similar to what I wanted to do (standard skeletons where you can change the character map being used in any given pose) but more easily applied to the visual ATL editor laird is building for us. Thanks for the tip. Maybe we should get you on a hot line to get your take on the methods we should be trying to use for our goals in the game.

[livingforever]

Exchangeable body parts and a skeleton system are the exact same thing.
The idea is to seperate the baseline animation by animating an abstract object (commonly called skeleton) instead of the actual sprites and then map sprites onto the bones.

Take a look at Spine, for example. It's a visual editor for 2D animation using that approach and allows you to create and export skeletons & skins (which can be applied to the skeleton with one line of code). Spine also has a runtime for PyGame.
Alternative tools for the same approach are DragonBones and Spriter, but I am not aware of a Python runtime for those.
Regards,

oL4F

[ValturNaa]

I have tried to use spine (it is the only animation program presently supported by game maker studio), but have not had the money to buy it (and the free features are shit). I have played with spriter in the past, and with unity as well. The difference between the two is that in unity, there are no bones, just sprites. The sprites directly receive any rotation, translation, or scale applied to them, and other body parts built on the same basic design can be swapped in with the same conditions. This also applies I believe to flash animation, though I have not tried that system myself. It's the same result by different means. Especially on the coding end, the two methods can be viewed very differently, though on the animation end they are similar and on the gaming end it doesn't matter which was used.

Tell me, do you do much animation and do you think you could help design a system where multiple poses can be animated each for multiple bodies, without necessarily using a flat side view like the LoK games?

[livingforever]

Indeed, Spine is very (overly?) expensive. Its primary selling point, compared to similar products, is the high amount of runtimes, available for various programming languages. In any case, it was only meant as an example - imho, understanding and simplifying the artist's workflow is very important to build a productive environment.

Unity also uses the same idea by maintaining a hierarchy where the sprites are part of the bones and therefore inherit their values for animation, it just doesn't always use the same terms. Essentially, it's closer to the programmer's view of the problem, but it's the same thing on the "coding end".

I, personally, don't do any kind of animation (other than the occasional Microsoft Paint(R) smiley for testing purposes, complete with rigging, inverse kinematics and stuff). I did spend some time writing systems to improve the pipeline between artists and programmers, so yes, I most likely could help.
However: First, I'm biased against RenPy and frankly, I have almost no experience in dealing with its ATL.
Second, I don't think you need my help "designing" it, unless you need advanced features like inverse kinematics. For the simple use cases that I would expect from a project like this, all you need is a parent object that handles all the placement and a replaceable child object with the texture/sprite attached to it.
Regards,

oL4F

[pornomancer]

Breeding season seemed like a great game, but I thought the number of pairings would have become mathematically impossible to manage after a short while. It just wouldn't have been able to cater to the variations possible. Other games don't seem to manage that in a good manner either.

You just need swappable base parts so multiple animations can be reused without too much obvious repetition between characters.

Sure, thats the easy part for each pairing. But what I mean is that BS got bogged down under the number of mathematical combinations.

First pair of creatures:
M1 + F1 (+1 animation)

Add one female
M1 + F2 (+1 animation)

Now add one male
M2 + F1, F2 (+2 animations)

Now add one more female
M1, M2 + F3 (+2 animations)

Now add one male.
M3 + F1, F2, F3 (+3 animations)

Now add one MORE female
F4, M1, M2, M3 (+3 animations)

Adn one MORE male
M4 + F1, F2, F3, F4 (+4 animatons)

Aaaaand you get the idea.
At 4 males and 4 females, thats 20 animation pairings already. Scaling up becomes increasingly difficult at that level.
The partswap system is easy, but creating that many custom animations? Unless one set of skeletons can be kept totally constant for all positions with addons for kink effect (all females have the same animation for all creatures), its going to get out of control quickly. I think thats what killed production on BS.

[ANooB]

One body was used in the original LoK. The reason it worked was because the perspective was kinda forced as a 3/4-side profile hybrid. The torso was the only thing that was turned 45 degrees. Nipple placement and appendages (including head) were all side profile views. And there were at least 10 different sex positions that you could make. Now with 2d skeletal animation, you're allowed to apply a mesh to your 2d art and transform along the contours for a realistic 3d effect using one 2d resource. That will definitely be your best route. It does require an exceptional amount of skill to do, however.

[ValturNaa]

I've been studying the LoK files for a while now trying to figure things out, but didn't want to restrict animation to a side view if I could help it. The other possibility that occurred to me is doing every body part at a whole bunch of angles so we could use full-on, 3/4, or whatever was suited to the animation.

But I'm loving that suggestion about 2d meshes. I didn't even know that was a thing. It reminds me of lattice deformation from my brief dabbling in 3d animation. Took me most of the day yesterday to track down enough information to really understand the reference. I'm going to look into it further and see if it has any application to this project (and down the line, perhaps I can start to use it in my gamemaker projects, which already supports a program capable of handling it).

[ANooB]

see it in action for yourself. Requires unity web player, so you'll probably have to run it in internet explorer or firefox:
https://2d152a4ae3677c5ebfd46a0995c7ad9 ... k/web.html

The gifs and a brief tutorial are on this site if you don't wanna run the web player:
http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/two-g ... ation-3059

[ValturNaa]

I've seen some very interesting demonstrations like this, also bubba found some animation sequences made using a single, uncut image the other day. Apparently spine is already equipped with mesh deform tools, and spriter pro is building some in as told here. Laird believes that he can eventually add this into the editor he is building for us (for now it does a pretty simple but functional animation with moving sprites) so perhaps, one day, we can add a nearly three dimensional, really high grade animation style in this game.

[ValturNaa]

Well, sorry for the recent silence but there have been some interesting developments. First off, we have had to release Shames from the development team today due to a combination of unnecessary drama and failure to complete the tasks he was asked to do. He has talent, a lot of good ideas, and a fun personality, and though we had some arguments, I for one am sorry to say I didn't see any other solution. Thankfully, he seems to have retired gracefully rather than causing a big scene, and I hope it remains that way. I have been asked to fill the role of art director despite my not being officially part of the art team previously, and due to my primary talent as a writer I feel very inadequate to the task. I will lean a bit on the artists and do my best to fill this position. Although he does not feel up to the task of making this statement at the moment, VintageBass will be our new PR man, and already has some marketing ideas to employ once a demo is off the ground. We have also recently added a new artist, Coinicopia, and he has proven invaluable in character designs that had previously been added to the ever growing pile of "eventually we'll get there".

Finally, Evildumdum has been consulting with a highly skilled coder with extensive knowledge of Ren'Py's systems, and has identified several areas where the battle engine may need to be restructured. This will set back the coding end of things a bit, but things have not stalled in other areas and we are still on track. I hope to unify the art and screen style over the next few days, a task which shames sadly left for others, and polish off the last of the screen designs soon after.

[Ungawa]

The best advice I can give is that it's best to just try to keep as transparent as possible as well as keeping the drama down. Hopefully, Shames can add to this in other ways besides being on the main team (fan art for example) while everyone is amicable.

Other than that, at this point, the only thing I can say is to maintain the flow and hope that everyone keeps on while these small shifts come up.

[evildumdum]

We've had a few days to restructure and the effect has been minimal. Keeping drama down is exactly what everyone is after. The main thing that is taking so long is that we want the demo to be an actual playable game with at least several hours of gameplay in it rather than just proof of concept. Quality takes time, but it's getting there especially with our 2 artists working together so well. Quality is something that the indie porn game world sorely lacks due to most developers being solo and unable to fill every role to a high standard without grinding to a halt, so hopefully we can begin to expand that niche.

[ValturNaa]

I agree. Sadly, the lack of resources to replace is one of the reasons we had to let him go, and his leadership of the art department was almost nil. But already I feel like the art *team* is coming together instead of being a bunch of individual artists.