[RPG Maker MV] Captivity (Porting to Unity)

[x3Darkie]

Ohai there. Guess who's back? Yep. It's me. The guy who never releases an update. Without going into specifics, the long story short is that, I had a retail job for awhile now. I wanted to quit to work on the game full time, so I had to spend quite a bit of my time both during work and off work to train the new guy and pass off my responsibilities and shit to him before I can actually leave. That's the reason I've been on a 1 and a half month-ish hiatus. There's no punchline to this story, it's just one of the things that comes with having a retail job.

So starting from now (or tomorrow), I will be working on the game full time. At the moment, I'll be working on various concept arts of characters I have in mind for awhile and draw a few pages of the manga while I readjust to drawing on a shitty wacom tablet. And I'll be posting these on the Discord so it doesn't feel like I'm spamming the forums. Speaking of which, I'll start being pretty active on Discord from now on. So if anyone wanna chat or whatever, just hop on to the Discord channel.

Another major announcement is that since I'm effectively unemployed now, I will be accepting art commissions until my Patreon campaign gets to a sustainable level. Y'know, just so I won't have to starve on the streets. I will release details about this sometime in the future, so look forward to that if you're looking to throw money at someone to draw you art.

[Darthjake]

I'm not afraid of hell, I've worked in retail.

I feel your pain...

[Gidshiri]

Full-time work? Oh, sounds good

[x3Darkie]

I know I said I'll only be posting these on the Discord channel, but this character's design is just too good to NOT post it on the forums.

I'll leave it to you guys to speculate what role this character's gonna play. After all, this is still going to be a very story driven game. Hint: It's not a coincidence her design directly contrasts the player character's. ;)

[x3Darkie]

Yes, I know what I said, put down your pitchforks. I'm showing you this again because this is effectively going to be in the game as a bust (with some tweaks here and there before actual implementation). Maybe not totally to scale, depending on how much I crop and place it on the screen. But this is pretty much the quality of the busts you can expect to see in the game. I'll also slightly animate busts to make them look more alive with DragonBones and include an option to disable animations if you prefer non-jiggling boobs and static images. But why would you do that, you sick fuck?

That face screams "I'm evil."

[Lenbasisky]

Hi, i wanted to know if i could give you my services for the art for free. These are some examples of my art:
http://lenbasisky.deviantart.com/gallery/

I know that in my portfolio, there aren't NSFW stuff and only sexy stuff yet, but i wanted to see if my style could interest you first.

[FMC]

Totally not the main antagonist of the game, right? Been wanting this game for a while, so I'm happy you're back. Maybe when I get paid again I can get a commission from you. Depending on what your rules are, of course. xD

[x3Darkie]

Hi, i wanted to know if i could give you my services for the art for free. These are some examples of my art:
http://lenbasisky.deviantart.com/gallery/

I know that in my portfolio, there aren't NSFW stuff and only sexy stuff yet, but i wanted to see if my style could interest you first.

I somehow completely missed this post. Sorry for the extremely delayed reply.

Well then, 2 things, I took a look at your artwork, but unfortunately I don't find the style to be a good fit for the game. Then again, I want the game to have a consistent and "standardized" artstyle. Meaning even if I do accept free work, it's gonna need to imitate my style to the letter.

Second, I usually don't accept services or help for free. I have no idea how to word this nicely, so I'll be completely blunt. People who work for free usually have less of a commitment compared to someone who's on a payroll. So I can't really expect people who work for free to follow my standards (for a lack of a better term) and/or instructions to the letter. In cases like this it usually results in lots of delays whenever someone doesn't deliver on time. So I'm highly against accepting free help at this stage. I do however, have plans to commissioning help when I got the game to v0.1 and Patreon rewards properly setup to start generating more revenue. So then I'll start commissioning help.

Totally not the main antagonist of the game, right? Been wanting this game for a while, so I'm happy you're back. Maybe when I get paid again I can get a commission from you. Depending on what your rules are, of course. xD

An antagonist, yes. Her color palette is literally the opposite of the player character's. But whether or not she's the main antagonist I'm not gonna reveal at this stage to prevent spoilers. :3 That said, the story is effectively done. I've outlined the plot (including the ending) and everything on physical paper. So while I am making shit up as I go, the story already have a definitive ending. So rest assured I know which direction I want to take the story.

I think I totally forgot about wanting to do art commissions after I last talked about it. One of these days I'll actually figure out my prices and whatnot so I can actually start accepting art commissions.

In other news, at the moment I'm finishing up the lineart for Ryugami and Kerry's bust. After that I'll move on to redrawing a large part of Player's bust since I don't like the angle of the torso. And once I finished Kyle's bust I'll have to work on the sprites and the map, sourcing music and sound effects and coding the UI, main menu, functions, movement and the sort. ...and that's the amount of work involved just to recreate what's in pre-build 4.4 right now on Unity. (Yes, I'm whining. I have the rights to whine like the asshole I am, damn it!)

Also, quick note: I've ultimately decided against animating the busts due to too much work involved in separating layers and rigging them together. Hopefully the busts will be animated someday, but at this stage, the idea's scrapped because separating layers all day long is literally going to drive me mad.

[x3Darkie]

Ohai, it's me again. The update is not ready yet unfortunately. You have no idea how much work it takes to create a game from scratch. Coupled with my lack of experience and being a one-man team, the update has been delayed time and time again. (This is what I do, I procrastinate and whine all day.)

So anyway, the news this time is that I'll be implementing some Patreon rewards ahead of schedule. Initially, the plan was to only include proper Patreon rewards once the game hits v0.1, but at this rate, I wouldn't be able to continue working on the game and have to get a day job because of family pressure and all that (I'll spare you the personal details.). So, in the next day or so I'll make the Wyrm tier (10$) rewards* available for Patreon pledgers and the Hatchling tier (5$) rewards* as well after a couple of days later. (I'll explain why the 5$ tier comes after the 10$ tier down below.)

The Patreon tier rewards I had originally planned remains unchanged, so if you pledged 10$, you'll get 1 week early access, the original resolution h-scene CGs and the original resolution busts. 5$, you'll get 1 week early access plus the original resolution h-scene CGs. BUT, while I do have a lot of CGs sketched, they're just that. Sketches. They're not presentable yet, that's the reason why the 5$ tier (specifically, the original resolution CGs) will come later. But for now, if you pledge 10$, you'll just get the original resolution busts. When I release the original CGs pack, 10$ pledgers will automatically get those as well.

And here's some samples so you'll know what you're getting.

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Right now there's 31 busts in the pack. 5 characters, each with multiple expressions and outfits (and lack thereof) that makes up 31. So...yes. Please give me money so I don't have to abandon all my work for the past 2 years on this game.

The pack has been upped, so pledgers of 10$ will now have access to the original resolution busts. The CG pack will come later.

[x3Darkie]

Ohai guys. I'm not dead, obviously.
But, quick post, I'm currently streaming me drawing CGs for a couple hours. So come on in and shitpost and flame me for still not getting the next update done.
https://picarto.tv/x3Darkie

In other news, I'll probably set up a regular stream schedule so you guys can watch my progress live. So yeah, that'll be fun.

Update: Stream's over! There wasn't a lot of people who came to check it out probably due to timezone and/or because it's a weekday. Thank you for those who came though!
I'll stream again in the coming Saturday and/or Sunday. If you wanted to see a specific CG in the next stream, y'know, reply what you wish to see in this thread.
And for those who missed the stream but still wanna know what I did, here it is.

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

[x3Darkie]

Next time I should actually mention the timezone of the date I'm gonna stream on... But eh. I'm streaming right now! Come on down and watch me draw titties and/or chat.
https://picarto.tv/x3Darkie

Streamed for a total of 11 hours. I was initially planning to stream on Saturday PST/EST as well, but this shit is tiring. I don't know how streamers make this their living.
But here's today's stuff.

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

[FMC]

I can't wait to see how that particular pic gets used. ;P

[x3Darkie]

Happy April Fools everyone! I'm making this post in an attempt to keep this project relevant and to give you guys a pseudo-progress-update. Click here for latest blog post. Sorry there's no April Fools joke this year. I forgot to prepare one. But yes, Happy April Fools! And I'm still pouring my heart and soul and tears into it and I know I should be killing this project by now so I could pursue less ambitious projects but I make bad life decisions.

[Car6on]

Just tried the demo. Very nice!
Great story, art and nice characters.

Great work ^^

[ophis]

Hello,

I just found your game today and tryed it out. Even if it's still very early in development i realy enjoyed the plot, as gender bender and beeing stuck in a video game are some things i really enjoy. The few images you made where also very nice.
It's unfortunate that you don't seem to have the time to really work on it, as i see your updates a very far in between.

Hopefully i'm wrong and you are still working on it. But it's the sort of project i would have been happy to support if i saw more progress.

[x3Darkie]

I'm glad you enjoyed what you played so far. But I am still actively working on it. Though things are going slow due to various factors regarding development and my lifestyle at the moment. The main contributing factor for the lack of update is due to my poor planning. Porting the game to Unity requires me to create original assets which I'm just struggling with. I know at this point what I say just sounds like a whole bunch of excuse, which is true in a sense. I can't help it if I lack the skill set, okay? That's why I'm trying to develop my skills so I less bad at game dev.

On another note: I'm fairly active on Discord and posts new character art and stuff when I'm ready, so check that out if you'd like.

[x3Darkie]

Hi guys! How's that development hell, huh? Anyway, to get the shilling out of the way first, you should join my Discord server or even LoK's unofficial Discord server since I'm fairly active there.

With that out of the way, the game's still not dead. Lots of things are still trying to get done because I can never quite finish them because I keep reworking them and tweaking them which I SHOULD really just stop and get the release done already and stop being such a perfectionist. On the bright side, it allows me to put out higher quality shit instead of lower quality shit. Especially for this example, she is definitely vastly less shitty looking than all previous iterations I've done of her. And while I normally only post artworks and small progress updates on Discord, I felt like this warrants a dedicated thread post since she's the protagonist.

So here we go, the long overdue final artwork of the protagonist. And also a UI mock up of conversation stuff.





also i should get back to streaming but i cant find the time or motivation to do so because im a mess