She sure looks happy, I wonder why…?
That, we shall know in a later update…
I’m really having a lot of fun with the expressions. Basically, I made 10-ish sprites for the eyes, another 10-ish for the mouth, a couple more for the eyebrows and a few additional emotions sprites (like blush or the angry-anime-symbol), and made a shuffle button that randomly takes one sprite in each category and slap them on the face of the character. And I literally just spent the last hour pressing that god damn button.
I think that’s all I’m going to do with the expressions until the next update ; it’ll be technically functional, but it’ll remain a “loose” feature for now, independent from the dialogs. The reason why is because I’m also working on additional interaction options and the dialog lines that come with it, and… Well that’s a whole lot of dialog lines to write, and I don’t think I’ll have time, on top of that, to reference all the sprite combinations to make interesting expressions and map them to each dialog lines.
So what I’m gonna do for the next update will be focus on the lines I have to write, and leave a debug button for you to have some fun with the faces. Then, for the following update, I’ll start making a list of all the expressions I want to use and map them to the dialog lines, so that the expression of the character will change according to the situation she’s in. I’m really excited to get this done, as it’ll be the second step to make the characters feel a bit more unique and alive !
6 Likes
Maybe in a future update could we have a selection of clothes?
Clothes are definitely planned! But it’ll take a bit of time, as I’d like to have a couple more proper quality body sprites before I start working on it (at least the “empty” sprite for each available sizes), and producing the sprites of the clothes might also take me some time.
That’s the kind of work I’d like someone to help me with, but I feel like I can’t ask someone to put their time and efforts into an half-assed game. My goal right now is to produce enough features for the player to actually have something interesting to do, and once this little demo can be seen as a proper small game, I’ll start asking for some help for the sprites and writing.
6 Likes
So did the hard drive swap trick work?
I haven’t tried yet, life is a bit busy these days and I still haven’t looked into that…
1 Like
Newest version is up on itchio!
I added new interactions when you click on the character. She’ll react differently depending on how stuffed she is, her current status and where you clicked. Technically, she can also react differently depending on her weight, but I haven’t made the dialogs for that yet…
I also worked on the emotions and added a debug button to generate a random emotion. For now that’s pretty much all there is to it, it works, but all the dialog lines have a “default” expression bound to them. All there is left to do is to define a few emotions and associate them with the dialog lines, and voilà. And of course, all of that is entirely customizable, so if you want to create your own emotion with the available sprites and associate them with a dialog line, you can now do it ; I updated the documentation to reflect these changes. All you need to know is in the readme of the gamedata/Personalities folder.
I also tweaked some code and started a memory leaks hunt. The leaks were very small, a few kb here and there every time you loaded the game for example, so nothing really dangerous. But it was there, and it was bothering me. So now all the leaks have been plugged.
Finally, a quick heads-up, but I’ll be quite busy with work in the next few weeks, so development will slow down a bit. But I’ll do my best to keep working on the game nonetheless.
8 Likes
Hey, I just tried out the new game it seems you introduced a little bug. When the girl is full the game crashes with this error.
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object oStatusDisplay:
string_replace argument 1 incorrect type (undefined) expecting a String (YYGS)
at gml_Script_ProcessDisplayLine
############################################################################################
gml_Script_ProcessDisplayLine (line -1)
gml_Script_DisplayReactionSpeech
gml_Object_oStatusDisplay_Draw_0
I’ll investigate this, thanks for the report!
Edit : Found it, it comes from one of my refactors ; before, when the character ate something, her stats were calculated after she said her dialog line, so the dialog line that was selected could be wrong. So I changed it to only display the dialog line after the new stats were applied. But when the character is stuffed to the max, she isn’t supposed to eat or drink anything else, so there’s no dialog line for that and the game goes potato. I reverted to the old method, the fix is up on itchio.
1 Like
All this new dialogue is so nice to find. 
1 Like
Amazing stuff so far, can’t wait for the rest of the weight phases to look as nice as the lowest one
Gotta ask though, is there an upper limit to stomach capacity? i’ve gotten my character to the point she can eat 3 melons before she’s completely full and i’ve been tryin to go further
also the burps do it for me, would be great if we could get a bit more variation
chuck that on the lower end of priorities tho
I’m glad you like them! But right now these are only placeholders. I would have liked more variety, and different lines depending on the character’s weight, personality and so on… But I didn’t have time to write it. I’m very bad with words and this part is a huge motivation sink for me, so for now I kept it simple.
Thanks, I too can’t wait to be done with the sprites. It’s very time consuming, but at the same time it’s quite interesting and I feel like I’m learning a few things.
Regarding the stomach capacity, I indeed put a limit to it. I’m going to change things a bit when I start implementing the economy as I’ll have to actually balance pretty much everything, so this maximum value might change at some point.
When I have a bit of time, I’ll go through the sfx archives I have downloaded to see if I can find a couple more burps sounds. This reminds me I really need to add the authors of these archives in the credits…
2 Likes
Wish we could freely cycle through all the expression pieces. XD
Well, it’s not exactly an in-game feature, but this will be in the future customization tool.
And I’m currently working on it. At first, I wanted to wait for the game to be finished before I started developing an additional tool to modify the game files, but the json files are becoming quite large and are starting to be a bit painful to handle by hand. So I decided to start working on the customization tool right now, so that I would have a tool that would take care of formatting the files for me. Here’s a sneak peek:
I don’t have a lot of free time right now, so I’m trying to keep it simple and easily maintainable. I’ll start using this tool as soon as it’s finished to create the expressions and associate them with all dialogs. I might also bundle it with the next version of the game, because why not.
8 Likes
Ooooo~ Looks interesting!
Hi guys, it’s update time.
No new version available yet, there’s still a few things I want to look into. But I though I’d write a small report regarding what I’m working on right now.
The customization tool took quite some time to develop. It’s not even complete yet, it just has the base functionnalities. I still have to include a bit of documentation and instructions, a few extra QoL functionnalities (backuping files, merging files, sharing options, …), and catch a few errors. But as it is, it can absolutely be used to manage the game files, and I am currently using it to add the expressions and emotions to the dialogs. I’m not sure if I’ll include the tool with the next version though, as there’s still a bit of work to be done, but maybe I’ll add it to itchio as a standalone alpha test build. But I’d recommand not using it directly with the game files for now.
Regarding the game itself, I modified the dialog files structure in order to make the personality system a bit more versatile; before, only one trait could be used to map the dialogs to the character, meaning for example that if your character had the feedee and curious traits, only one of them would be used to fetch the dialog lines of your character. Now, I differentiated the “kinky” traits (feedee, feeder, gainer…) and the “personality” traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neurotism…), and every “personality” traits are now used when determining which dialogs to map to the character. So, if a character has the “feedee”, “curious” and “callous” traits, the game will first fetch every personality traits that have been defined within the “feedee” trait (if it exists), then add every dialog lines from the “curious” and “callous” traits (if they exist) to the character (and if at some point in the process, no dialog lines have been returned, it will use the “default” traits).
I also started to look into shaders. Right now, I’m using separate sprites for each color variation. For example, for the hair, there’s one set of sprites for black hair, one for blond hair, one for pink hair… Which means every time I want to modify or add a sprite, I need to do it for every single color variation and import all of them to the game. In other words, it is neither practical nor ideal. Instead, I want to have a shader do it for me: every time a sprite has to be rendered, I’ll give the shader a list of colors to replace with another list of colors. This way, instead of managing 8 sprites for each of the 3 hairstyles, I only have to manage one sprite per hairstyle, and whenever I want to add another color I only have to define a new color palette and the game will handle the color swaps for me. This should allow me to easily put more variety in the character creator, like introducing skin colors without having to manually color swap a hundred sprites.
So that’s pretty much it for now, and that’s what you guys can expect for the next version. Expressions aside, it won’t exactly be noticeably feature-heavy, but in the background a lot of work will have been done to improve the game on the long run. I’m not really sure when I’ll be able to deliver it, but I think most of the work has already been done.
15 Likes
Thank you for the progress update. You’re doing God’s work.
2 Likes
New version available on itchio !
All dialogs now come with various expressions, to make the characters more lively. I made some modifications to the way the dialogs are handled to try to make the characters a bit more unique. Even though right now the dialogs are just a placeholder, so there’s not that much variety… And on top of that, I decided to change the dialogs for each existing personality, and they all share the same lines for now. Since this is supposed to be a placeholder, I didn’t want to spend too much time on it, so I decided to minimize the number of dialog lines I have to manage for now. I’d like each personality to have their own dialog lines, but also their own facial expressions. So for now, I’d rather focus on one single set of dialogs/expressions, and later down the line when I have more time, I’ll work on properly implementing the other personalities.
However, if you don’t want to wait that long, now you have the tools to give it a go. Yup, the Customization Tools are here! These tools will allow you to:
- Create new character personalities, edit them and delete the ones you don’t want in your game,
- Create your own expressions and emotions for any existing personality, modify or delete them, and use them in any dialog,
- Write your own dialog lines, modify the existing ones one by one or in batch, and delete the ones you don’t like.
All that without having to open any json. The Customization Tools are taking care of writing the right lines at the right place, creating any necessary folders and files for you, and should not let you do anything that could break the game. Now, this is something I rushed a little, so it isn’t pretty, it’s bulky, and there might be a couple glitches here and there… For now, be cautious when using it. Backup your gamedata folder when you launch it, and if a glitch breaks any json file, please report it here in details (if possible, tell me what you were doing when it broke and include the file you were working on) and download the spare gamedata folder on itchio if you didn’t make a backup. Also, if you have some suggestions on things to include in these tools, share them! I can’t promise everything will be possible as Game Maker has a couple limitations (especially regarding external sprites), but I think any idea is worth considering.
Here’s a short list of what I’d like to add to the tools:
- Sharing an merging options : use your own gamedata folder to create standalone personality and dialog files to share, or merge files you downloaded into your own gamedata folder to include personalities and dialogs made by someone else.
- Custom palettes : create your own color palettes to apply in game ; hair, eyes, skin, clothes…
- Sound library : add your own sound effects and musics
- Of course, various minor glitch fixes, ergonomy improvement and quality of life modifications (the pop-up warnings are annoying. I know.).
The Customization Tools come with a short userguide, I hope it’ll be enough to make it easily usable. Also note that if you delete an existing personality and load a save that used that personality, the game will assign that character a new personality depending on her traits right after loading, so the game shouldn’t break. Likewise, if you delete an expression, it will be replaced in every existing dialog for that personality by the “default” expression if it exists, or the first expression in the list otherwise. Finally, note that the tools are only compatible with the latest version of the game forward, so anything you’ll produce with it won’t be compatible with versions 0.2.4 and lower and will break them.
Now, for the final big change of the update. I am now using a shader to handle the color swaps, which will allow me to easily add more colors to the character creation. As of the latest version, the game already uses this shader and doesn’t use multiple color-swapped sprites anymore. Instead, there is a single sprite for each element, and the shader applies the correct palette when rendering the sprite. For you, it absolutely doesn’t change anything for now, so it probably isn’t very exciting. But this could allow me to move the color palettes from the game’s code to a json file, which would be editable through the Customization Tools as mentionned earlier. It’ll also allow me to easily include more diversity in the character creation. I have already started to run some tests to include a couple skin colors for example, which I’ll try to include in the next update. Now, because of the new shader, the game’s performances have taken a bit of a hit, but in my opinion it’s definitely worth it, and it’s not like it’s a very CPU-intensive game to begin with. I still have a lot of room to spare, and I made a lot of effort to optimize the draw pipeline as best as I could from the begining because this shader idea was in the back of my head for a long time.
And I think that’s it for today! Now that all this is done, I’ll try to improve the character creator a little and make use of that fancy new shader. I’ll also get back to work on the graphics, keep improving the portrait sprites and work on additionnal sprites for the facial expressions. I’d also like to implement the economy, balance the food items and weight system, add a shop (to go with the economy) and a couple more rooms to the character’s house. I’m not sure yet in which order I’ll get all of that done, but that’s what I intend to work on for now. Also, once I’ve added the economy, the inventory will be completely reseted and the “refill inventory” debug option will be replaced with a “give money” option. This way, I hope you’ll give me feedback on how abundant money should be in order to keep the player entertained and give him a reason to come back to the game once or twice a week without frustrating him too much. I’ll also probably add a “character edition” debug option, so that you can play with the new character creator options without having to create a new character.
And as always, please report any bug or crash you encounter, I’ll do my best to fix it as fast as I can!
21 Likes
Alright, I think I’m about done with the character creator for now. Time to start coding some actually new features.
13 Likes
oooooh, monster girls? Any others that may be added in the update like lamias, scyllas, etc.?