Lewds, Gateway, and the hub world

I present you with this month's work! We've worked on making the Gateway activate and spin as it should, levels load in and out, player's characters travelling between realities, hub world where the Gateway itself stands (and where the houses and dragon NPCs will be living eventually), and some more work on the lewd interactions.

Hub world

Starting off with the hub reality progress, you can see it is quite different from the concept I drew before. Now it's a bit overgrown and has an overall warmer feel to it, rather than a lone floating island in the cold void. Its important for me to make this place feel comfortable and welcoming like home. 

Instead of white crystals I went with darker ones to contrast better with the vivid grass and surrounding landscape. Also didn't want it to look like ancient greek/romain ruins, while I like them a lot, I wanted to give this place a distinct non-human-made look.

The floating island is made to be expanded later - as we develop more areas (and later as player progresses through the game) the central hub world expands with more floating islands situated on each of the four directions. This is a pathway to a desert region, where other sides of the central island will lead to frosty mountains, a tropical sea, and an alien forest... Designs for those are not finished yet, but I'll try to make it unique looking, while still preserving this warm, homely feeling.

Contemplating whether I should turn this body of water into relaxing hot springs...

Those rings will provide access to the remote parts of the hub world - the idea is to make it big, not to pepper it with content, but to provide a meaningful and inspiring scale to this world.

This is only the central part of the hub reality, with a bunch of temporary assets holding the place for proper buildings, but you can already see it taking shape, and I think its a big improvement over the concept art I shown before.

Gateway

As there is no video embed support on Patreon, I will have to rely on big fat gifs to show the Gateway activating sequences, however ill attach some videos at the end of the post if you want to see them in full quality!

Players explore realities to gain knowledge and resources to progress through the game and unlock new content. 

Realities are like dungeon instances, except they don't have to have the dungeon aesthetic. The big open hub world is always available for players to peacefully explore and roleplay in, while realities provide most of the gameplay content, challenges and minigames. 

The time the Gateway can stay active is limited, when it runs out, all the travelers will be returned back to the hub reality (they can also extract at any time before if they find the extraction point). 

When activating, the Gateway first dials the address of the reality (it needs a key crystal for that) then, upon manual activation it will start transceiving - meaning it will both send and receive creatures at the same time to or from the connected reality respectively. The creatures who wish to be sent need to stand in the Gateway while it's spinning its rings, while ones who wish to be extracted back need to find the special extraction points.

Since realities are separated from each other, can have various sizes, feature different content and vary up their gameplay, once we properly finish up all the systems, we're planning to be releasing single realities as a content updates every once in a while.

LEWDS (nsfw section)

Can't make the new build without having what is the foundation of our key, unique element of our game - the interactions. 

Each character comes equipped with two distinct sets of peaceful actions they can perform - interactions and emotes.

Interactions are special "skills" that can be done onto other characters or objects, the player needs to aim them at the area they wish interact with. Interactions include abilities of communicating, petting, licking, putting your fingers into things, humping orifices, etc. 

This is how aiming an interaction is performed. Inspired by how some games do combat systems, where you can inflict various types of damage depending on where you hit the enemy, we decided to go with a similar approach, only for peaceful interactions instead.

Interactions are like skills/spells, they are not hard-coded into a "context menu" of each object, its the abilities your character personally has and acquires new ones over time. 

Performing those abilities affects other characters and the world in systemic ways - licking someone's genitals will give them a pleasant time, while doing the exact same licking interaction to a water surface will just hydrate your character.

This is a very different approach from other furry/nsfw games, instead of making animations where only an exact predefined amount characters can do predefined poses selected from a predefined list, we make it that you can just intuitively control what your character does. You don't even have to do nsfw things with these interactions, for example, licking something doesn't automatically imply lewd.

Yes, the contacting bodyparts might be not as precisely aligned, so this approach doesn't come without drawbacks (mostly it's not even that visible though).

But in my opinion, the overall gameplay and roleplay capabilities are much greater and more involved this way, not to mention the modding compatibility, where you can just out of box make two characters from completely different mods be able to lewd each other, no special API or other compatibility patches required.

Also gotta make sure the camera now focuses on the action and you can orbit around it and comfortably view it from all angles. 

Please ignore the blinding yellow dot (which is the part of the UI feedback to let people know that the object can be interacted with) or the fact that sergal was floating in previous gifs.. or the fact that all the animations are not yet final - it's all work in progress ^^

Emotes are actions that your character does to themselves, such as dancing, laughing, laying down, suggestively raising the tail, sucking themselves off, etc.  

We just started working on this, but if you're expecting an MMO-like system where you just type /dance command or select a "Praise the Sun" emote from a list - don't! 

The way it's going to work is first you choose the emote, such as "relax" and your character sits on the ground... However if you start pressing your directional keys (or controller's thumbstick) your character will change their position accordingly, lean on the side, lay down, turn around and lay on the back, spread paws, etc. 

This will allow you to change poses naturally, which is a very necessary feature for roleplaying, after all you gotta give your friends a good view, a pose they can perform their "Interactions" on :}

Again this is a very early prototype of those actions but it shows the ability to change poses by pressing directions, as I'm only pressing "W" in the gif, it changes poses on the camera orientation, just like character movement. No animations have been done yet, just the temporary placeholder static poses. And yeah he has a boner because that's just how the models behave by default :}

If you ever played Arma 3, think of the various firing positions/stances you can choose - this feels pretty similar to that.

Hope you enjoyed the update post! Soon all these things will be done and I can't wait to have you play with them :}

Ah also forgot to mention... we have a chat system ready and working now as well (it gives weird random player names at start), and multiplayer also works once again! So much work being done...