Current state

Due to elusive "save draft" button I accidentally posted it too early, this is the new updated version with screenshots and gifs added. Text is still the same, aside from screenshot annotations.

Thanks to everyone joining in and patrons continuing their support! 

I'm sorry that didn't make this post sooner, it's just my PC broke down and became unusable (BSOD every 5 minutes), so I've spent quite some time researching the PC component market, looking for what to buy. I'm already ordering new parts and they should be arriving soon. Currently I'm on an old laptop, but I'm still continuing work! 

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I will be returning to the discussion about adult features of the previous post, I got all the amazing votes and I have a good idea of what we can do... But for now I want to put some light on the topic people have been concerned about - why it is taking long time to make a new build. Honestly, we are on the same page with you, we want to make a new playable build just as much, and we're working on it.. hard!

The game is fresh after a very major code and visual refactor - we deleted all the junk and rearranged all the good stuff. Its extremely useful and much more efficient to have clean code again, but some systems have been disabled because of this rework. 

I want to provide you with a list of systems that were done, what is being worked on, and what is on road map of the upcoming builds and future. The list is giant, I don't expect you to read through it all, but at least check the bold text first, it contains condensed information about the game systems and their status.

Yet another map iteration design sketch, I'll do a post dedicated to it later, but we're already creating art assets for it (textures, models, etc). It's pretty much set in stone that the next map will have a desert + canyons + oasis type environment.

LEGEND:
✔ - Implemented and functional so far. There might be some additions to it later.
❌ - Was done before but now removed/disabled, will be reiterated on later.
🔃 - We're currently working on it or improving it.
⚠ - Not yet touched upon, future plans. 

1. Content System  ✔ 

PURPOSE: Core system that loads all the game content, manages mods, their load order, assigns object IDs, etc.
STATUS:  ✔  Implemented! Freshly reworked. 

INFO: It's a very technical, probably often neglected, side of moddable games, but this is what makes it possible for more content to be just added by dropping mod files into a specific folder. There is no custom mods to enable yet, but even the content we make it's considered to be the "core" mod. The system also handles how mods should behave over multiplayer when joining a server (perhaps even automatically downloading and enabling the right ones later on). Recently it has been rewritten to improve C++ code accessibility and overall stability, nothing too exciting but extremely nice to have for us.

Declaration of all content classes, put in nice and clean macros functions. 

2. Action System ✔

PURPOSE: Core system powering active abilities, movement, weapons, emotes, animations.
STATUS: ✔  Implemented! 

Action system is the base of all player interactions, it's a generic concept, I know, but that what the system is - it is generic and makes a foundation for other systems. It also has been reworked and improved multiple times over the year, now its highly modular, (quite) stable, and working as intended!

3. Movement System 🔃

PURPOSE: Moves the character in the world.
STATUS:  🔃 Reworking - partially reimplemented (missing features and doesn't yet work in multiplayer). To be showcased in the next build and finished afterwards.

What you've probably seen in the previous builds was us tinkering with default Unreal Engine 4 movement system, but we've decided to remove it and write our own custom one. It's not an easy task and it's not finished yet, but its quite amazing so far! It's simply more fun to control, built on physically accurate formulas it delivers a robust foundation for many ways of travelling across land, water, air, or even zero-g environments (not something we actually planned, but why not, if it can do that effortlessly). And thanks to it's modular design it will give us and modders a lot to play with. Currently we haven't gotten to making it work in multiplayer just yet, but we will later - after all, gotta see other players move around too!

New movement system with animations hooked up, looks similar to the previous one, but feels much better and smoother... Plus the Hizathri leans when you turn :}

4. Animation System ✔

PURPOSE: Plays character animations - breathing, walking, swimming, falling, jumping, climbing, interactions, emotes as well as social and sexual animations.
STATUS: ✔ Implemented! Freshly reworked.

Plays the character animations at the desired conditions, such as walking animations when walking on the ground, falling when in mid-air, etc. We improved on the tools that Unreal Engine 4 offers, teaching it to work with mods that would add new creatures and new animations to existing creatures (after all, anyone can make them using Blender). It's also very streamlined now, which will help us making more animations of sexy scalie butts wiggling around and interacting with each other (yes you know what I mean).

Swimming animations in the new movement system. The new smooth quaternion rotations make it look like you are truly in water and not bound by gravity, so if you turn around you can swim belly-up :}  Water effects are disabled for better visibility. 

5. User Interface 🔃

PURPOSE: All user interface, HUD, settings, etc...
STATUS:  🔃 Reworking - to be partially implemented in the next build and finalized afterwards. 

Old UI was removed! The code part is still here, but the graphical part was completely removed because of the redesign we wanted to do. I already posted how it's going to look like - but that is just a Photoshop file, still gotta put it into the game. The process is similar to how websites are made.

6. Bodypart System 🔃

PURPOSE: Character customization: body parts, skins, colors, clothing, accessories.
STATUS: 🔃 Almost done reworking, will be in the next build.

Previously we had a very hard-coded system, allowing you to only change predefined slots. Now it's a completely modular, nested system, inspired by Warframe. For example, horns are attached to the head, which is attached to the body, and the body comes from the creature you selected. The system allows you to navigate deeper inside, like subfolders in file explorer, and change everything to your heart's content! Models, shape sliders, skins, colors.

New customization system - still lacks proper UI and icons, but it works and changes bodyparts in the nested format fashion. The little <B button opens the customization interface for the selected bodypart.

7. Interaction System 🔃

PURPOSE: Using items, interacting with objects and other players.
STATUS: 🔃 Reworking it, like, right at the moment of writing this.

Recently we re-iterated the idea of interactions, joining many other little systems under one roof. Interactions such as licking have very similar properties to weapons, which are also similar to usable items... So it makes sense to combine them, but by doing so we have to introduce some changes, even in controls and UI.

8. Save System ✔

PURPOSE: Saving and loading game state.
STATUS: ✔ Implemented.

Pretty self explanatory, game automatically saves and loads all the progress, backs it up, cleans up unused references after removing mods.

This shows the save system refactor in action which also got nice macros to simplify saving any kind of fields...

9. Player Account  ✔ 

PURPOSE: Recognizing returning players on the servers, authorization, permissions, communication (chat).
STATUS: Implemented.

What players immediately will see is that we now have a fully working chat system! Players can set their names and personal color choice, system is also responsible for recognizing returning players and it puts them in control of their own characters.

10. Camera  ❌

PURPOSE: Provides a view into the game world.
STATUS: ❌ Removed, placeholder for now.

I already told quite some time ago that we made a good camera system... Well, long story short, it wasn't good enough and we decided to remove it for now and re-do it again. It's very important to have nice camera systems in games, but for now it's just returned it to a placeholder state - a very basic camera, which is to be changed later.

11. Dimension system ✔ 

PURPOSE: Handling dynamic level loading, level settings, randomization, interiors, home instances, in-level biomes and regions.
STATUS:  ✔ Mostly implemented, but needs more work in the future.

The game world is made out of levels that change when a player goes through The Gateway, the system gives the ability to select the destination and modifiers for it, such as adding rain to a world they are visiting (more about Reality traveling later). Loading times are hidden because the game keeps running while another level is loading. Every level (dimension) has multiple biomes that provide temperature, pressure, electricity and other elemental properties of the region, which directly affect the simulation. Values that are too extreme are taxing or damaging for some unprepared creatures.

All the old textures you saw in the previous levels are very outdated, we're making some good new ones!  

12. Inventory System ❌ 

PURPOSE: Manages inventory, item reactions to the environment or damage, drops, crafting.
STATUS: ❌ Disabled, outdated. Will be reworked after the next build.

We decided to redesign the inventory, items and crafting, make it more suitable for the gameplay we're aiming for, as well as optimize on the program level. Regular simple crafting or gathering resources isn't the focus for our game, so we came up with something elegant and creative just for our needs. I'm very happy and excited about what it will be like - but that is a story for another post.

13. Combat System  ❌ 

PURPOSE: Equipping weapons, elemental influences (damage), hitboxes and projectiles.
STATUS: ❌ Currently disabled, reimplement after next build.

While we had combat working and you could even shoot things, currently the system is disabled because it is outdated - the rest of the game systems went forward and we haven't touched on it yet, but we will do that soon.

14. Elementals ⚠ 

PURPOSE: Enemies to fight, defeat, loot. STATUS: ⚠ Not implemented, design & develop in the future. It's important to make elementals look very neutral so no one has hard feeling about destroying those - they are not alive or sentient, just simple robots, golems, or environmental anomalies.  

15. Simulation System ⚠

PURPOSE: Simulating life. Health, stamina, fatigue, status effects, diseases, digestion and other body processes, pregnancy, birth and growing...
STATUS: ⚠ Placeholder, design & develop in the future.

This is the very system that is supposed to set our game apart from others, aside from the sexual freedoms and living as alien creatures... ah wait, that's still the part of simulation, uh, nevermind. We're leaving the best for the last, seriously its a giant system, currently it is just a simple health and stamina bar. Later on, after almost everything else is rock solid and tested with multiple builds, we'll get to work on this very important part.

16. Knowledge Tree ⚠ 

PURPOSE: Player progression, unlocking content, storytelling.
STATUS: ⚠ Not implemented, design & develop in the future. 

Aside from us leaving some links for it to use later, there hasn't been any serious work done on it yet, this is definitely a feature for later. With this we will give players a meaningful and rewarding progression through the game, roughly speaking, it's a non linear, branching list of things to do.

17. NPCs ⚠ 

PURPOSE: Non-player characters to meet and interact with.
STATUS: ⚠ Not implemented, design & develop in the future.  

Boy we're gonna have a lot of fun with that!

Sergal model textures were done recently as well, Question is though - Should I spend time to put them into the next build or wait for the next ones? We already have Hizathri there, which is probably enough.
I'll get back to the adult theme, but for now I just censored it here (full version is on our discord server for now). All models have genitalia modeled by default in the erect state (this is to be able to properly animate it all), so when I post a so called "T-pose" they are gonna have it proudly displaying.

Here is a bonus GIF of wild sexy underwater spinning moves ;}.