Dragons Coming Soon!

Hey guys,

I've been working like crazy to get dragons into the game for ya, and they're almost ready!

Since the previous update I did a lot of rework on the textures, deciding the original plan of using only changes in roughness to imply scales wasn't detailed enough, bit I didn't want to go overboard with the normal mapping either because normal mapping doesn't look 3D in VR and I also felt heavily normal mapped scales didn't match the aesthetic of the other characters. I decided to go subtle with the texturing, so if you get up close, or you're small, there will be obvious scales on the surface, but from a distance the surface looks fairly smooth, with the scale details appearing in the specular highlights. I also completely reworked the chest scale textures, so the divisions between the scales are represented with normal mapping and ambient occlusion to darken the separation between plates.

The Substance Painter file for these guys ended up being a nightmare, because every color combination is in a single file and every time I need to update something on one of the dragons I gotta find all the places where I set the colors for it and change those over. It's a huge pain but I have things about as organized as I can get them now and have simplified some of the mess I made while tweaking stuff to try to find what worked best.

But there are also three different Substance Painter files to cover all the various parts and color options, so I had to manage those as well, though I found some shortcuts to getting the colors to match up across the files thankfully! I don't know if it would have been better or worse for all the parts to be in a single file to begin with cause there are a hell of a lot of pieces and layers to color them!

Anyway... I tried dozens of different color combinations, and I've settled on these nine for now!

You may also notice they all have different body types! There are around fifty different blend shapes to tweak with these things and I wanted to cover a wide spectrum of shapes and make each one look as unique as possible from the rest. There are probably a few too many with blue hair, but I can't tweak them forever... I've gotta get them in the game for you!

I also gave some wings and some not for the sake of variety, I'll probably add a wing toggle later. Wings are going to present a problem for a lot of positions like laying on a bed, though for that I'll mitigate it with a folded wing position eventually. But they'll also be in the way when you want to see the action, and they're likely going to clip through arms grasping the waist in some poses as well. I thought about just leaving the wings out for now until I found a good solution, but they look so nice I decided instead to just have some with and without so you can work around any issues for the time being.

Dick types are also on my list of toggles I intend to add. These avatars have three built into them, the one you see here, a long tapered one with no sheath and balls, and a human style one.

I may tweak the avatar colors a bit more later, but only a little. Part of the reason I've waited so long to give you an update is because I didn't want anyone to get too attached to some color scheme or body shape I came up with but then discarded!

I will definitely be adding more skins though. And there's at least one more body type I want to add... an aquatic dragon, with fins!

I also want to note that the skins being fixed to specific body types is only temporary, so I can get the update out as quickly as possible! My plan is to add a dropdown to the main menu to allow you to select from different skins for each avatar. But that will take some time to code. When that's in though, along with the aquatic dragon, you'll have a hundred combinations to choose from!

Why didn't I just go the character creator route and let you adjust the sliders yourself? Well, a couple reasons. First, it would take a while to code that. I'd need to add another menu with sliders, figure out how to save your settings, etc. I've got other more important features I need to focus on now like interactivity. And second, I've played other games that allow that level of customization and when I'm in the mood I don't really feel like having to tweaking hundred different parameters to get something that looks good! And tweaking colors directly in-app, which is probably what you'd want since I've given you a wide range of body shapes, is never gonna be an option anyway, as that requires complex setup of textures and materials and special shaders. And that's too complex for something of minimal benefit when there's so many other better things I could be spending my time on adding to the game!

Anyway, that's all for now. The next step is to rig the models up. I need to add dynamic bones because for some reason they have none, and do all the setup for the tail posing and orifice settings. Hopefully that will go relatively quickly since these models are all identical just with different blend shapes enabled for boobs, dick, hairstyle, horns, etc!

PS: I've attached high-res versions of the pics below in case Patreon scales them down!