PocketSweeties 2 Devlog #1

Hey Gamers,

Discord invite

Last time we had our big announcement for PocketSweeties 2.
We've made some really good progress and we are super excited to share this today!

If you want to stay up to date with the latest progress then please check out our Discord server. Our Full Pass members have access to the exclusive Secret Sweetie channel on our Discord server. We use this channel to regularly post our work in progress and behind the scenes content of the game.

(Please keep in mind that everything you see if work in progress and a lot of refinement will still be made to everything.)

Let's start with the most exciting part, Thicc The Bat. Last time we showed you the T-pose of her model. We worked really hard to fully rig and weight paint the model. We made a couple of poses to test out the rig. Test poses are really important to see what the limits are of a rig. If a certain pose doesn't work you can go back to the weight painting and improve on the rig. We really like some of these poses and might add a couple of these to the final game.
While we were working on the rig we also made several test animations. We put a lot of special care into the face rig to give Thicc The Bat lots of fun and sexy expressions.

Our first 3D environment for the game is a legally distinct creature garden called Nostalgia Island. We have loads of different environments planned for the game. Our next environment is going to be the hub world of the game. So please stay tuned for that:3

We wanted to go for a stylized look that will work well on mobile and compliments the art style of the character. We were inspired by various early 2000-2010 games and tried to recreate the look and feel of those games.

A big important thing for me was to have different variants of the 3D environment. So far we made a day, dusk, night and rainy version of the island. We are thinking of making a snowy variant of the island as well. If you have any fun ideas for backgrounds. Please let us know!

For PocketSweeties 1 it was really easy to add multiple backgrounds because they were just simple 2D images. But for this game it takes us a bit longer to make a fully 3D background. This is also a reason why we wanted to have variants of the environment. It is an efficient way of using existing assets to create more content. But also to bring more atmosphere to a game.

We've added a lot of subtle things to the backgrounds such as god rays, animated palm trees and particles to the waterfalls. We are planning on adding ambient sounds as well to make the atmosphere of each environment even higher.While AP was hard at work on the model and environment, I was busy with all the gameplay features of the game. Lots of different systems were made this month. And progress is going really well.

Here we have a rough work in progress of the boob dragging system. I still need to adjust loads of things to it such as the weight and how far you can drag the boobs. But we were really excited to show this to everyone. We know a lot of you enjoyed the boob dragging system in the Tori scene. So we wanted to add that back. We will def add the milk squirt option to this as well. We are also planning on adding butt spanking to the game as well.

You can tap on Thicc The Bat to earn money. You use your money to buy cosmetic items, backgrounds, music and more.

Various setting systems have also been made. The biggest would be the "rotate phone screen" option. This way players can choose if they want to play the game in portrait or landscape mode. We've also added a FPS counter that players can toggle on or off. This was a good way for us to test the performance of the game. We noticed that some lower end phones were having trouble running the game. So we also added buttons where you can switch between different resolutions making the game run better on lower end phones.

We also animated the logo in the title screen. But we still wanna add more things. Such as a 3D model of Lily (our mascotte).

Making a 3D game takes a lot more time and effort then a 2D game. But has many advantages compared to a 2D game. The initial setup is longer because more steps are involved. But in theory more content can be produced faster with a 3D setup. For example, with a 3D body you can reuse the same model and you will only have to make a new head.

You start with a sketch and then use that as your reference to make your 3D model. Some artist can skip the sketching part if they know exactly how anatomy works. The test girl we showed in our announcement post was actually made without a sketch. But in general it's always better to have a reference sketch. The best way to setup your sketches is to have multiple angles. You pretty much only need a sketch of the front and sideview.
After modeling you will need to unwrap your model which is basically taking the skin of your 3D model and making it flat. That way you can paint a 2d texture and put it on your model. Often the 2D textures can look straight out of a nightmare. I def see a scary face in the body texture lol.

One of the biggest and most time consuming things is weight painting your model. You first make a skeleton of your model and then tell each bone how much each bone influences the skin. This can be a tedious process because often you don't know if your weighing is correct until you've made a few test poses and see where your model breaks.

For us the most time consuming part has always been preparing/making the assets. The animating part is usually pretty fast.

Here we have some early screenshots of the 3D environment. It took us a while to settle on the final look and feel for this island. We tried lots of different textures and changed the size of various parts of the island multiple times to not make it feel just right.

The Nostalgia Island is actually really small compared to the skybox and the background elements. The mountains are actually just flat 2D textures but they add a lot of atmosphere and make the sea less boring.

There are a couple of ways to overlay the user interface in a game. For the title screen it's actually attached to the camera. But it's also possible to have the UI as a whole overlay because if you parent the UI to the camera, objects can still fly through the UI.

The way the UI works in Unity is really strange. They have the UI as a giant object in the sky. But during gameplay you ofcourse don't see this.

I've put an MP4 preview in the attachment of this post that showcases some of the sounds of the game. We aren't allowed to directly post videos in a Patreon post. Hopefully they will allow NSFW creators to do that in the future.
So what is next? Our next big steps are animating the model and making the outfits for Thicc The Bat. We also need to record new voicelines for her and model the male character of the game. Our current big goal is to make a playable alpha version of the game as soon as possible. We have an internal deadline for this and will reveal more info about the release of the alpha version in the near future. So please stay tuned for that!

We hope you are excited and looking forward to the game. We can't thank you all enough for the awesome support you have given to us. If you have any questions please let us know. We would love to answer them.

Kind regards
KeeBee and Alternate-Pass