Development Blog 1

This is our first development blog so please give us input on whether you like the length, consistency of writing and whatever else you possibly can make up to critique us!

The contents of this blog are separated into each a TLDR and a long portion. TLDR for anyone that doesn't like lengthy story-times, long for anyone who wants to listen to development adventure stories.

Since I, Helltaker, am writing this, expect sections of this to have a certain humorous underlining.

Current State of Development

In the first week of February 2022 we released our founders Pre-Alpha to showcase the general concept of the core sex gameplay. We got a lot of positive feedback and loads of critique & bug reports. 

Plans for the next build

Now that we have been able to play-test and get feedback on the first execution of our core gameplay mechanic, we are going to fix issues starting with how well the core gameplay loop plays out, over technical bugs and finally including more polished animations.

The next build is going to be called Alpha 0.6.9 and will not be limited to “Founder Status” Tiers any more. You can expect this Alpha to be downloadable between end of February and mid of March 2022!

Helltaker´s Dev Adventures

We got loads of feedback on the blocky face animations. Short story - they were actually JUST blockouts and never intended to remain in the game. We are looking forward to giving you more juicy and fluid facial(s) animation in the future!

A bit of history first.

We started development of A nut between Worlds in June 2020, more than one and a half years ago. In the time from there till now we slowly grew our team from 1 to now around 10 active individuals (with more on call when needed).

Originally the game´s concept was a simple single room experience, focusing mainly and solely on the sex gameplay. We quickly discovered that Melody´s “real world” adventures gave us a lot more to work with than we initially anticipated. There was loads of lore already being generated both by her and the fanbase.

As huge fans of Isekai Anime we decided to incorporate existing lore and create our own Isekai story, where players venture into Melody´s world and live through a hopefully life changing adventure - with all it´s (w)holesomeness!

The first year was mainly spent on writing game design documents, building out first concepts of the world and most and foremost continuously developing our characters' look.

The look and style that we went with has many reasons. 

For once, when we did test classic cell shading we quickly discovered that it would hurt our long term “per scene setup efficiency”. Cell shading is highly dependent on very specific mesh structures and a lot of other technical complexities - especially if you want to bring it to “the next level”.

With our characters being the main interest in our game, we decided to take the risk and develop our own unique style to make them the focus of your attention. We incorporated a mix between traditional NPR (non photorealistic) and PBR (physically based) rendering techniques.

We love our current style! But we will continue to develop the look and style until the final release of the game, whenever there is time and budget for it.

As seen with the approach we took with characters, we will eventually share many stories of long term investment into pipeline research that cost us months and months to go through each phase of development. 

We take this seriously and want to build a product that lasts and redefines what it means to be a hentai game.

Let's skip forward to December 2021!

We released our trailer and opened the patreon just in time before the winter holidays. But instead of just making you wet (wait) for a few months until we handed something playable to you, we pushed on through the holidays in order to bring a playable product to you as soon as possible. 

That meant loads of overtime on some artists and developers and loads of burn on personal energy levels too.

The result was worth it though! Finally we were able to play through our ideas and also share them with you!

So what actually is the current state of development?

Early February 2022 we released both our pre-alpha and a somewhat working demo of a mini arcade game that eventually will become part of the playable world for the full title. Both the arcade and the pre-alpha received overall positive feedback, lots of bug reports and positive critique and feedback. Most importantly though: 

Your feedback was pretty much spot on with the results of our internal preliminary play-testing.

The pre alpha had to fight with two major issues:

• Technical Bugs
• User Experience

We will resolve all currently existing technical bugs for the upcoming Alpha Build.

The User Experience is currently is not fully communicating to the player which options they have available. We got a lot of requests on specifically that topic.

The upcoming build will address this by making the selection process extremely clear.

What are the goals for the next build?

The next build will focus on creating a “playable hentai show”. We will take core systems we developed for the sandbox and simplify them down to create a single highly polished experience.

While the pre-alpha shared with you shows a lot of our initial intentions of player freedom and expression freedom, the next build will focus on making sure the characters, the animations, the facial expressions and all interaction types can stand by themselves.

That means we will be temporarily removing all unused HUD elements that involve orgasm, excitement and lust tracking.

So instead of playing a “numbers game”, we will have you play a fully fledged (s)experience that focuses on letting the player know what's going on through audiovisual cues, instead of having to look at some bar on the side of the screen.

Our vision for the game is to first of all focus on immersive experiences, then the quality of our audiovisual execution and finally the quality of interaction types.

That means we split the upcoming build into three major target sections:

• Transitions
• Base Loops
• Interactions

Transitions

Transitions can be full animations that move the characters from one position to another. They can also simply fade to white, if an animation is out of our current scope.

Base Loops

Base Loops are usually regular looping animations that can, but not must, have variation blendspaces. Variation blendspaces allow to blend between fairly similar variations of the same pose, adding a lot more visual variety to a base loop. Base loops can also be longer, more specifically varied loops. In some cases a base loop can also be a single long loop to allow for more directed storytelling inside of each scene.

Interactions

Interactions are specifically designed as either single action or looping types. Single action could mean a slap, while looping types could be squeezing her tits and moving them with the players hands.

Additional terms that are added for this stage of development are:

• Cues
• Panties

Cues

Cues are audiovisual components that introduce interaction and scene switch types to the player. This can happen either through an NPC asking the player to do something specific to them. It can also mean that the player receives a dialogue prompt to ask the NPC to be able to do something to them. A cue can also be any other type of clear cut communication between the characters that the player should easily be able to perceive.

The goal with cues in general is to create a system that allows us to unmistakably communicate the next possible action.

Wrap-Up of this section!

Alpha 0.6.9 is going to remove anything resembling a pure sandbox experience, solely focusing on the sexperience storytelling. You can expect this Alpha to be downloadable between end of February and mid of March 2022!

So you've experienced these nice facial animations in the pre alpha, huh? 

Yeah … we all did!

Let's start at the beginning ...

Around a year ago we hired a friend of mine to rig for us. We initially set out to create our own blender based pipeline for working with body and face mocap. We got kind of halfway to a working pipeline but the budget grew totally out of hand and mid development we had to pause it.

Since the financial burn was pretty high on that experience we basically mistrusted the process and, instead of continuing down that path again, we went and tried multiple other tools from Rokoko plugin for blender, over Faceware for facial capture, to the full iClone pipeline.

But with all those additional tools, not only was the learning curve pretty steep - each new tool introduced a whole slew of new issues.

So after nearly a year of back and forth between different solutions we ended up scrapping anything in relation to classical mocap (for now) and only kept working on face mocap. But time was scarce and with the trailer release being close, I decided to make a last ditch effort in designing a simplified facial expression system so we at least had something for the pre alpha.

The system originally is based on face mocap lip syncing audio callouts and then driving a fixed facial state with mouth up / down and blinking to make it seem a bit more alive.

The system even uses a specific function to create those snappy movements of the mouth. Originally I wanted to test how it would look if we were closer to classical 2D animation in terms of face expressions. So instead of going smoothly up and down, the mouth snaps between 0/50/100% of being open based on its input.

After I was done designing this copout quick-fix we ended up showing this to my friend who had worked on his original solution nearly a year back.

He was in utter pain and went basically: 

“This is SHIT”.

And I was flinging my arms in the air: 

“Yes I know! But it's what we have right now … better than nothing?”

... then my friend decided to get back on the face mocap pipeline xD

I was so happy, but at the time obviously we still had to ship the pre alpha with my shitty intermediate solution. I honestly would love to know if people would rather have had my not so good expressions, compared to not having any?

Moral of the story: If you show a specialist the shit you do as a generalist or designer, they might eventually be in enough pain to take over and do it properly.

Or: How to start with something good, then try everything else in the book, just to confirm that what you started with was the right choice.

The new face mocap pipeline is currently being tested and needs another few weeks to be presentable. You will experience if it's as good as you imagine in the next build.