Late April dev log/update

A quick update as I promised the standalone chapter with Artoria to be released at end of this month. I've decided to delay it. But I promise, the wait will be worth it as I've increased the scope for this chapter.

Plan tldr

At a very high level the scope is this: Artoria will take you with her back to her time as a slave.

• Have 3 different locations and moving between them seamlessly/without a loading screen - Player's apartment, Artoria's Castle Bridge, Artoria's Throne Room. The models themselves are actually done but the system to load different "stages" is not.

• System to let Artoria "manhandle" the player - pick them up, throw them around in VR and non-VR.

• System to let the player move freely in their apartment or the throne to do small tasks, etc.

All of these technologies will finally make this project finally worthy of being called a game. I might not release the full chapter all at once, this will likely be staggered in smaller demos.

More info as to why I decided to this now below.

Poll tie and story

Firstly, the poll ended in a tie. To break the tie, I even tried to weight the paid patron's votes by considering how many months supported and the numbers still came out exactly the same! At the same time, I was not happy with either idea no matter what I thought, this gave me the idea of combining both ideas. So, the plan now is to do that Artoria will be summoned to your "world" and then take you with her back to her time as a slave. This alone at least doubles the complexity/depth of what I'm planning to make.

Movement system

Initially, I was planning to rush the work on this chapter by just re-using the mechanics established in previous chapters. So, the plan was just innovating on the character's graphics and doing a very basic/low fidelity location & a short story with a foot or shoe worship focus. But the more I thought about the story, I really really wanted to give Artoria some real "power" control over the player.

By that I mean when the player first summons/encounters Artoria, I want her to pick up the player, manhandle them/toy with them to make them feel helpless. And then seamlessly transition into our usual gameplay. This not only requires me to animate both Artoria and player in tandem, implement a real synced animation system to the game that doesn't exist yet. But also do this for web based VR is something that to my knowledge has not been done before, a lot of WebXR API implementations on some devices actively try to fight this sort of thing as it can be extremely disorienting for the user. But I'll implement it in a way that won't make the user puke and use it sparingly.

In addition to this, I actually also want to implement the final free movement system to let the player move around freely in larger areas instead of just controlling the avatar's upper body. Again this is very challenging to support in VR seamlessly while having the ability to move between these movements modes seamlessly. We're supporting normal flat screen devices too like mobile and desktop too.

And all of this needs to be orchestrated in the right manner by the game engine and none of that tech exists too.

Why now?

I've been working on this the past few weeks cause I couldn't resist, and it is looking promising so just decided to fully commit to doing this now. As you some you know, I wasn't planning to do this movement system work until much later. The current movement system (where the player has a limited upper body movement and the domme moves around) is perfect for the boot/feet worship games I wanted to do and other similar mini games. But I've really been feeling constrained by it in terms of what I can do for "scale" without making our game like a static scene.

For example, one thing I really want to do is for the domina to leash the player and move them around. Or the player to walk from point A to point B manually to initiate a sequence/progress the story. No matter how i tried to see what the smallest slice of this I could implement, I couldn't break it in a clean manner. I've been thinking about this problem and trying to do this for 9+ months. But I feel like if I put this off any further, I'm hurting future chapters in terms of what I can do.

Finally, decided to just bite the bullet with this and do the first full implementation of this new movement system all in one go. Although, I know it'll be very challenging, I've learnt enough that implementing this doesn't feel impossible anymore.

I'll post another update on how it is going in May.

What's already done since last update

• Artoria's model is fully done including jiggle & hair physics.

• The 3 planned locations are actually nearly finished. They're not perfect but they're functional enough.