Dev Blog 2026.1

Heyhey Scientists!

Welcome to the first Development Blog of the year. It took me a bit to write this, but let's get to it! We’ve got a lot to talk about, such as some exciting progress news; and some definitely needed reality checks.

TL;DR: In this Blog, you can find information about the Roadmap for all games in production at Big Bang Studio, at this time. The blog goes from more art-and-content related topics to more tech-and-finances related topics. We will start this off with a tentative Roadmap for ANBW for 2026: our main focus, and follow it up with production goals and information for all other games we have under our wing right now.

For all Dev Blog NSFW Images go to this supporter only post:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/character-and-153135607

The goal for ANBW in 2026 is to completely wrap up gameplay and story content of the game by the end of the year. The game will be rough around its edges VISUALLY by that point, but focusing on gameplay and content completion will help us discover and fix issues faster.

It also enables "parallelism" in our task planning, allowing different departments/team-members to work alongside each other instead of being bottlenecked by a waterfall task system.

What is a “Blockout” ?

This is probably a repeat from a past post for some of you, but for new members here, here’s a short explanation: Producing art content in a rough concept state that does not reflect the final look or visuals of the produced content, but is functionally complete. 

For levels, this means “grey boxing”: having elements of the levels at a “Pre-Art” pass that allows for navigation and gameplay to completely take place, but art assets will replace these blockout elements at a later date.

For characters we will build them in a rough version, first. A few images below show a few examples of how this looks. The characters then receive a “Skeleton” and a rough “skinning” pass, which applies the body to said skeleton, allowing us to start animation production and have characters physically appear in the game. This enables us to let character art, game design, and animation team work alongside each other instead of individual departments having to wait for full completion passes on individual characters.

For gameplay, this means that we produce all story graphs required to play through a full experience, but with a lower degree of polish at first. Thanks to this, at the end of 2026, we should be able to play the entire storyline of ANBW. The way our storytelling pipeline allows us to produce content is on a “node” basis. Meaning that dialogues are extremely fast to implement, as well as basic navigation and missions. The more complex pieces such as cinematics are not required to “complete” the blockout pass and will be implemented following the blockout pass completion.

For character audio, we will have most characters recorded until the end of 2026 and all their audio imported to the engine, ready to be used or already implemented in our story graphs. At the moment, we have 50 individual VAs working with us on ANBW!

Now the (2026) reality check for ANBW: 

In 2025 we already reduced the number of planned pre-animated Cinematics to remove production pressure on the animation team. After creating “Can I get an Iced Coffee with Breastmilk!?” we learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of our current production pipeline for release ready content. That led us to investigate other gameplay elements unique to ANBW and ask the question on how much time we should invest in them in 2026. 

One major feature that has been a headache for a long time has been the combat feature that, while on paper very fun, in reality felt very lacking in its foundation. This led us to the decision to scale back its current level of complexity. This step allows us to spend less resources on combat overall, but focus on improving the core gameplay loop.

In detail, the combat will have the following adjustments made - for now:

• Reduction in the number of playable weapon forms for the Virus Sword (Pandora). We will focus on one sword and one gun form.

• Removal of the Skill Tree. While we LOVEEEE the skill tree, its scope alone takes considerable time to get it to a complete state. We consider revisiting this system when we have more room to breathe OR in a future game that is more combat oriented than ANBW.

• Focus on improving hit feedback, visuals, audio, and general game feel when we are in combat for ALL encounters including “Unarmed”, “Stick”, “Baton”, “System Gun” and so on.

• Improve Boss encounters, attack pattern readability, and general placement and engagement behavior of bosses.

What else is coming to ANBW in 2026? Aside from dozens of new characters to have fun with? Jump down to the “Sandbox Roadmap 2026” section to learn about that!

Fun fact: the original working title of “Can I get an Iced Coffee with Breastmilk!?” is “OBM” or, in long form, “Operation Breast Milk”. 

The current plan of attack:

• Add more animations to the Sandbox

• Regular Sandbox Animation Polls on Patreon (For all games using the sandbox feature!)

• Add more “Post Credit” Lewd Content

• We´re currently investigating additional gameplay loops we can add to the core loop. We will be sharing information about whatever we come up with in a newsletter on STEAM (Link here https://steamcommunity.com/app/4158970/) so make sure to follow our developer account! And grab the game while you´re at it :3

• We will continue to investigate any reported performance issues as we go and improve things like CPU and GPU time as we go. One example of that is the separation of gameplay and sandbox character animation blueprints, which will decrease the amount of individual logic run per character in the scene (Resulting in an improved CPU frame time).

• We are also looking into adding more characters to the game, especially focused on cameos with characters from other creators.

• ACHIEVEMENTS! You asked and yeah, we´re working on adding milky achievements to the game :3 :3 :3 

• Improvements to player agency during intimate scenes! We want to give the player more opportunity to drive the progression of a scene from making it more meaningful to fondle Muffins breasts to milk her and also enabling Orgasm control (instead of automatic orgasms”)

Overall, we aim to continue to support and add content to “Can I get an Iced Coffee with Breastmilk!?” for the remainder of 2026.

"Heyyyy you made it here! <3 Let's talk about Sandbox for a second."

Sandbox is not only a gameplay tool, but also our fairly advanced animation toolkit that anyone can use to create, export and import intimate scenes.

We consider the sandbox a foundational “Big Bang Games” Feature that crosses the boundary of games and allows players to utilize scenes from other Big Bang Games they own, in any other Big Bang Game they own. This means if players create content for ANBW, any player of “Can I get an Iced Coffee with Breastmilk!?” is able to import the ANIMATION into their game and use it in quickplay or sandbox mode.

While the creation pipeline is already fairly advanced, we always knew the gameplay needed lots of polishing. Visual errors aside, we are looking to heavily improve player agency, character reactions, User Interface, and UX Quality. We recently did a public playtest on Steam to gather player feedback and will use the over 100 detailed feedback responses from players to work on drastically improving usability and general enjoyment when interacting with Sandbox Mode or Quickplay

Sandbox Mode and its Animation Toolkit is, and will, continue to evolve over 2026, with the goal to have every single update for the sandbox sandbox relayed across all games utilizing this banger gameplay system!

While we don´t often talk about this game here on patreon, since it was produced by a separately funded team originally, our production lead Helltaker is actively working on moving Kagura Survivors out of its current Early Access state on Steam to a 1.0 state in the next half a year. Funds received from this project will flow back into funding more work on ANBW!

About a year and some more back, we had a short exploration (with a separately funded team here at Big Bang) into a SFW game involving some of the bigger names of the VTuber space. The project is currently “on hold” after its first failed Kickstarter and we are exploring options for the games completion with all project owners. More info pending, but do wishlist the game if you like the idea of a puzzle fighter game with a bunch of cool VTubers!

As a studio, we are currently facing a lot of friction that impacts our production speed and choices moving forward.

On one side, we have an increased censorship by Visa/Mastercard on the ability to sell legal adult games across major platforms.

Additionally, more and more nations / states are implementing higher age verification requirements, reducing our ability to approach adult customers in certain countries as easily as we could previously.

And on the other side, of course, next to AI Art reducing the value of individually created human-made high-quality art and the resulting burst of “Slop” productions reaching both Steam and Patreon, we also have the resulting insane Hardware Prices affecting our players to consider moving forward.

How do we approach each of these issues individually?

Censorship

We are in contact with a vast network of adult creators in order to explore alternatives, just in case Steam, Patreon and Itch further increase censorship due to payment processor pressure. We also started looking into alternative payment methods through such as Crypto based payment platforms, to improve our ability to get games funded outside of easy-to-censor payment platforms like Visa / Mastercard.

Intermission: Before you shout at us “Crypto .. WHAT???!” xD We are very aware of what that term is sounding like and we feel very much the same about that space. 

No: we're not Crypto-Bros. No: Crypto will not find its way into our GAMES. 

But we consider crypto as a potential “Pachinko Style” https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko alternative currency that could be used to get paid by you.

We are actively working with the creators behind “Redulse” a new and upcoming game marketplace to figure out viable options for making this work for players.

If you are interested to get active in exploring this with us as an optional route, or backup for the future, please visit Redulse and help them with feedback by filling out this google form!

Redulse Feedback Form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1LqVFTBRcjKgg2YVHtWnH1Vl7p3TWjpg8wcIrKharX_o/

As a reminder for working with Crypto: Stay safe and do not start using it as an investment vehicle, unless you ABSOLUTELY know what you´re getting into.

Age Verification

Age Verification is coming ... and we will see more of it being implemented over the coming years. The issue with age verification is that it currently has different requirements from nation to nation, state to state. Depending on how this ends up being implemented in the majority of nations, this can be - for lack of a better and more professional term - a shitshow or a “low friction” experience. For example: there are legal AV apps in Germany like https://go.cam/ that do not require any data submitted to a third party for the age check. But then Steam uses “Credit Cards” as AV toolkit for their UK customers … and not everyone even owns a Credit Card in the UK. So, some people are just flat-out locked out of buying adult content on Steam because of it.

Overall, this is a mess and a … DYNAMICALLY developing situation. 

Our way to respond to this is to diversify where you can buy our games! 

Platforms you can get our games on are currently: 

• STEAM

• ITCH

• JAST USA

• REDULSE

• PATREON

• FANSLY

Platforms we aim to sell on in the future:

• GOG

• KAGURA GAMES

• DL-Site

• Physical Releases (USB Stick)

Did we miss anything here? Let us know!

We´ll stay on the hunt for opportunities to serve players in all nations of this planet to purchase and consume their smut games from us <3

AI Slop

While this currently heavily affects 2D Visual Novels the most and is less impactful for full 3D titles like our games, we do see the shadow of full 3D Character generation on the horizon. We honestly do not know how this will play out long term but we are committed to staying on the “no AI” course until we run out of options, for all Elements of our production. 

The general assumption is that we have another 2-3 years with lower degrees of competition in the 3D only space, and we aim to make the best of it while we still can.

We truly hope that players will speak with their wallets in favor of non-AI Generated Content and we can continue making games for another 1-2 decades!

Hardware Prices

Jokes aside, looking at how hardware prices have developed, we honestly question our decision to move to UE5 a few years back. The entire move was predicated on the expectation that the hardware market would develop towards higher VRAM and RAM specs, just as the projection showed back in 2021-2022. In reality, we have to now assume that the available hardware we can deliver to is not only gonna stall but potentially even degrade in average performance because gaming is just getting ridiculously expensive otherwise.

To meet with that reality, we are looking at a mix of things that can be loosely defined as making our games “Potato-PC Ready”.

This includes anything from simplifying shader instruction counts on our characters, further reducing VRAM requirements, improving CPU and GPU times, decreasing RAM requirements, making LUMEN optional via baked lighting scenarios, and so on and so forth.

There are many things that can be done, and we are committed to investing into adapting our production pipeline for the hardware reality players face in 2026, and whatever follows in 2027/2028.

Wow! I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did! I know the last part is a bit dry, but I figured it helps you get some perspective on what goes through the head of a studio manager when planning for the future, as well as what can affect that aside from the actual production itself.

Thanks a lot to our patrons on Patreon that made - and make! - all of this possible in the first place!

If you are currently a free tier member: Consider supporting us!

We´re gonna make you burst!

If you want to know more, put it in the comments or ping us on discord!