Gloryhole animations

Hi folks!

Since the game's release, we've been receiving many requests to add something new, cool or unusual to the game. Animations are one of the most common. To be honest, I'm a little surprised at how often people request gloryhole animations. We'd decided from the very start that the game would contain no animations. That decision influenced the development process, system design and the decision to give every card unique art - we focused on adding a large amount of quality art to make sure you wouldn't get bored watching a static heroine.

Nonetheless, I clearly underestimated the interest people have in moving pictures. The porn game market really must have changed. Animations are becoming the norm instead of an expensive luxury few developers can afford. And in that case, we should meet the demand!

But even so! What do we do if the game is already out? I have to admit that we can't animate every card. It's an unbelievable amount of work. We also can't animate the heroine herself inside the stall. She has a massive amount of positions compounded by interactions with cum and penises. And there are multiple heroines too! And for the cherry on top, working on Tavern Animated, where all the animations were rendered in webm, to adapt them to web, was a lot of effort. The webm format turned out to be a very rocky road with a lot of hidden pitfalls. Using it for Gloryhole, where the engine already has plenty of other tasks to handle, is hardly possible. It seems like there's no way out. Or is there?

Our animator uses Spine. Thanks to the experience we've gained, we figured out a way to export a Spine animation to Web without turning it into a video. The moment we figured it out, a ton of opportunities opened up for us! But the question remains, what exactly are we going to animate?

The cards are a no-go, as are the heroine's poses… So I figured we can animate the suits! Our game has four suits - handjob, blowjob, vaginal and anal. Making 4 animations for every heroine is a realistic task! After a few tests and iterations, we have this prototype:

(This is a prototype with a temporary interface, the player won't have access to the controls)

Thanks to direct Spine exporting, we can take one image and create multiple animations with it. We made 6 animations for the standard blowjob, three of which you can see in the video. We can also control the animation's speed, scale and framing. All of that gives us a lot of options to add variety!

We have also tested two animations at once. I think it looks quite nice! That's about how I imagine it looking in-game. However, the frames cover up the penises' excitement and patience levels. We'll have to figure something out with the UI.

And this is our animator working on the vaginal suit animation. We will have different facial expressions later. I think we'll be able to focus the animations on different body parts.

There's still a lot of work to be done to implement animations into the game. Everything needs to be set up and tested exactly right. We will release animations for Luna first, then see what you think and decide whether we should add them for the rest of the characters and have different versions for all the suits.

So, what do you think of this animation format?