D.E. Vane's Domain

I've been working on modeling the characters for the past two or three weeks, now.  I'm still some way from being completely finished, but I've got the main bits down and they're at the point where I don't see them changing dramatically between now and when the game is released. I've had a third party helping me out a bit with the actual character design, since I'm really quite bad at that sort of thing, though I've been kept plenty busy turning the drawings into 3D models.  Initially, I wanted to go with a 'pixar' style for the characters, though it turns out that it's actually pretty difficult to pull off without looking like 100% shit.  As such, I've fallen back into a style that's about 20% pixar, 80% pseudo-realistic.  It's not what I wanted at the outset but it's what I'm going with for now, since I don't want to spend a year and a half on this thing. For those curious, here's a render of our female leads...

Finished another girl's dialogue.  Holy shit, it always surprises me how damn long it takes to write this stuff.  There's not even that much of it, but goddamn, accounting for every one of a small number of possibilities means you're still covering a lot of bases. Oh well.  That's me half-finished with all the game's dialogue, so I can't whinge too much. Other than that and finishing off a few other minor locations, the biggest bit of progress has been more or less finalizing the design of the main character and, in so doing, deciding on an art direction for the project. This is our hero, ladies and gentlemen!  His name is Orval and he's every bit as sleazy as he looks.  Soon enough, with your help, he'll be able to wet his dick in a handful of as-yet-to-be-designed women. I'm hoping to have this released by about mid-to-late January of 2017.  I had initially planned for a December 2016 release, but it turns out that making a gam...

The last week has been fruitful, at least in regards to the quality of the sex scenes in-game. The previous system consisted of a bunch of still frames (jpg) packed into a binary file and forming a very crude type of animation.  It worked, but it was slow to load and a brute-force effort at best. I've since updated the system a bit, though, finally figuring out how to successfully play video files with SDL2 in a useful way.  After that, it was a matter of tweaking the structure of the bin files that contain the animations (cleverly named 'VID' files, go figure) and re-writing the tools and scripts used to create said files. I also tweaked the in-engine system for handling the scenes to make that a bit less crap, as well. The results are dramatically better and far less resource-intensive (less VRAM used, less disk space for the VID files, etc.).  What this means to the end user is that the game will be slightly less obviously shitty, so that's nice. How the in...

A cursory glance at the post history of this blog should tell you that I haven't been updating the VN very often recently.  Truth be told, I put it on hold a while ago and haven't touched it for months.  I couldn't tell you why exactly, other than to rail off excuses as to why I keep dropping projects that I've become bored or frustrated with. Some of the VN was good, some of it wasn't, and I'm just too lazy to go back and fix what needs fixing at the moment.  I intend to resume progress at some point in the future, but it won't be for another several months at least. Why so long?  Because I started work on yet another title, of course, and I don't want to split my efforts just yet.  This new game started 'production' months ago.  The earliest modification date in its 'docs' folder is September 7th, but I'm almost positive it's been longer than that.  It feels like it's been at least twice that long. I haven't posted...

Good news:  I've completed parts 1-4 so far.  Rough drafts, obviously, but the story's in place generally speaking. Bad news:  There are now 6 parts, not including the 'endgame'.  Plus, I still haven't done any work on the real art yet. I expect to have most of the rough draft finished in a week or two unless I burn out again.  I'm not sure that's as much of a problem with Ren'Py, though, since I can play through the game piece by piece as I make it and the whole process is satisfying in immediate and obvious ways. To be continued.

I've made a bit of progress with the VN, though it's already become quite a much bigger project than I thought it was going to be.  It's definitely going to be more than 'a few weeks'.  Hopefully it won't be more than a couple of months, though, since I don't plan to include as much sexual content (and thereby, rendered animations) as the other one. I've got all of the major stand-in art done, and I've written up the basic plot outline, the characters and the gameplay system(s) used -- at least, as far as they're possible in Ren'Py.  I've also written Part 1 of five, though more parts may be added and most of those are introductory in nature anyway, so there's still quite a lot of writing ahead. Still, learning the ropes.  Who knows how far I'll be in a week or two.

I've decided that I'm going to take a short break from my 'main' project and work on something else for a few weeks.  That's not to say that I might not work on it a bit every here or there, but I'm going to focus my efforts on something else for a little while. Specifically, I've decided that I want to make a short game in Ren'py .  It's an engine you're probably familiar with if you're a fan of visual novels, but for the uninitiated, well... it's a thing that lets you make visual novels.  Whew!  Made it through the intro, wasn't sure I would. Why Ren'py?  It's easy, cross-platform and good for what it does.   Akabur uses it, as do many, many, many other people, and 10,000 wolves can't be wrong as they say.  I don't think I'll be using it for my main thing, since half the point of that is just the fun of developing shit by hand, but for simpler stuff it looks like it should work quite nicely. So, what am I ...

Earlier today, I decided to go a different direction with the idea of a 'journal editor,' instead splitting its functionality across a myriad of other application-appropriate editors.  For example, journal entries about characters go in the Character Editor, quest entries go in the Quest Editor, etc..  I haven't actually implemented any of this, of course, but I'll get around to it. That being said, there were a few categories which didn't quite fit anywhere else.  To address this, I went ahead and made an 'Info editor.'  That doesn't seem like a particularly good name for it, but I can't think of anything better so I guess that's that. Thankfully, the type of data being messed with is all very similar; identical actually, except for its parent category.  This means the editor was dead easy to write compared to basically everything else I've done.  Only about a 1000 lines of code, and I bet a more competent programmer could probably squee...

Well!  That was certainly a much bigger pain in the ass than I thought it would be. Only a couple more editors and then I can start on the content itself.

Development has been slow for the past week or two; in addition to becoming a bit burnt out on the project, other things have come up which took precedence. That being said, development has more-or-less returned to normal for the past couple of days.  I've figured out how the 'sex system' will work in-game and the editor's about 85% done, I'd estimate.  Probably be finished with it tomorrow or the next day. Incidentally, here's a picture of a butt I whipped up a couple of days ago: I haven't nailed down the aesthetic yet.  I think this is generally the look I'm after, but I'll have to check out how other details look before I make any final decisions, especially the faces. If you want to make one for yourself, it's not too bad:   Blender is the primary modeling tool used, though the character model itself was generated/tweaked/etc. with Manuel Bastoni 's blender plugin.  Give it a shot, it's easier than it looks.

Well, after spending entirely too long pulling my hair out over a number of stupid and simple issues, I managed to finish off the event editor.  I've also modified the world editor just a tad so that it can connect hotspots to said events, in effect finishing that off as well. There isn't much visually exciting about the Event editor so I'll skip the screenshots this time. So where do we stand, exactly?  I'd estimate I'm about 65-70% finished with the editors, unless the Character editor is significantly easier or more difficult that I'm thinking it will be. The following are finished (well, good enough): Scene Editor Quest Editor Item Editor Prop Editor Event Editor World Editor Which leaves me having to complete the following: Sex Editor (still not sure how it's all going to play out) Journal Editor (maybe?) Character Editor The character editor is the big one, essentially four or five editors in one.  Thankfully, I don't thi...

This may be cheating a bit, since it isn't 100% finished, but it's as done as it's going to get until I make another editor.  After that, it's a matter of adding a little bit of code right next to another, very similar bit of code, after which it'll officially be done.  Finally. Went quicker than I thought but not as quick and easy as I'd have liked.  Is it ever, though? At this point, we're looking at another three or four editors and then it's time to work on the assets.

I've been working on the World editor for a few days now.  It's going quite a lot faster than I thought it would; the last (first) version I wrote was a goddamn nightmare in comparison. It's still a little ways from being done, but probably no more than a week. Here's a quick video demo of the World editor in its current state: Hopefully it'll be done by the next entry.

Alright, I lied.  The world editor wasn't next.  I may have underestimated the amount of shit involved in putting an area together so that it isn't worthless when loaded into the game. To that end, I've put together a 'prop' editor.  Props are just things you can click on that make other things happen (or simply have a description attached, for flavor).  My natural inclination was to dub this stuff 'scenery', since that's what it's called if you've ever used the Inform editor, but being that I've already got that whole 'scenes' thing going on, I decided to go with 'props' and sidestep potential future issues with confusing things.  Me brain dumb, no want complicated. Here's a screenshot of it: Next step, hopefully for-reals-no-bullshit-this-time:  World Editor (maybe).  Unless I encounter some other busywork that further forestalls my having to actually do the hard work of making the game itself.

The 'scenes' thing seems to be working pretty well.  I've tweaked the Item and Quest editors so that they use the scenes rather than static images, which means I've completed (more or less) the following: Conversation Editor Item Editor Quest Editor Scene Editor I'm not 100% about the Conversation editor, but it may be just good enough to get the job done.  I guess I'll find out. Next up:  World Editor (redo).

Just finished up the Scene Editor.  It isn't bug-free but it's good enough, so I'm moving on. The editor allows the user to create 'scenes', which are basically just collections of images and sound effects with X,Y, and Z coordinates so that the 'engine' will know where to draw all of the shit. Static images are just that, static. Animations are layers that are made from a series of still images (frames). SFX layers are either standalone or tied to a specific frame of an animation. Here's a quick video of the editor in action. It ain't much but I imagine it'll get the job done.

I'll be honest, I haven't been working on the game very much recently.  Too lazy, too many other things to concern myself with, etc.. I have made a little progress with a couple of the tools that will be used to produce the game, one of which is the quest editor.  It's very barebones and isn't capable of a hell of a lot, but then, I won't need it to be capable of much.  All it really needs to do is string along enough of a token plot so that the player doesn't feel like he's completely wasting his time as his character bangs fictional women. For the curious, it's written in Python3 using PyQt5.  That being the case, it will necessarily be released under the GPL, as is required when using PyQt5 under normal (or perhaps any) circumstances.  Off the top of my head I can't remember which variant of the GPL they make you use, probably version 3.  Check their website for more details or wait for the release.

Hello, my fine friends.  This blog will be the primary source of updates on any progress made for my porno games.  Obviously, the content will be 'adult' in nature (pornographic), and may very well feature content that is otherwise offensive or 'triggering' to certain individuals (rape, gore, etc.).  No guarantees, it just pretty much depends on what I'm in the mood to make. I've been lazily working on one title for some time now, though progress has been incredibly slow for a number of reasons, not the least of which being simply that I'm lazy.  These games will take a back seat to quite a lot of other things since I don't have any immediate plans to charge money for them; no direct payments, no subscriptions, no Patreon hullabaloo.  While one or more of these may be an option in the future I'm not counting on this being a lucrative enterprise, so any motivation I have to make these is purely that of my own passion / horniness / boredom / whatever...