D.E. Vane's Domain

I've updated Orval Creep n' Hammer to version 0.95. What's new? Better map icons Cheats (well, just one for now, actually) Tweaked minigame grind Added a way to actually beat the game (lol) Download links (mega.nz): Windows 32-bit Linux 64-bit Check the README or the manual for info on the cheats. I've also been poking at FGAME's script, getting it written piece by piece, though there hasn't been much of note going on otherwise.

FGAME (working title still) is going to be a relatively short game, with only five or six concise 'acts' that take place throughout.  As such, I didn't expect to spend very much time building the skeletal structure of the code, or the plot, or the standin character art. As usual, I've underestimated the amount of work that actually goes into creating a fucking game, even a fantastically short one.  You'd think I'd know better, but no, it's a lesson that just doesn't seem to stick. Still, some honest-to-god progress has been made.  I've learned some of the renpy ropes and have already built the majority of the locations that can be accessed, and the player's means of accessing them.  None of the final art of course, which is going to take the longest by far, but... baby steps. I've also finalized the plot structure, events, etc. and started in on the script in a proper fashion.  The first 'act' is done, though I haven't ...

Hey all.  Been a while. As is my usual flaky nature, I've pretty much abandoned the two games mentioned in the post immediately previous to this one.  That's not to say that I won't ever pick them back up; in fact, I fully intend to develop both of them at some point.  However, for the immediate future, I don't see them getting a lot of my attention. That's a bit of a problem I have, I'll admit.  It's gotten to the point where I don't even want to bother announcing stuff I'm working on unless I've made substantial progress on development.  It's probably for the best that way, but will result in the occasional dry spell unfortunately. On the plus side, I have  actually started up on a new project and made a decent amount of progress on it already.  The basic premise is that it's a game about a dude who has to help (and fuck , of course) a small group of fairies, along with probably a few other women as well. I've already develo...

First thing's first:  I've gone ahead and canceled any plans on bothering with a port for OCH.  Truthfully, I haven't even really started on it, other than just learning the ropes for Unity and making a couple of other small, unrelated Android 'test' games.  I'm about done with OCH, I think, and would rather just move on to other things. Speaking of, there are a couple of old games I've wanted to make for a while and I figured I might as well dust 'em off and get to work on them. Project A  is going to be a simple pseudo-VN developed with Renpy.  What can I say, it seems like a decent engine for this genre.  I'm not going to bother with details on the backstory, plot, etc. just yet, since basically none of the actual game has been developed and I don't want to overpromise on anything. Project B  is a text game, something that I haven't spent as much time developing backstory for as Project A but will probably be finished long before, si...

While I'm mostly done with Orval Creep n' Hammer, there are a few things I wanted to do with it before entirely moving on to other things.  I've got a short list of things that need to be tweaked, but the big issues are technical in nature. First, I'd like to change the way videos are played.  While the current system works , it's not ideal and given the quality of the videos, the file sizes are just too big.  For what it is, the game just weighs too much, you know? Secondly, the Android port.  While I have technically ported an SDL2 project to Android, it was a bit of a process and the project itself was very, very small in scope.  It was basically just C++ with bits of the SDL2 "standard library".  This game, while not tremendously complex, is quite a bit larger in scope than that earlier "test project," so I'm not sure how all of this would play out in an attempt to port to Android. So what are my options? Option A is to simply do ...

It took a while, but the game's finally finished. I present to you:   Orval Creep n' Hammer . Alright, so I'm not great with names.  Believe it or not this is the best iteration that myself and three other people could come up with. Features: Stars four women Multiple animated sex scenes Wood paneling There are currently a couple of known issues, both particular to the GNU/Linux version.  Basically, typos that I forgot to correct before uploading the files.  Oops.  😢 It's a simple enough game, give it a download and try it out (approx. 700mb). Links: Game manual (PDF) Win32 mega.nz Google Drive GNU/Linux x86_64 mega.nz Google Drive Screenshots Spycam watching Alyson bathe Laptop's store page Madeline doing you a favor l33t She doesn't remember you!?  The insolence.

I've got most stuff nailed down by this point.  Currently working on 'post-production', i.e., seeing which filters are the best at making my stuff look less crappy. Probably a few more days of this, then a few minor changes to the code, then the last-minute stuff and an initial release.  I'm planning on a simultaneous Linux / Windows release, with Android to come at some point in the future assuming it isn't too much of a pain in the ass to port. Obligatory picture:

I've been in a bit of a rut for the past few weeks, and progress has slowed to a crawl.  Luckily, even at a snail's pace you'll make progress eventually, so I'm glad to say that the main 'sex' videos are about finished, other than post-production (i.e., adding SFX and probably not much else). After that, it's a matter of a rather large number of comparably simple static images, finishing off the dialogue, a few bug fixes and BOOM.  Project done.  I've also started work on yet another thing, though it's text-based and I've only just started laying out its development.  Won't post much about it yet, other than maybe "Hey, if you want to play yet another text-based porn game, check back in several months." Anyway, here's a random watermarked screenshot. If I had to give another woefully optimistic ETA, I'd say about 3 weeks.  Maybe 4.  Who knows, check back.

Don't worry folks, the game hasn't died just yet.  The characters are as done as they're going to get and we've been busy putting together and rendering videos for the past couple of weeks, in addition to playing a lot of Stardew Valley on my part. I'd estimate that, at least by sheer numbers, we're about 40% finished with the 'raw' renders of the videos.  There are quite a lot more to go and a bit of post-production to do on all of them, but the project's still chugging along. Unfortunately, it's taking a lot longer to get these done than I had anticipated.  I've been kept plenty busy in Blender without having touched the code at all for weeks now.  At this pace, I would be amazed if it wasn't at least mid-February by the time it's all finished. Oh well.  It takes as long as it takes.

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...