I paused billing last month because I expected an extreme amount of work from my "real" job. However, that work ended up getting pushed back to this month, and then I didn't think to pause billing again. So, in penance, I will pause billing again for June, even though I intend to push releases then. I will also outline the current state and plans for Hungry Critters in this post, as I was able to do a lot of needed work on it in the time I ended up having free.
I believe that according to Patreon's rules, NSFW can't be included in public posts, so the embedded images will be censored. However, links to the uncensored images will also be included.
Eagle-eyed players may have noticed that belly bulging hasn't quite been working as it should lately. It was no longer showing the fine-detail bulges, and the procedural jiggle animation was inconsistent.
I've gone through and completely rewritten the code and shader for the procedural belly animation. I was much less experienced when I first wrote it, and it was a miracle that it even worked at all. Now, however, it's quite robust and I'm proud of it.
HC has had only flat ground and a skybox for an environment since work on it was started. Recently, I've started making preparation to make it a bit more interesting, while hopefully allowing it to still run at decent performance.
I've been studying open-world games to get a better grasp on how I want to make an environment for the characters, though the playable area of HC will remain very limited for the foreseeable future. I've done some tests with sculpting landscape in Blender, dividing it into seamless chunks, and loading them into the game. Not a lot of progress has been made on this front yet, but it's a start.
In order for environments to both look decent and run well, I've worked up an improvement for dynamic shadows. It allows a light to bake unmoving models into its shadow map one time, and then redraw only moving models every frame. This effectively bakes shadows of static objects into 3D space so they don't have to be recalculated every frame, and then these shadows can be cast onto both static and dynamic objects.
I'm sure people have been eager for new characters to be added, and here are the next few ones I have planned, in order. They'll take advantage of some fun new systems I have in mind. Geier is considered to be complete and will stay as-is for now, but may eventually be updated with these systems.
My personal kobold character, Gandr, will be added next. I'm not really sure how people feel about him, but this one's for me. I'll likely only give him some basic features at first, so I can move on to other characters quickly.
Gandr's sculpt is currently almost done.
Levy the dragon is my previous persona which I feel I've grown away from. However, some people still really like him, and have been champing at the bit while awaiting his inclusion in the game.
He's big. Extremely so, compared to Lotti, at six times its height. Some things may have to be tweaked for him to work well in the game.
I've actually had a sculpt of Levy that I'm happy with for a long time, but he still needs to be retopoed.
An as-of-yet-unnamed Tanuki design is gradually being hammered out. His physiology and methodology will present some very unique animation hurdles, but I've got some ideas I'm looking forward to trying out.
Obviously, his main mechanic will be CV, but OV and AV should also work with him quite well.
Trying to juggle my day job and these projects continues to be tough, so progress has been slower than I've liked. I'm still not at the level of support where my projects can support me and I can work on them primarily.
That said, I've got fun ideas and content which I look forward to adding. I hope you look forward to it, as well.
Tags: anal vore, game development, hungry critters, vore