Slimechemy

New character WIP

The polls are in, and we've come to a decision. The slime maid is coming up next, and as a part of the gameplay update you'll be able to bring her with you and customize bits and bobs as you see fit. I'm coming up with a couple of hairstyles and outfits to switch out and morphs to tweak. This is coincidentally a great testbed character for the planned gameplay mechanics, so please be excited. I'll share more developments and beauty shots as the process moves along!

I'm also investigating the remaining reported issues t...

Next NPC poll

While i work on another hotfix, it's a perfect time to put democracy to the test!

If you've read the latest roadmap post you know that I'll be bringing more interactable characters in as ways to get more story and gameplay mechanics in, and this is where you come in. Rev up your fantasy and pick one!

Now, as with any real democracy, some members of the democracy are more democratic than others, so we'll use the latest polling technology to make the results weighted, so make sure your vote weight reflects your desire.

Now if...

Slimechemy 0.8 Hotfix 1

Fixed a bug where the inventory expansion would not expand. You don't need to do anything, load the save file and it'll give you all of your slots.

Meanwhile I'll figure out how to make patches.

Roadmap for 0.9

Here we are, at the next step of our roadmap! Once whatever bugs are ironed out, I'm getting to work on 0.9.

With 0.9, it's planned to introduce more content and a few new gameplay system, among the most important ones:

The Dating System:

A quite popular system, now getting into Slimechemy. As part of my initiative to not try and force written story out, my plan is to make the "story" more emergent, by allowing you to take NPCs out for a stroll, an event and a scene (if you're close enough). An...

Nvm, fixed it

The promised day is finally here! The new version is out, now with bugfixes!

- First and most important, the saving system is fixed and worked as intended, I did 3 passes of testing on top of bugfixing what was broken and everything came out working properly;

- Now, the dreaded "can't drag stuff to buy" bug if fixed, the whole windowed/fullscreen/resolution/window position thing should be fixed;

- Continue button works as intended;

- The Forest location now loads it's state properly;

- General code improvements ...

Saving not saving

As the work on cleaning up and improving the release goes on, I've made some improvements (If you're on Discord, you might've seen some), but today we'll talk about saving and loading. I've already said before that it's one feature I'm scared of the most, as it includes a lot of reconstituting the state of the world and there's always something going wrong! Well, that time came again, as per a bug report I've went and checked the status of saving, and the thing I've suspected to break the least, was actually the worst!

The world compos...

Full gallery save

Here's the full gallery save! If you stick it into C:\Users\*user*\AppData\Local\WG\Saved\SaveGames (replace *user* with your user), then next time you open the gallery it'll have everything unlocked!

There's also an annoying bug, if you can't buy anything at the store and playing in a window, try moving the window all the way to the left/maximize and the buying/selling should work properly. There's something wrong with the resolution/window size math that I'll try to sus out, but so far, this is the workaroun...

Preview Build (0.8) is here!

After huffing, puffing, cooking and recooking I've settled everything that have bothered me and put together the preview build! As previously discussed, it's basically the full release, except there still might be some quirks here and there. Tongues, for example have some weird rotational issues, maybe the text might skip somewhere or clicking on things too fast might break something. Oh, and if you save and load, the forest pickup will not load the same.

But other than that it's all very working and even packaged to a reasona...

Last asset drop before Patreon Preview, I promise!

I've been hard at work cleaning up whatever was in the wrong place, touching up a little bit of everything, from icons and data entries to 3D assets and locations. The forest location got the most work, in an attempt to find a simple and visually pleasing compromise of existing assets. The only things that I'm going to go over again is the dialogue, since a lot of progression is tied to the dialogue and I don't want to forget to unlock an item that's needed for progress. I have some other quality of life improvements in mind, but I plan to a...

The Penultimate update post, or the curious case of the flyying beenis

Busy, busy, but here's some more thing I've been working pre-release:

- Cleaned up the save/load UI and functionality, made sure everything still works, even though I'm still scared it might break!

- Added more gallery categories to easier categorize scenes. I've just realised I haven't assigned the thumbnail icons I've made, but other than that the gallery is way more readable and usable now. I've also found and squashed a bug that overpopulated the lists with the same entries, so it's all prim-and-proper now!

- As I've be...

Pen-penultimate progress update

A little bit of computer trouble this week, so I only got the progress to report!

- About a dozen of animation related things left to fix! Some timings are off, some loops are clicky and after I've updated the skeleton, the protagonists hands are now broken in older animations, but these are solved by just re-exporting already existing animations.

- Scene widget now features a "GO AGAIN" button, repeat the scene as many times as you want and paint everything as much as you want!

- I've added some short-range goo ...

Pre-release cleanup

Exciting news, after spending some time struggling coming up with a system to stop certain liquid particles, I've finally gotten acceptable results. Now your goo splashes stop correctly and don't just fly through meshes!

Along with that I bring additions to the gallery functionality. It now breaks up all of the scenes into main actors for easier navigation. Not only that, but it also color-codes AND does a gallery cleanup to make sure there's none of those pesky duplicates or broken events.

With these I've also went over about a ...

Posters posters!

I'm combing over the planned stuff, but here are some posters I've promised. More progress details somewhere in the middle of the week, stay tuned!

Posters posters!

Everybody loves gifts!

Here's what's been happening the last week!

First of all, we've got 9 new items! It's good to think about alchemy, but sometimes you need to live a little and maybe give others some gifts!

With that, comes a revamped GIFT system! The characters get their social stats changed with the gifts you give, some are better than the others, others are downright offensive!

With that, comes a revamped likes system! I've streamlined the entire thing into one data table and removed some redundant data points for easier editing and less ...

Fresh Effort

Here's what's happening this week:

- Major work on the Forest and Garden locations, it still needs the ground coverage. I'm trying to come up with a good grass solution that won't warm up PC's around the world, but all of the background cutouts work great, I'll probably create a couple more with single trees and whatnot;

- New widgets! Including new alerts about new shop stock and new unlocked actions;

- New Dialogue Objects that is a cutscene player. It'll try to load the next text object if needed, a...

Margo poster

I'm working on the outdoor location, and the ground coverage giving me trouble, have a poster in the meanwhile!

Weeks effort

I got a little sick over the weekend, but I've used that time to write up the alchemist storyline. On top of that, here's some progress since last time:

- NEW ICONS:

A variety of new icons to support new story content AND icons for the bestiary system and actions (so I don't have to use a placeholder bucket icon);

- NEW ASSETS:

A few 3D assets to support the story content, for use in gameplay AND cutscenes;

- NEW BESTIARY ICONS:

Bestiary now gen...

Tech focus poll

I'm working on the story content, but here's a little poll to decide on an extra tech feature to focus on. Let me walk you through these a bit. They're all connected to the meshes and all require a bit of research and time to implement, but they're about the same complexity all around.

Jiggle option is to dive and see if we can squeeze more juice out of Unreal's physics system to add some jiggle to things like thighs, tummies, jelly bits and whatever else. Note that there's already some procedural jiggling in character and slime hair, ...

Slime poster

While I finish up the animation assets, here's a slime to keep you warm!

The Grimoire

Here it is, the last part of the Grimoire. After a bit of soul-searching I've settled on a way to track the fruits of your labor. The bad news is that now I need to come up with icons and names for every single one, but it shouldn't be too hard. I'll type out the names, but I'll see if the icons can be constructed somewhat dynamically. I also need a batch of icons for all of the types of flirt scenes, so I'll get that after I finish the last missing scene. Don't forget to peek at wip teasers in Discord!

Shortcuts

I'm not sure how come this idea did not come to me before, but here we go. Instead of jumping through the map you can now directly pop from one location to another. I'm working on the remaining animations and finishing up the grimoire system.

Rigging, skinning and animation fixes

I went ahead and fixed up the animations on the variations that were reusing one animation, cleaned up the soft body rig so it now exports and deforms correctly and re-inserted a lost bone into out Protagonist's arm. The wrist is properly girthed, and  I also tweaked some of the skinning around so there's less unwanted clipping. I think that's it for the post-demo cleanup, so I'm moving on on finishing the story content, remaining Irene scenes, couple of leafy locations (Garden and the Forest) and doing a second pass on animations.

New Logo and code improvements!

Thank you for enjoying the demo and providing feedback and bug reporting if you did, I'm glad to know it doesn't break too hard. There's still some resolution-related issues going on that I'll need to test, but the system mostly works as expected.

I've used the little time between writing text to even out the logo, now the top and the bottom go nicely on the curves, the previous one had a little bit of a skew.

Other than that I've folded the last minute code additions into the main branch, some buttons were dropping ou...

Tech Demo tips and Walkthrough

Here's a couple of tips, if you don't want to read the walkthrough:

- You can put any amount of mutagen on your slime right away, you still need the correct ratio to get the specific grow;

- Easy first recipes are 2 mutaberries or 1 mutasap. Guaranteed results!

- Invest in the mutagen indicator early, it'll show you the amount of mutagen you need;

- Having a scene with a slime counts as Feeding it.

Here's a full story cont...

2023-05-23 01:15:10 +0000 UTC View Post

TECH DEMO IS OUT!

The promised day is finally here!

I've crunched and bugfixed till last minute, but the Tech Demo is finally here!

The intro cutscene did not make it in on account it crashing the project, but plenty of other fixes and improvements are in! I've combed through the growing system again, weeding out bugs and foolproofing it as much as I can. Others systems, like adding more stuff to the store inventories, sticky FX and widget blends, Gallery system!

There are some issue though:...

It's Building Time!

I usually don't do a post today, but I've skipped a post yesterday since I had to do some math fro this, so here it goes. The last thing I wanted to add for the tech demo is in. The mutagen indicator will now show you the requirements for the next mutation depending on the mutagens you put in. More mutagen you put in, the higher quality slime will come out, but beware, you still need to maintain the proportions! You can also see a slime color indicator in the corner and a little bug where the drop zone does not disappear (all fixed now). I'v...

Margo Poster and code improvements

As I've been prepping everything I've made some code improvements and that took a little bit of time, the week has also been very busy, so I'll try to get back into regular posting schedule. Here's a poster in the meanwhile.

Improvements include, but not limited to:

Dialogue object will now auto-correct some errors;

Item requests will automatically load the next dialogue object on success;

Sold items will now limit at 1 gold;

Shop inventories update properly at set dialogue points;

Alchemy tub upgrades all...

We're back

I've fixed it. The culprit was the new game intro cutscene, what a weird thing to break. I'll try to re-introduce it and remove the little part that breaks, but only after i branch out a demo fork. With this done I'm back on track testing and packaging. The dialogue tree breaks after a flirt event, so I'm looking into that. Thank you for your patience!

Tech Demo Delay

As I've been rushing to build a Tech Demo, cleaning up whatever issues that popped up (And I was VERY successful in inserting cutscenes into existing events), it seems that something along the way a redirector or something dumb like that broke and now the whole project refuses to load. It's not a BIG DEAL (that why it's written in big bold letters), as far as I can tell it's only an issue of tracking the object that's causing trouble and excising it.

However, I deeply apologize and letting you know that the Tec...