March 2025

General

The devblogs for February and March were made at the same time.

The March one is shorter because I was on vacation during that month

Vore Animations Tests Level

If you read my previous devblogs you know that the functioning of the Vore animations is way more complex than the other animations. It often happens that I fix something in one place, and later realize it broke something else somewhere else.

So, I made a test map to easily check everything I need. It’s like a debug map, but focused on Vore Situation.

AI Tests Levels

During this month I worked on Talas AI to fix the bugs reported by the game testers.

To test all functionalities, I did new testing levels, it’s similar to what I did with the Vore animation tests but with auto checks.

AI tests how Talas does a simple stomp on a micro.
A2 tests how Talas moves to reach the micro and stomp him
A3 tests how Talas moves to reach the micro and puts him in a valid stomp zone before stomping him.
A4 tests how Talas exits a situation context and moves to reach the micro and puts him in a valid stomp zone before stomping him.

B1 Tests how Talas does a simple Vore.
B2 ...

When test 1 succeeds, it runs test 2, then the 3 etc. I will add many more tests so I will be able to know if a test fails and why. That is very useful and that will save me time.

New Wear System in C++

To fix a reported issue from the game testers about Talas shoes I did a new Wear System allowing a character to wear clothes and manage clothing states. The code is not new, but I created this module to standardize the process of wearing clothes.

I first moved the replication method from the shoe to the new wear system on the character code in C++ as I did with my other systems.

I created a debug menu allowing me to see what the process works in game then I replaced the old codes with the new standardized Wear System.

Situation Look Around

Following the change of February with the positions using the root offset and the root motion used in the situations systems, this introduced new bugs, which were reported by the game testers.

Some animations were broken because the animation to place Talas on his bed is offset from his root but that is not possible for the blend animation that makes Talas turn his head. I need to apply this offset directly in the animation source files to fix it.

I also updated my preview panel so I can test the look around in Editor. Here I show it in the editor first, then in-game with the game master

Mini Game

During this month I started adding content to create some mini games. For now, I’ve just added a reach point object with some points of interest in the game level to spawn it. It’s just a small feature for the people who use it. In the future this feature will be added to the game master. For the moment it can be added only from the game host using cheat codes.

Other

It is fun to see how some animation trees look much simpler now that my situation system can handle some actions using montage call.

I added a popup at game start to let the players choose how they want to play. (VR or non-VR) Of course, they still can switch in game with "K".

This prevents the game from starting VR components like running Steam VR App at game start because last time you played in VR when you just want to play in desktop mode instead.