July Devlog - Rockin' Improvements

Hello again! Welcome to another game development update!

In today's update, I'll be going into my plans and current progress on Rockin' Resort as well as discussing Catgirl Care Chibi a little bit. As mentioned previously, my current plan is to take turns working on each project to help avoid burnout and allow me to work on multiple projects if one takes a particularly long time to make.

Anyhow, let's dive in.

Rockin' Resort Updates

I've done some improvements to Rockin' Resort's adventure game system. The main improvement is pretty simple: I've built a basic UI for the inventory and hints systems. This includes a template that I can easily build new menus for (such as the map or settings screens). To stick with the "always on screen" UI style for the visual novel scenes, the adventure game UI is currently always visible during adventure gameplay.

I've also updated the object highlighter a bit. With the old revision, the selection rectangle couldn't track objects in motion. To fix this, the new system requests a rectangle position from the object and updates the selector accordingly.

For the Godot nerds: I'm building a Rect2 for the NinePatchRect to match. In 2D, I just multiply the global Transform2D by the Rect2D. For 3D, I unproject the points in the mesh's AABB and expand a Rect2 by each.

The second major adjustment I've been working on is adjusting the game to work with a node-based component system. Previously, all of the interactions available on each object were resources that then referenced an action resource and a condition resource. This got difficult to work with fast, so this new system has all three resources in one node that can easily be added and edited - even while the game is running.

These little nodes will ultimately build out how the game behaves when you interact with any object throughout Rockin' Resort (and future games), so it's important that they be very easy to add and adjust.

I've also been working on a base mesh for all of the Rockin' Resort girls. I tried following a 3D modeling tutorial but I wasn't happy with the results, so I've scrapped that mesh. Fortunately, I already have a fairly decent body mesh that I made for Date a MInk 3D, so I decided to adjust that to work for human girls.

This time around, I'm trying to optimize my materials a bit more. Eris's model had a different material for each color, which ended up fairly cumbersome and was likely bad for optimization. This time, all of the colors are on a single texture and I'll be making space on that texture for important details (such as the nipples, eyes, and blush here).

Catgirl Care Chibi

Have you tried out Catgirl Care Chibi yet? Here's the link if you haven't:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/catgirl-care-0-1-107213140

I think the next update for Chibi will be Beta 1.0. There's still a lot of ideas I could implement, but my core prototyping for Catgirl Care proper is done and interest is low. At this point, I think it'll be best for me to focus on finalizing Chibi (mostly adding missing features like the settings menu), and putting the game out on itch so I can move on to Catgirl Care development.

It's definitely a fun and cute project which I've learned a lot from. I think the main thing I've learned is that I need a robust solution for the catgirl AI. This for two reasons:

• I think my focus on the core game loop meant that the catgirls are a bit simple. They're very cute and I like their simple behaviors, but I think more human-like interactions will make them more interesting and easy to become invested in. I think I can achieve this through written dialogue and by dramatically increasing the number of available actions they can perform (such as napping and playing with things).

• The state machine for the catgirls got a bit convoluted as things went on. There were several common functions (such as walking) that I'd like to explore better options for. This will likely be my main focus for early development.

Current Goals

Now that I'm taking some time to focus on Rockin' Resort, I'm not sure how long it'll be before I swing back to finish up Catgirl Care Chibi. I'd like to get a demo out, of course, but my current main focus is on deciding on a visual style for the game's characters and world. I may go for a vertical slice (a couple rooms for the player to explore, along with some 3D tests for each of the girls) but we'll have to see.

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Thanks again for your support! These games are getting more and more complicated as I go, but your support here on Patreon is what has allowed me to learn how to make these games. Even if you're just here for cute art, every bit of support helps!