Dev Journal: In Motion

It was a pretty big relief to finally get v0.08 out and put the first big piece of the puzzle in your hands. I'm happy with a lot of what I've accomplished, but I knew I needed a bit more of a break from working on the Interp-Theory Mind. The next chunk will hopefully be a pretty big step forward, but I need a change of pace before I get into that, you know?

For a bit there, I was really debating on what to work on instead. There are so many things I'm excited to add to this game, and I feel like the current build still shows so little of the game I ultimately have in mind. And it's true that that's becoming part of the problem: I've been working on this game a long time already, but because I'm trying to accomplish so many complicated things that most people don't bother with, I still see it as early in development. People look at this game and it still doesn't "look like much." I know that how a game looks is important, and I've tried to put a little effort into its appearance here and there to avoid being too misleading on that front, but I've known for a long time there's one big aspect I'm missing to give Project Wild One the "quality appearance" it deserves.

The game needs art. I know it does, and I've dreaded it for a long time. It's been a long time since I worked with artists, but to be honest, it was always the part of my work that I dreaded the most while I was developing MVOL. But there's definitely such a thing as "premature asset development," and I've been figuring out so many different things for PWO that it's true it would be hard to be confident what all art assets I could add and actually use through to the final version of the game. I've used that partly as an excuse to hide from the prospect of having to struggle with art commissions again.

But things are coming together bit by bit, and I've juggled a lot of ideas for how to give the game a good visual element while I'm working on all the rest of it. Now, I think it's finally time to take the leap.

Since finishing v0.08, I've been exploring the process for making basic animations for PWO myself. I've been hearing more and more good things about a new, free app for creators called DaVinci Resolve, and I finally took the plunge to try and learn how to use it. It does have powerful tools for animation, and I found it shockingly comfortable to build out many of the ideas I dreamed of. It's certainly confusing at times since it uses a very different interface from anything I've seen before, but it allows far more control and creativity for creating different effects. I put together a few mock animations to prove the basics to myself, and I've honestly been pretty excited by the results.

Now, I've had enough experience at this point in the industry to know that just because you can make something doesn't mean it will actually work well in the final product. Once I had my most basic proof of concept animations, I moved over to Unity and started studying what would be involved in adding these to the game. It does have a built-in handler for animations, but I found I didn't like it much. Further, I wanted to use layers and transparency for my animations, and for a long time that looked like it just wouldn't work. I've had to learn a lot, but I've finally found a way to render animations the way I want in Unity that seems to work well, mostly by coding it all up myself.

But it wasn't enough that it just play the animations with transparency. I needed it to actually look good and "fit in" with the game well. The concept I'm going forward with is in-line animations: the main text output for the game will start adding tiny animations alongside actions to show what's happening. Rather than having a dedicated animation area, I'm going to make it part of the feed of activity, so you're always seeing glimpses of what's happening right in the main area.

Now, that might sound weird, or like it might look ugly, or clutter things up. I've been very conscious of that. I've been working a lot on how best to present these in-line and get a good "look" for it. I've ultimately decided I need some flexibility so players can choose the experience they want. You can turn the animations on or off, you can make them larger if you want, and you can set them to "squish" down or not to make sure they're not bulking out the text display too much with empty space. I've been working on systems to handle all of this, along with learning how to make all of this possible in the first place, over the last month. Now, I finally feel like the game is ready for real animations to be added to it.

As I write this, I'm partway through putting together my first proper animation for the game. I'm not an artist, but I'm trying to pick up what I can from a lot of the artists I admire most and turn it into something that's easy enough for me to illustrate and take full advantage of my tools and my medium. You might call it "silhouette animations," but I'm putting a little extra into them as I experiment with my options. I'm hoping it will come together in a unique style that helps give PWO its visual identity, and not just look ugly or messy. I'm honestly still not sure how it will all come off in the end, but the tests I've run so far seem promising.

Actually, if you'd like a very rough idea, I was so excited with my first, very rough test animation that I posted it as a mystery teaser a while ago on the site I'd go to habitually for such things. But, well, that site is looking less appealing these days, so I've also recently made another big change. With that in mind, I've moved my focus over to a new account, and I've posted the preview again there-- over on BlueSky!

It doesn't look like much, but the proper one should be rather more developed, and it'll be very small on the screen anyway, so hopefully even my meager talent will be enough to have a pleasant effect. Right now my basic goal is, similar to when I first built any of the other systems for the game, to simply build the most basic and broad-reaching versions to start things off. I think this new element may provide a good way to "add some goodies on the side" to future versions of PWO as I go, adding more animations for different actions or different situations and gradually filling out a greater variety in the game. Right now, though, the focus is basically on having "very basic animations for all/most sex/vore actions" that are maybe more abstractly evocative of what's going on, and leave the juicier stuff for later updates. As always, I'm trying to find the best compromise to show what's getting added and keep each update coming out quicker!

I'm pretty excited for this one, and I'm hoping it'll do a lot to raise the game's public profile, so to speak, but I'm also worried that as soon as I start throwing the word "animations" around people will raise their expectations dramatically, only to be disappointed by what little I'm capable of. So this is all around a pretty peculiar and emotional update I'm working on. Hopefully I'll have some decent samples put together before long, so I expect I'll finally be putting up some art previews again soon! Keep an eye out for those!

So that's the big news for current developments. I've been both looking forward to and dreading sharing this news, since I think it's probably something a lot of people have been hoping for in some capacity or other, and I just hope that I can manage to satisfy most of those desires without setting people up for disappointment. I'll try my best!

Thank you for your support as I tackle still another way to make this game the best it can be. I hope you've been enjoying the recent changes, and that you'll like what's coming up!