Implementing Dual Pose Recognition!

One of the biggest obstacles to us getting the Pupply Play scene with Yuki-Onna out has been re-coding the pose recognition and pose assist mechanics, to support a new way for the game to recognize when the players answer yes or no.

BECOMING A REAL PUPPY

The game was set up to recognize yes and no answers as head nodding or shaking. Whenever a Mistress asks the player a question, they simply nod or shake their head and the game tracks the movement of the headset to register the answer. But, Yuki wants her pets to be real puppies so she is training them to answer with their paws. 🐶

This means the game has to be able to look for and recognize more than one pose option AND display more than one pose assist icon. 

Geez, that Yuki is much higher maintanence than we thought!! 😱

REDESIGNING POSE RECOGNITION AND POSE ASSIST

Up until now, the game was designed to look for the player to take one specific pose and it was read simply as a 'success' or 'failure'. To help the player get into the right pose, the game displayed the pose assist mini-slave statue positioned into the correct pose. As soon as the player's controllers and headset moves into range, it is registered as a 'success' and the scene continues. 

Since Yuki will not let the player answer her with a head nod or shake, we had to do our part to make sure the player is able to answer with their paws.

Getting this mechanic to work required re-designing the  pose recognition and pose assist mechanics to now look for one of two different poses, instead of the previous single pose. 

Not only did we have to code the game to be able to recognize either one, but we also had to make it so that the pose assist mini-slave statue could display more than one pose. 

...And because players wouldn't know which pose assist icon matched which answer, we added a label to the icon. 

...And of course, we couldn't have the two icons overlapping, so there was work to be done with how they display side by side.

We are excited to inform Yuki that her puppies can now behave the way she expects! (Though we still need to enable keyboard and mouse support - tricky! 😬 - and we still need to playtest how well it works!)

FUTURE USE

What's great about re-designing the  pose recognition and pose assist mechanics is that we can use this feature in future scenes. Instead of just using this for yes and no, we can also use this to enable the ability for puppies and slaves to indicate to a Mistress what they are interested in, allowing for a much more dynamic interaction in game!

THANK YOU FOR BEING PATIENT LITTLE PUPPIES!

Stay tuned for playtesting!