Soggy Horror October Devlog
Hey all,
Work on Soggy Horror continues to be slow and steady and I'm finally knocking out this month devlog where I talk about my priorities with the upcoming Halloween build, the scope of the project and celebrate Unity finally kicking out that shitty CEO and reversing just about all of the bad changes.
Out of the gate, I would like to say that I do think this year's small Halloween will be controversial for a few of you since it focuses on the graphical and look and personalities of the characters rather than focusing on expanding & fixing the old and work-in-progress maps as well as giving rather flat gameplay and dumb AI the facelift that needs. That and a lot of the feedback I have been given by you will all eventually become our main focus and will get the attention it needs on this year's big Xmas update.
By far, the biggest improvement that will be in this small but important October build is the improved models for the initial six characters that all have a full texture set (before they only had a placeholder albedo for their texture) and the addition of 3 new cultists that want nothing more than to see you drool all over yourself in one of the island's secluded nurseries.
These new models are built in mind for what I have been building up for the alpha 2 and potentially beta builds of the game where they have a much-improved rig over the 2022 Halloween and the summer 2023 test of the game and have full facial bones and a complete set of bones for their ears, tails, breasts and two bones for well... You know...
In addition to the current cast of 9 characters all getting their alpha 2 models, I have done a good deal of redoing old crappy animations that had clipping issues and were made in mind for a 30 fps game and additional animation work for the cultist's interactions that will get slowly get introduced in future builds including rather embarrassing ones for characters that get in a rather... compromised situation...
All this rig and animation work is going to get worked in the new Work-in-progress AI and cutscene systems. They are also very important since we do want to differentiate the cultists and friendly NPCs with their personalities and abilities.
Another big focus of the update is the new graphical effects, features, and optimization. The game looks a good deal better than it did in that silly stress test demo I did this summer and runs way better. Features can also be turned off and on paper, you shouldn't have issues running the game if you had no issues running the 2022 builds. Keep in mind I will be doing my usual hotfixes since this build will no doubt have its share of nasty bugs.
With all that said, I do want to admit I am a bit further behind than I want to be due to those controversies you read about with Unity's upper management. I did end up flirting quite a bit with Godot and was extremely impressed with it, but I eventually came crawling back to Unity after they did a 180 on all the really stupid stuff and shitcanned that reject of an EA director that should have never became the CEO of Unity in the first place. Although I think Godot is an ideal game engine for a hobbyist like myself, it just doesn't currently scale well enough with what I want to do for Soggy Horror and I don't have the time, energy or experience in the engine to rewrite everything. I am however pleased engines like that, monogame, and GMS got a bunch of new eyes on it with this controversy. I do however find it absurd that people have been running to Unreal when using that engine is far more expensive than Unity and has way more bullshit fees and just isn't suited for hobbyists at all.
Anyway, that's enough rambling for now, see you on the 31st. Although this year's Halloween scope is a bit limited I am positive locking the new models and graphical improvement will pay off when we start going hard again with this year's X-Mas update.
Comments
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I played the demo of your game and it was good.
Will there ever be a 3rd person view?
cutscenes for sure, possibly a optional switch view button that can get assigned to just for the fun of it in the future.
Awesome! Your models are so well made its a shame I can't really see them XD
Also, will there be more gameplay other than just walking around and picking stuff up?
I have bought your game and played it but never saw any real use of said padding :(
Sounds pretty neat!
I wouldn't worry so much about bugs. Supposedly we all signed on with the understanding that this is an Alpha.
yeah, the new test maps I am working on are going to be full of them and people should go into them understanding that they are there for testing the look and the props first and foremost.
Wait so are we getting animation this Halloween
New model animations for the alpha 2 version of the 9 character models. I would like to include some additional content I worked on as well but I can't promise that if I run into compilation errors so I am setting realistic expectations.
Dude Unity had nothing to do with you not putting out any of the update you said were coming, since SPRING. And not wanting to put out buggy builds? That's what an Alpha is. And despite all the other updates, after7 months we're getting model improvements.
Trust me, going that route would've been a major mistake with the major overhaul systems that are interconnected. Setting unrealistic expectationing based on something that said in spring and later recanted when I got knee deep in completely rework the ai, sound engine and all the interaction systems is just silly and waiting till the end of the year to really see things put togther is hardly a stretch especially when it comes to game development.
Additionally, burning out a very small hobbyist team to rush stuff out while during a transition phase is always a horrible mistake and taking this route allowed me to collaborate much more with them then usual. I"ve made this mistake before and I am not doing it again even if it does upset a few people waiting patiently on the updates
There is far more going on then just updates to the model and graphical pipeline especially with the art and sound but it's best people understand that we have our eyes set to december now for the big jump to alpha 2. And again, doing a gameplay focus release each month before the systems were in would've ended up as a disaster.
Trust? So you're already rolling back that the "October update" from your last post and now this update isn't even getting the alpha 2 models according to this post? You're preemptively dropping a load of nothing on us. Like ya asked people to hand you money and we're going to see a whole lot of nothing for it but excuses.
Why the toxicity over the transition to late alpha/early beta? That process always takes a good bit of time. The new models, graphical pipeline with additional optmizations and the new shaders are a big deal and they are in the halloween build. I am not going to bite off more then I can chew to the point where we have to fargo a xmas update.
Kinda feel like a broken record here but rushing all the maps, sound and existing objects over to the alpha 2 codebase would just be silly at this point and I can't really get behind why that's a hard concept to grasp.
I really hate generating unearned hype so I decided to stay silent on a lot of things. And I didn't even state that I got the fmod sound engine fully working on the alpha 2 codebase on fmod which also need its good share of porting and tweaking to make it worthwhile.
How about cause it's been a year and the only thing you've released is an single updated game test room? I wouldn't call it rushing anything and just pretending to dangle a carrot the entire time. You're still trying to dangle that carrot like everyone is supposed to believe an Xmas update is gonna come with your track record. You even said you had a build ready to put out in may, but you didn't want to release it cause you'd be away at work, then never release it still.
Dude I never had an expectation of you to actually finish the "mess around fetish game in unity" I was though at least expecting a couple updates down the road to have something to mess around with till the project eventually gets cancelled, like the other ones. And yes I'm angry because I'm not even seeing those, and all of a sudden you want to try to pull the UNITY card, like that in anyway effected the past Development of the game, and even the future Development with how small a project this is.
Like I said, what happened to the may update you didn't put out cause hell, SOMETHING is better then nothing.
Honestly I would say don't worry much about the graphical or texture in the game you have one of the best looking games out there! I would say focus on content. maybe an animation if you get caught. A few sunk some money to see this project succeed and the last post makes it seem like not much has been done. try to showcase your new 3 cultists or the differences of the old models. It has been 5 months. Sept 12 unity so I can see a hiatus there and honestly we all get a bit lazy to so lay off Hogde a bit Evecharm. we counting on you hodge your game looks promising we hope to see more and more content.
Congratulations on returning to the engine you are familiar with