Battle-Arena Reyka

arena 1 progress

2023-05-27T22:53:42Z

Progress continues on the first arena, which, as I've stated several times, will be a mostly-complete copy of the Night-games classic arena (mostly, because I'm dispensing with the kitchen). At this point I have the arena basics coded up, navigation in place, and background art all set up. I am able to plop myself in the arena, and walk around searching for, and battling competitors. I took some screen cap of this experience, which, apart from some jankyness with the inconsistent fight-system art work, I'm pretty dang happy with.

There's a lot more to do but yay, arena combat.

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on to the code

2023-05-18T19:28:25Z

At this point I've more or less wrapped up the scenes I want in the next update, and I'm starting on coding up the first arena, which is kind of fun, the plan is for the first (or first several matches) to take place in the classic night-games arena, which means I'm looking at the Night-games map and more or less re-creating it. As I dig in it strikes me that it's been over a year since I've played NG, and I think since the community has heard anything from SilverBard. I super hope they're doing well, and I gotta say I can, at this point, certainly empathize with the absentee h-game creator archtype. Working on a project like this really is just SO different from any other kind of software or art project. You can't just jump in and out of it as time allows, an investment of time really requires an emotional component that is probably pretty fucking unhealthy in all honesty heh. You need to take that basically manic uncontrollable, horny energy and kind of pour it into this **extremely** slow moving complicated, intricate, easy-to-fuck-up process which necessitates that you maintain that energy for hours on end.

It's not just a question of _do I have some time to make a little progress on this h-game side-project. The question is really more like, do I have the time and inclination to work myself into a fuck-needy lather and then write code, diction and make art like that for 4-6 hours, and then keep feeling the aftermath of it for days?

I barely have the beginning of an operational game, and I find it difficult to believe people do this all day every day as a job. Maybe that's why, for the most part, the good games get abandoned and the ones that get finished are sort of uninspired. The chunk of meat these projects take out of you is substantial, unless you're just not really invested, and in it for the morally-questionable cash.

Anyway back to the grind.

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minigame ponderings

2023-04-14T22:55:32Z

As I'm working through storyline scenes, I've been thinking a lot lately about replayability. The typical thing to do in renpy is make two or three variations on the scene and just replay it verbatim every time. I would like there to be a lot of casual sex in the house, but I don't want it to feel repetitive. So I've been thinking about how I could go about giving the player a little more control over things..

I have in mind a UI that would basically look like the fight UI, where you have some choices to make over at the right, and some arousal bars up top. probably no log window. The encounter would consist of groups of 3-6 frame animations, eg.. lets say you're having a sexual encounter with Octave, you'd start out with a couple options like "Kiss", and "boob grope".. you choose one, and you get a replaying animation of the girls making out, until you click something else. As arousal rises, and depending on the interpersonal relationship between the NPC and maya, more moves are unlocked.. Eg "force octave to her knees" if octave is submissive to maya, or the other way around if octave is dominant. When the arousal bar peaks, you can select a finish or continue the scene at your leisure.

The animations would be re-usable, but the player would basically get a build-your-own-sex-scene type interface, so it would be potentially different enough to make it interesting, and it'd be a lot easier to add to and build on than constantly making new scenes from scratch. While making the Harry scene I've experimented a little bit with wiring things up this way, and this video is the result. I think there's a lot of potential here, it's certainly a different style experience from what you typically get with a renpy engine game.

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updates updates updates

2023-03-24T22:03:19Z

Greetings battlefuck aficionados. I have not posted in so long I actually forgot I had a blog, which is maybe something that happens to people leading secret double-lives where they surreptitiously create lurid video games about demonic wrestling leagues? Looking back at my last update in (jfc) December (well.. ALMOST January) I neglected to even post about the v0.0.2 update, which dropped 1/1 and is available at the f95zone thread here: https://f95zone.to/threads/battlearenareyka-v0-0-2-artisnal-depravity.119792/

Since then, having mostly completed the fight system, I've mostly been doing scene work. There are two, possibly three scenes I want to have in the bag before the next update. One scene with joy, which will give the player some background on the various factions involved behind the scenes, and kind of spells out how I see the whole patron/benefactor dynamic working, Joy will also tease some upcoming content related to "VIP parties" and the like.

Another scene with Harry, which will give the player the opportunity to "opt in" to a partnership with him, where Harry provides some goods and services from the outside world in exchange for, well blowjobs mostly. This dynamic is intended to reflect the "shopping" mechanic of Night-Games. You'll "earn credit" with Harry and use them to buy stuff in his shop. You won't be able to buy zip-ties, but I have in mind analogous things that work better given our Narrative direction. For example, I expect the player to be able to purchase magical wards from harry, that will bestow in-fight advantages. Think: a symbol magically drawn onto Mayas forearm which, when touched in a certain, deliberate way, will temporarily stun her opponent, and etc.. The size of the ward will dictate how many maya can hold, and smaller wards cost more.

Harry will also be able to use his influence with the Patrons to help Maya delay or dictate the tournament schedule, enabling the player to more or less click a button to enter "tournament match" mode whenever they want. All of this is, of course predicated on sucking his dick, which I grant some players may not be into. We'll see what kind of feedback I get, and depending on that, I may hack up a scene to give maya a means of blackmailing harry into cooperating instead, giving the player the option to still patronize harry's services, without patronizingly servicing harry.

And finally some fight-related scenes involving holly and octave. These are intended to more or less establish that Holly's demon dick isn't JUST a problem for Maya, and will be the starting point for the first quest, where the player can work with octave (or against her) to mitigate the threat Holly's demonic gift represents.

I am done with the aforementioned Joy scene, and about 3/4 through Harry's scene, I probably wont' have the shop up and running in the next update though. But I do intend to have a working tournament match done in the next update, so lets talk about that.

In Night-games, the tournament was always the same, and took place on campus at night beneath the noses of the "normal" students and staff. Reyka's tournament is not likewise constrained, and will include several different tournament games with a more "squid-games" sort of flavor to them. Don't worry, it will mostly still be running around and fucking each other, but goals will change.. sometimes the winner will be the first across the bridge, or last atop the platform. I expect there to be opportunities to form alliances, and betray people, and of course the original tournament on a demonic mock-up of the university grounds will also be included.

Lastly, one thing I feel I'm not doing a good job of already, even though we're barely out of the intro at this point, is providing sandbox content, by which I mean things for Maya to do in the house. I expect that the player will spend most of their time training, learning new moves, sparring and etc. But I also want to provide some other off-time activities, and I'm not sure what these will be yet. Having a shower, seems like an obvious one, and I added a kitchen with the intent to include a cooking dynamic, but yeah. I generally want there to be a means for Maya to improve her base-stats or at least maintain them, in the standbox style we all know and love. Maybe she takes a charisma hit if she doesn't shower every so often? Anyway food for thought.

Until next time, I leave you with a teaser from the upcoming scene with Harry..

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Holly fight video

2022-12-30T15:58:08Z

Sup pervs!

Super happy to report that Holly's fight art is 100% complete. I've had probably a dozen fights with her, and she's stupid fun. I recorded one of our fights and pasted the vid below. In this fight, Holly uses a new action I added called 'feed guard' from the standing position. Feed-guard basically works by collapsing on your opponent, forcing them to pull guard. You wind up in in either half or full guard, which is a disadvantaged position for you either way, but the move is usable from some pretty deeply disadvantaged positions, like standing back control, so it can be useful to escape greco or judo holds, and bring the fight to the ground, or as a strategy for players who want to train up their passes and don't mind working from inside the guard.

As a very strong stand-up fighter, it's not a strategy Holly should be using, but it worked out well for her this time.. from my closed guard, she passes into her brutal gable-grip flavored side-control, and wastes no time transitioning that to back-mount. From here she takes a moment to punish me with some stiff tit-slaps before showing off her beyond-brutal back mount pin. I go ahead and tap at this point because just the sight of that pin makes ME uncomfortable, and Holly decides to finish things off in doggie-style.

You'll notice in the finish-phase transition that holly is not sporting a dildo, but a wicked looking demon dick. There's storyline reasons for this, and her phalice comes with a massive damage bonus which isn't implemented yet. You'll notice her finish is standing, unlike the other women, Holly prefers a stand-up finish and both of her current finishing moves are standing.

Also at the end of the video you'll notice the new training system text. More on that in my next post.

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Holly holly holly

2022-12-18T20:52:22Z

Working with the Holly 3d model early on, I really didn't realize how buff she is compared with her competitors. Now that I'm about half-way through her fight-art though, the full --ahem-- weight of her physicality has -ahem- impressed itself upon me. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I'm personally not really a "muscle girl" type of guy, but I'm definitely here for Holly. Working with her has been super fun, and honestly she's just sexy as hell.

If you've wrestled or rolled, you will have met people like her.. who are just difficult to deal with because of their athleticism or size. I've been able to work this into pretty much all of her positions so far, and I continue to be surprised by how each of the fighter's personalities and fighting-styles work into their position art. Here for example is Octave's closed guard:

Relaxed and dynamic.. as an expert bjj player, Octave is comfortable on her back, and not particularly worried about your pass attempt. She would prefer an open guard to this position, but that doesn't yet exist in the game, so she'll chill here, and look for arm bars or chokes, or perhaps sweep you into full-mount if the opportunity presents itself

For comparison, this is joy's closed-guard.

High and defensive. As a judo player, Joy isn't crazy about working from her back, and prefers to work a high closed-guard to make it harder for you to pass. As you push for space, she'll look for sweeps, or other opportunities to take the fight back to her feet.

Now here's Holly...

Heavy, relentless and aggressive. It doesn't matter what position you're in, or whether you have advantage or not, Holly is a handful. She will force you to carry her weight, and use painful overhooks and forehead grinds like she's doing here, and otherwise just generally assail you with how much it sucks to do anything other than what she wants. With her, you're never on-balance, never comfortable, never truly on your game. She will grind away at you until you quit, and then she'll make you sorry you did.

Anyway like I said, her art is about half done.. and I have high hopes of holiday-related free time to finish her off and hopefully bang out a couple scenes. then it'll be v0.0.2 time!

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the dawn of holly

2022-12-09T00:37:20Z

I'm done putzing around with UI elements for the moment. It is my least favorite activity -- I would legit rather fold socks -- and I know it probably shows in the polish of the ui elements I have so far, but I'm going to not worry about it and assume you're too focused on the boobs to notice anyway.

I have a new fight vid to show off the new UI polish, featuring Joy this time, so you can get a little more of a feel for her fighting style. In this fight, Joy gets an underhook and quickly capitalizes on it to put Maya in a guillotine choke. Maya only manages to get in a single boob-grope from the underhook position before she is quickly submitted. You'll notice that the meat of the submission comes from a special "choke" attack that deals massive damage but is only usable from choke positions like the one Maya's found herself trapped in.

Once Maya taps, you'll notice the stamina/composure bars, which both go from full to 0, are swapped out with an arousal bar that goes from 0 to full. A full arousal bar brings you to orgasm and ends the fight. The astute among you will further notice that the composure damage Maya dealt with her sneaky boob grope is carried into the finish phase as arousal, so Maya actually starts the round with a little bit of a head-start, which she could transform into a come-back victory if she plays her cards right. (I go ahead and push the cum button for her though, to keep the file-size down).

Anyway shut up and show them the vid art:

Currently I am working on Holly Art, and am almost finished with the standing positions. As always you can follow along with my art progress on the fight-art spreadsheet. We are heading into the holidays but I'd really like to have her art finished before the end of the year.

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updated healthbars

2022-11-12T17:16:07Z

getting some work done on healthbars this morning. I think they're coming out pretty well

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Is it dead already?

2022-11-09T23:24:47Z

I promised myself I wasn't going to apologize to internet randos for not being available-enough on this project and etc... so I guess sorry not sorry I've been kind of absent. Turns out getting a new job means you know.. actually doing that job.

Anyway, I have oodles of progress to report. Joy's battle-system art is entirely complete, which is dope. I can now challenge Joy and have complete battles with her. She's super fun. Her battle art is judo-flavored, so she has better stand-up angles and judo-takes on various positions. For example here's what her side-control looks like, in the judo-style made famous by Karo Parisian et al..

I took a few liberties with Joy's pins, making them a little more openly sensual than Octaves, since the storyline mechanic between maya and joy isn't going to be competitive/hostile (to say the least). Here's her backmount pin, which is, I think, the least racey of the pins I drew for her.

I also did a ton of bug-squashing, and a little AI work. Currently all of the competitors get a copy of a common "AI" class that is responsible for choosing moves from the list of available moves (in the current position and known by the fighter). Previously that AI class was just a random selector, with a few constraints (like don't select breathe if your stamina is already high, and don't select adjust if you selected adjust last turn), but recently I created an ai subclass for Octave. Mostly because I got fed-up of her selecting sweeps from closed-guard when she should be bitch-slapping and throwing arm-bars. Anyway that was fun for me, just from the perspective of being able to make a fighters fight-style match their personality a little better.

I want to do a little UI work, on the stamina/composure bars, to insert facial shots of the fighters, and swap out the composure bar for arousal in the fuck-portion of the fight. Then I'll start on Holly's art.

take it easy.

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stop fucking with the fight-system already art

2022-10-02T22:20:13Z

The finish-phase work I've been promising is pretty much ironed out, and I've spent the last few days in micro-tweak mode, obsessing over this or that detail and squishing little bugs as I notice them. But in the interest of getting a v0.0.2 out there (finally for fucks-sake), I'm going to stop fiddling with this, and call it "done for now". It's still a little rough, but I think it gets the job done, and I really need to move on to fleshing out the art, and making the storyline stuff I want to get into .2. I already have the octave-revenge scene done, and I need to add the joy interrogation scene hinted at the demo, and a scene with Harry, which you probably didn't expect, but will be super fun.

Enough gabbing.. lemme share a couple end-to-end fights between maya and octave, to give you a sense for the current state of the fight system. In this first fight, Maya starts out well, pulling off some sneaky boob-gropes, despite being caught in Octave's head-and-wrist control. One more grope probably would have won her the fight, but Octave manages to pull o-soto-gari and get side-control. Although Maya can still grope from this position, but Octave's BJJ affinity gives her a defense bonus in side-control, which is sufficient shut-down Maya's superior seduction skills. From side-control, Octave wastes no time, transitioning immediately to an Arm-bar and forcing Maya to submit. From here, you'll see phase-2 for the first time, as octave imposes a finger-fucking session. Despite having Octave's fingers buried in her pussy, Maya was still able to fend off the raven-haired BJJ fighter's slaps and spanks for a few turns, but eventually she succumbs to the passive pleasure-damage incurred by the position, bathing Octave's hand with fem, and giving her the win.

In the second fight, you'll get a feel for Maya's natural play-style. Octave gains an underhook almost immediately; a dangerous prospect for Maya since it opens not only several judo-throw take-downs, but also the standing guillotine -- a quick and lethal submission. But Maya sticks to her seduction game, aggressively groping up on Octave's tits while countering her osoto-gari and keeping the fight standing. It doesn't take long for the sexually-inexperienced fighter's composure to crumble to Mayas expert stimulation. Maya is awarded the goddesses gift when Octave goes weak in the knees and more or less begs her for a good rough fucking, which Maya delivers in the form of a doggie-style finish-phase. The sexually inexperienced Octave is completely out of her depth with Maya's cock buried balls-deep in her baby-maker, and brokers no resistance at all, cumming on her knees and baptizing the seductresses cock with her dignity in a single turn.

Maya's sensual superiority is evident in both the amount of damage her grope attacks do as well as the amount of turns it takes octave to finish her, vs the immediate sploosh suffered by Octave when Maya is on top in phase-2. At the moment, there's not much Maya can actually DO while she's persevering through the fingering, but eventually I'll implement recoil damage, and some actions sex-oriented players can train to pull off wins from disadvantaged positions in phase-2.

Again, there's a lot to tweak, but I think I should move on to fleshing out the art for joy and holly. I'm interested to hear if you think I'm on the right track here with the fight-system, so feel free to drop me a line in the f95zone thread or on the night-games discord.

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Back in the swing

2022-09-19T16:22:53Z

My absolute last interview (hopefully) is this afternoon, but it's a systems-architecture one, so my prep is pretty much over. Spent the weekend getting back into the swing of things. I haven't really been changing anything at all with the fight portion of the system, which is a good sign, and I've been working on the fuck portion of the system pretty steadily. The transition scenes I shared below probably won't make the cut, I think I'm going to replace them with individual shots rather than two-girl combos.. the existing ones just came-off awkward.

I have some UI work to do, to replace the stamina/composure bars with a single arousal bar for the second phase of the fight, and while I'm at it I want to get some head-shots taken and inserted into those bars where they need to go. I'm also thinking about elongating those bars.

I also need to go back through my position art and do a like.. Q/A on the relative size of the screen caps to make them more uniform.. Some of them are right up in your face like this..

And then others are WAY back and teensy like this:

it probably doesn't seem like a big deal just looking at the screenshots but when you're playing the size difference is really distracting when the images change.

Anyway once I have the phase2 details ironed out, I'll start churning out art for the other two girls and we'll be close to release time

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Abatedly progressing

2022-09-12T18:18:43Z

Had a job interview at the end of the week last week for a big-ass tech company. I think I did aiite? I guess we'll see. Keep your fingers crossed for me. This week more to come. But given how super responsible I've been with respect to preparing (go ahead, ask me to write a Fibonacci function I dare you) I allowed myself a little time this weekend to model up the first two finishing moves, the finger-fuck finish and the doggie-style finish. These will probably be the only two finishes I'll ship in the next version. Here are some close-ups of octave's (in game they'll be angled a bit differently...)

Anyway like the last update said.. I'll probably be heads down this week interviewing and prepping. Hopefully I'll land one of these and progress will ramp back up on the second release.

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progress abates uncontinued

2022-08-29T20:42:13Z

if you are SUPER CLOSELY following all of this hijinx, you've probably noticed the image spreadsheet hasn't moved, which, is accurate. I haven't had time to do any graphics work. Like I said a couple updates ago, I'm on the job-interview train, which is taking up free-time, but should let up soon (hopefully). Nobody wants to be back in the swing of knocking out static-assets more than me, I can assure you.

I've been wrestling with octave to QA things in phase one when I need a little breather, which has been pretty great. As a result of that experience I added several new actions, which I mentioned in my last update.. these include:

* boob grope
* boob grope (from disadvantage)
* bitch slap
* titty slap
* spank
* taunt
* joint-tweak

these are all kind of interesting in that they don't progress the position of the fight, but merely sap stamina, composure, or both. I need to add a few more, like the fellatio from the bottom action that was teased in the demo. I thought these little interstitial moves weren't going to be very important to the rhythm of the game, but having played around with them, they do add quite a lot, and they're giving me ideas about UI tweaks I could make, to improve the "feel" of the in-game fights. Even with a random-choice AI controlling octave, the way she pauses to spank you or talk trash before sinking in the arm-bar really adds personality. I'll probably expand on these with better graphics and dictionaries of taunts individually tailored to the personality of each girl.

Anway, back to heapsort.

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A phase-1 fight.

2022-08-25T14:00:03Z

Wanted to share a gif of the first-phase of a fight.. In this one Octave wins the initiative and uses it to take Maya's back immediately. She then sinks this deeper, transitioning to back control, using elbow tweaks spanks and titty-slaps to sap Maya's stamina before pinning her in back-mount.

"Bitch slap" and various gropes from disadvantaged positions have also been implemented, but Maya didn't get much of an opportunity to showcase them in this match. It was like octave could tell the screen-cap software was running heh.

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progress continues abated-as-fuck

2022-08-22T18:16:39Z

Not a super amount of progress this last week, things at day-job are looking a little sketchy lately, so I'm taking some interviews. If you've never done software-engineer job interviews it's a whole barrel of fun.

The ;tldr is, to do the work, you need one set of skills, but to get the job you need an entirely different and barely tangentially related set of skills. And if you're like me, and you spend all your free time making pervy video-games, then your getting the job skills usually need honing. And so here we are.

I did make a little progress. Mostly just playing through fights and finding little bugs here and there in the actions. There are a few balance issues as well, and some AI related problems where, for example the NPC will choose to rest or adjust her angle multiple times when she doesn't need to, which is an easy fix, but lots prioritized over that still.

Sorry it's taking so long to get this next release out, but it's a big hill, and once we're over it, the release schedule should become more frequent.

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the inbetween

2022-08-15T22:28:19Z

Over the weekend I got a little time to play around with that inbetween portion of the fight between phase1 (fighting) and phase2 (fucking). I'm still not entirely sure I know how I want it to work. I know a few things:

* i'd like there to be a proper cut-scene
* the cut-scene needs to transition to an actual fight position

I want there to be a cut-scene, because I'm working around the whole "wardobe" problem by introducing the very convenient mechanic that whoever wins the fight is magically bestowed a dildo, and I want that to be a kind of boom-ahhh event.

It needs to transition into a proper position so we can carry on within the fight system, and to do that you need a position to take actions from. As you know if you've been reading my complaining about creating static assets, this means I need 2 graphics per fighter minimum one for the phase-transition cut-scene, and one for the proper position. I think I want to make at least 2 of these per fighter though, depending on whether the fight ends in a standing position or on the ground. So that means 4 *6 total phase-transition graphics. Here are a couple cut-scenes I worked up for Octave, just to see what they might look like, one standing, one on the ground.

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houston we have submission

2022-08-11T22:20:54Z

Wanted to share with you a fight log from the first actual fight-system submission. This is a pretty fundamental milestone for the fight-system, since it marks the first completely unscripted phase-1 fight finish so far. It ended in an arm-bar submission after Octave got an underhook, took me down into smount with an osoto gari, adjusted her angle and sunk in the armbar. Pretty thrilled RN not gonna lie


composure check: 35 33
maya roll to hit: 3
octave roll defense: 24
rolled ac == 24
{=action_text}maya chose: struggle{/=action_text}
{=fail_text}Fail!{/=fail_text}
{=normal_text}octave stuffed your attempt{/=normal_text}
{=debug_text}Turn: 18{/=debug_text}
{=normal_text}octave has you trapped in an arm-bar submission hold{/=normal_text}
stamina check: 0 25
{=action_text}[p1.name] has been submitted. {/=action_text}

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fuck dayjobs

2022-08-10T22:09:54Z

dayjob is busy, but also kind of pissing me off with their bullshit, so I've been making progress while ignoring them this week muhaha. Anyway just wanted to share this screen of my kk_studio load screen with all the new positioning work yay.

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moar arts

2022-08-08T16:34:28Z

Got a lot of fight-system related buggery ironed out last week, and started in on modeling the massive amount of art I'm going to need, as previously mentioned. I put up a spreadsheet to track my progress on it if you care here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EwL1kUfeRfyTN4QagHFK6Arey5ZsV3yb4hXnL84wUuA/edit?usp=sharing

like my last post explains I need 6 images per position for the "normal" positioning, and some positions will require more, since they'll depend on the current fight state.. eg you'll get a different phase-transition graphic depending on how the fight ended, whether standing or on the ground etc...

This weekend I finished cut-in graphics for all three competitors.. cut-ins are those interstitial graphics before the fight where your opponent gets to talk a little shit and pose intimidatingly.. this is Octave's:

I also worked up quite a few missing fight-images, I'd like to get caught up 100% with one opponent so I can do a sort of Q/A iteration to make sure I'm not missing anything foundational in fight-mode. Then I'll move on to the finishing scenes for one opponent, so I can run the fight system beginning to end, and then I'll back-fill the rest of the graphics for the other two competitors. Since I already had Octave about 70% done fight-wise for the demo, I'll continue iterating on her until I can see a fight from start-to-finish. Here's one of the positions I finished this weekend; the back-mount pin:

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octave vindicta post

2022-08-01T16:52:10Z

Finished the scene I was working (octaves revenge), which came out about 3x larger than I'd intended and caused a bit of main-story-arch contemplation on my part. The very best scenes are the ones that teach you about your own world as you create them. As if the creation itself exists of its own accord; massive and wonderful but buried in obscurity, and as a storyteller, your actual task is the unearthing of it.

I made 35 static graphic assets to go along with it. Typically I try to limit myself going into a scene.. eg this should be a 10 graphic scene... I figured this would take 20 pngs to lay down, but hey, what's 15 extra png's between friends.

With that, I begin hacking on the fight system again. I have some finishing-move actions to code up, and then I'll be working on a MASSIVE array of graphics required for all the fight-scene poses. Currently the fight-scene requires 2n*p pieces of art where n is the number of Maya's opponents and p, the number of positions.

currently there are 21 positions coded; these are:
Closed_Guard
Half_Guard
Full_Mount
Side_Control
Sitting_Back_Mount
Back_Mount
Face_Sit
North_South
S_Mount
Full_Mount_Pin
Back_Mount_Pin
North_South_Pin
Face_Sit_Pin
Bowing_Angel_Pin
Standing
Wrist_Control
Standing_Back_Control
Standing_Underhook
Standing_Guillotine
Sitting_Arm_Bar
Arm_Bar_Bottom

With three competitors that's 2*3*21 == 126 images I need to make. There are actually fewer than that because most of octave's images have been done for a long time now (those were used in the fight in v0.0.1). BUT I'll also be adding another 10 or so positions (60 images) before the next release for all the finishing moves so, the grand total will probably be ~150 or so.

better get to it.

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progress continues unabated

2022-07-25T14:33:54Z

Not a huge amount to report from last week. Day-jorb continues to be a time-suck, so I really only managed a few afternoons of work on BAR along with a little time over the weekend. Finding lewd-game making time is a strange calculus. With other kinds of computer work, you just need you and a computer, but with BAR, there's this entire _who can see my screen_ component, which weighs way more heavily on how much I get done and what kind of work I can even do.

Anyway I'm still working on octave's revenge I'm about 10 images in, and pretty happy with it so far. Octave is, by far my favorite character in the game, she's just so... alive, both with respect to her presence in my mind and also just, in the purity of her motivation. My intent for the three competitors was to be sub/switch/dom paths for Maya, so if the player wanted to be dominant they could hang out with Joy, if they wanted a little of both, Octave, and if they like being submissive, Holly.

That's still pretty much the plan, but I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this little tit-for-tat Octave and Maya feud, and I'll probably try to incentivize the player to participate whether they're into the power-dynamics of switchlyfe or not.

peace

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progress progress progress

2022-07-18T13:21:38Z

Being a one-person dev shop means having three jobs; writer, codemonkey, and artist. It also means that when you're writing, you feel like you should be coding, when you're coding you feel like you should be making art, and when you're making art, you feel like you should be writing.

For the last few weeks though it's been nothing but code code code. I got I toe-hold into the scene that I've been wanting to spike out late last night, but mostly I've been hacking on actions, action-metadata, and the fight system. The actual *fight* part of the turn-based combat system has been done for a long time.. in fact, it was the first thing I made working on this project. But there's a lot of stuff surrounding the fight itself that had yet to be architected and wired up.

For a long time, I've held this notion of a multi-phase system in my mind, where phase1 was predominantly combat and stage2 predominantly sex. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is minimizing static-assets. By separating the two, I can keep the sheer number of graphical assets required to a number that's possible for a single human to manage. I also feel it's a bit more realistic but that's probably subjective. Anyway, it's been up in the air whether phase-2 would use the same combat system, or whether it would be a mini-game style thing, and that all got sorted out this weekend, and to give myself a little break from the code, I did some modeling for a scene I'm calling "octave's revenge"

Here's a screenshot

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progress continues unabated

2022-07-14T12:52:00Z

I'd like to say I've been heads down the last two days banging out code and art, but honestly work has been kicking my ass a little this week, what little free time I've had has gone to monster girl dreams, which, if you haven't played it.. you totally should. One of the most fascinating things about it to me is the way the game is designed beneath the hood. There's a thin layer of ETL and state-keeping code in renpy proper, but all the content is in JSON, and loaded at runtime. This makes it possible to mod without knowing anything about renpy really; you just need to learn their json wrapper framework. I feel like this should make the game kind of flat and predicable, but since you're pretty much **always** battling or fucking, you kind of don't really notice the game loop. As long as you keep new mechanics to a minimum, adding new content is an exercise in text editing.

ANYWAYS dayjob is easing up, so hopefully have some more progress today and tomorrow. I've been daydreaming about a scene between octave and maya for weeks, so I'll probably at least get some of that down on paper before moving back to the unfinished parts of the fight system. The MASSIVE thing I need to get wired up before the next release is basically what happens at the end of the fight. EG.. how the finish-move sex-mechanics are going to work. I've gone back and forth with myself over whether you should break out of the fight system and into a different mini-game type thing or not, and I think I've settled on not. This means implementing the sex positions and actions as, well positions and actions in the fight system, and deciding on things like will maya and the other players still be able to grope from finishing sex positions?

I think the answer to this will be yes. As long as nobody's orgasmed the fight is still technically on, even if one of the fighters has tapped. I think that's cool and kind of unexpected.. that you could still be dominated and choked out, and then still eke out a win from a disadvantaged sexual position given that you've honed those skills well-enough.

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training ui screenshot

2022-07-10T03:48:41Z

I may have been closer to being able to show it off than I thought..

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15 files changed, 1110 insertions(+), 123 deletions(-)

2022-07-10T01:16:31Z

My progress over the last few days according to git:

15 files changed, 1110 insertions(+), 123 deletions(-)

The back-fill of meta-action objects is complete for each currently coded action in the repo, and along with this I have a greater understanding of where the gaps currently are with respect to the available actions, but maybe I should back up and briefly describe the fight system, so you have at least a toe-hold with respect to vernacular.

To my mind, speaking as both a programmer, and also as a bjj purple belt, a wrestling match models as a series of transitions between state. Each state is a position, side-control, half-guard, full-mount. There are certainly short periods of scramble, and a constant battle for control of the transition, but for the most part, the fight tends to work like a ladder. Step by step transitioning toward a sub, or a beep on the interval clock.

Battle-arena reyka's battle system is a loop surrounding two primitives: positions and actions. We begin in a neutral, standing position, and roll for initiative, the player who wins init, goes first, choosing an action. There are currently 10 "types" of action, (though these categories are mostly organizational.. they are all instances of the same underlying class (of type "action)).

These are: Grapples, sweeps, passes, takedowns, reversals, pins, subs, gropes, finishes, and special moves. For the most part, these actions transition the fight between positions. A "scissor-sweep" for example, transitions the fight from full-guard to full mount, assuming it succeeds. Other actions are intended to attack your opponent's stamina (bitch-slap) or composure (boob-grope) or both (spank). The actions are designed with several key features:

1. There will be many of them, and Maya, won't know many to start. This means, like any other white-belt, she will often find herself in a position she won't have a good answer for. She will, by virtue of who she is however, have excellent groping skills, and will potentially need to rely on them to pull off wins "from the bottom" as it were (or you know, not. Losing is also fun), until you train her up to the point where she can level the playing field.

2. Each action will be individually upgradable. Like real bjj players, usually its better to hone a 95% triangle choke, and develop a game around that, rather than having an encyclopedic knowledge of every possible technique from every possible position and no real plan or game.

ANYWAY as I was saying a lot of code-work has been done over the past few days, mostly around the training UI, and I'm not really out of the woods on it yet. Now that the action-meta stuff is done, I'm working on nit-picky bullshit like greying out the moves maya already knows or doesn't meet the requirements for etc.. etc.. Once I come up for air, I'll open up kk_studio and gimp and get some art behind the interface so it looks not shitty; then I'll hit you with another, hopefully more impressive looking screenshot of the whole shebang.

Along with the code-work I also added a scene where Marcus and Maya have their first real tet-a-tet, which I think came out pretty well. Admittedly I phoned in the art for this just a bit, spiking out three angles of them talking and just recycling through those through the entire scene, which is a bit wordier than I'd intended. That will probably either have more art added or get edited down a bit. I also created quite a bit of in-game help syntax to teach players about the innards of the fight-system, including the fighting styles, how affinity works and even sharing the under-the-hood math for things like damage, init, and to-hit rolls.

so yeah. basically lots of typing has happened. hopefully something screenshot-worthy early this week. stay-tuned

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