Sunbeamstress

we'll never grow old; we've got souls plated in gold

[sunbeamstress]

neon dollhouse 005

i'd like for this eventually to be one of those fun, showy game dev blogs but we're still in the early stages of things, so it's a lot of complex engine work and behind-the-scenes stuff most players will never notice

fun assets i can dangle like jingling keys in a baby's face

i finished the base design of the UI art - it needs a shading/details pass but as a concept i am VERY happy with it! it doesn't quite nail the PC-98 eroge interface vibe i want (it's a little too modern and too much of the screen space is the actual game) but i think it's more than acceptable.

i was sick of the room name/area flowing off the edge of the left-hand side so i turned that into a time display, and restored the original room/area header at the top of the text box.

i don't know if those stat bars on the right are gonna stay, and there's a huge swathe of blank space begging for use. in my head i imagine that'll be another "doll" just like Swan there on the left that shows whoever you're talking to or fighting, but that's probably a pie-in-the-sky idea for tomorrow's me

messed around with the doll sprite a bit:

don't mind that everything is burgundy, those are just the colors i use when drawing to map out contrast/detail

removed the dedicated "examine" / "journal" keys and added a proper main menu. right now it looks a little like this:

my initial concept for the title screen:

do i think i'll keep this? not 100% sure. i don't really think it shows what the game is about. i saw some screenshots from a game recently where you do maintenance on robot girls that was nothing short of breath-stealingly erotic and honestly it retroactively ruined this concept for me. i'd prefer the title screen to be sexier. since i planned for this image to be animated, i'll probably end up just reusing it for whenever Swan rides the tram from place to place on the campus i like showing my art in progress because 1) AI has turned the artistic world into a joyless hellscape and it's nice to actually prove a human made this stuff and 2) the glow-up when it's finished is always worth it.

boring engine stuff for technical dorks who like that kind of thing

okay so starting out, i didn't really think ahead re: what kind of states my game would be in, what kind of mechanisms would be present, or even like, what you do from moment to moment.

i knew you would:

move the player from place to place (rooms),

talk to/interact with NPCs and other elements (dialogue),

and get into "cutscene interactions" that necessitated moving the player to a special room and then back when they were done (encounters)

rooms/dialogues/encounters made up the entire ecosystem of the game. i gushed about making encounters work in a previous post, but if we're dividing ND's interactivity into a pie chart, it's really only one slice. not yet enough to make a game with

there is also one more major mechanism in place: choices. that's these guys right here:

initially choices were pretty simple objects. they derived their information from a metatable with some basic values i wanted, and were created through a function: create_choice():

i made some strange decisions when implementing these. for instance, each choice implicitly added itself to the room it belonged to, which meant invoking the choice was kind of ugly. in practice, every single room's choices were created like this:

this was a pain in the ass for a few reasons, namely 1) it was a bunch of typing i didn't really need to be doing, and 2) making choices belong to the room was kind of nonsensical. why do i need to invoke the room's name when adding choices to a room state (basically a room within a room)? why do i need to add "encounter" to every choice that belongs to the dedicated encounter room? i've been programming for a very long time; i can tell when i'm doing something the long, hard way, but i'd gotten so far in my progress i didn't want to change it.

at least, not until i had to.

i need a combat system. just like the room system pulls double duty as the encounter system, the combat system is also going to function as the engineering/hacking system, and the sex system for erotic encounters (people who have played Degrees of Lewdity will probably understand). if dialogues and encounters were half the pie, this system is the whole other half.

i realized that my system of creating and presenting choices to the player was entirely unusable for this. i was going to need a new choice type: i wanted "complex" choices, e.g. controls more involved than simply choosing the hotkey of the action you wanted to perform.

in fact, shit. i was going to need more advanced controls for other things: the wardrobe system won't work off of simple lists of choices, either. and what about when i implement the Space Station 13-style hacking?

pictured: me comprehensively rewriting 3-4 major core systems just so swan can take her top off

so i set out in choices.lua and wrote:

and that is how far i got before saying to myself "wait. my choice system is really clunky. what room am i going to assign these to? am i gonna make a 'combat' room? there has got to be a better way to do this."

from what i could see, choices had four major problems:

they implicitly belonged to rooms, meaning that the player could not be presented choices in dialogue or anything that wasn't coded as a room. for dialogue this was fine - i invented room states just to handle conversational trees and it works great - but if i was gonna add a whole new system this wasn't gonna cut it.

i was simply adding all these choices to the room's own internally-tracked "choices" table and then just... immediately moving them to the core game.choices table.

i was offloading actual choice processing: displaying icons, descriptions, finding and evaluating hotkeys, etc. to the functions that were supposed to just be displaying these things or running simple actions.

i coded choices in a really silly way so you HAD to use hotkeys to select them. going through the list with arrow keys or mouse control was basically impossible

step one was cleaning up the needless pass-along interaction between game.rooms[room].choices and game.choices. the former no longer exists; rooms simply dump their choices into the latter, game.choices.

the flow of code went from:

run choice processor -> figure out which room i want -> find the room's choice creation function -> dump all of the choices into the room's internal choice table -> discern which choices should be available and dump THOSE into game.choices

to:

run choice processor -> if the game's state is "room" just run the choice creation function of the player's current room (why would i ever need to run it for a room i'm not in) -> put them directly into game.choices

in lua you basically do everything with tables. i am intimately familiar with this design paradigm. i created two new companion tables: the job of game.choice_keys is to store every choice that passes the "can i do this" test and its associated hotkey:

just like that, with a few more tweaks, the controls were totally fixed. now the player can use up/down arrows to iterate through them. i haven't done mouse control yet but it should be pretty trivial

the second companion table is the most important. when the game displays the room to you, it does these things in this order:

run goto_room(room name)

if the new room has a pre_enter() function, do whatever code is in that

load the room's data, including processing the choices in that room

if the new room has a post_enter() function, do whatever code is in that

finally, get the prompt through get_prompt()

the prompt was doing an unnecessary amount of work: going through every available choice in game.choices, parsing its descriptions, setting values for time passing, determining whether or not to even display the choice to you based on stat checks, and more. i have no idea why i wanted to do things this way, other than that i was just starting out and planning ahead is not my strong suit

anyway, this is my new choice creation function:

the idea was: why not simply fully process the choice when it's created and then send it directly to game.choices?

finally, to piece it all together, the choices will then add their information to the second companion table: game.choice_rows

no need to post-process anything, no need to evaluate a shitload of variables in each choice as i'm building the prompt. just use the data that's already in there and don't worry about anything else.

after that was all done, and i'd tested to make sure the game wasn't reenacting 177013 every time i booted it up, it was time to do a very very scary thing: go through every single file where i'd used create_choice() and change it to its newer, sleeker sibling: choice{}. i've been programming in lua for 16 years and i had no idea you could just do function{} by the way. that still feels weird to me

anyway it worked great! it was a lot of work for something a player will never, ever notice, but god does it feel nice to have it done. it paved the way for way more complex systems down the road, and just like that, i'm a little closer to making this game the DoL/CoC/TiTS ripoff eroge fantasy i'm dreaming of

am i following my vision?

not 100%. i keep looking at those old mockup screens i posted a year or two ago and wishing i could be making that game. but i think i need to learn how to make games, period before i make that game. i don't want to half-ass it.

i wouldn't trade this for the world, though. i have very much always wanted to make a game like neon dollhouse (an eroge RPG with just as much effort put into mechanics/worldbuilding as smut), so it isn't like i'm compromising on my dreams, i think i'm just making myself eat my veggies and finish my plate before i get to have dessert

okay love u thanks for reading! ♥

join the Neon Dollhouse discord server at https://discord.gg/2fjBugSUnj or don't, i'm not ur boss

[sunbeamstress]

neon dollhouse discord server

i've been coordinating notes, github updates, etc. on a private discord server. i decided to move all of that stuff to its own server and open it up to the public. if you'd like to chat or even try test builds of the game, you can do so at:

the nsfw cyberpunk sandbox, built in LÖVE 2D | 1 members

please note that this is an adult game i'm making, and thus this is an adult discord server!

[sunbeamstress]

neon dollhouse 004

i've progressed enough on UI pass 2.0 that i feel comfy sharing a video of it in action:

it still has a few issues (overflowing room name, the fact that i haven't finished drawing the lower right corner, etc.) but it's functional and i am very happy with it!

this video also showcases the new renderer: fading text to grey and transitioning seamlessly between scenes might not seem like a big deal, but there was a surprising amount of work that went into this thing to make it as robust as possible! you're going to be reading a LOT in this game so it's important to me that it's comfy

[sunbeamstress]

neon dollhouse 003

i'm getting kind of serious about this project. going this long is kind of untread waters for me - usually i find some other hyperfixation by now. the game has consumed most of my waking thoughts. that's owed in no small part to the engine. LÖVE 2D is very easy to work with and super unobtrusive. i wouldn't use it for a huge game with lots of effects/physics/etc but for this project it's perfect. also its website is super cute

new stuff

Swan can now run afoul of the Sentinels of the Security Circle (armed corporate guards). they wield their power almost totally unchecked and if you haven't been behaving yourself during your stay at Saint Judith's Ward they won't hesitate to use this as a door to do not very nice things to you

Swan can now get a temporary gig modeling for an art class.

Overhauled the concept of travel entirely so now to get anywhere in Saint Judith's you have to either walk the halls or take the tram. This way you engage with the random encounter system

Expanded on the characters Jodi and Pistola, who both work for the Electrician's Club in the Maintenance Wing.

Pistola hangs out with the group the "Incubus" friends over in Communal but doesn't speak much compared to the other two. She's meant to be your in-road to naughty stuff like stealing, shoplifting, sneaking into places without clearance or access, prostitution, etc.

They're internally called incubus_friends because their names are Pistola, Anna Molly, and Isadore

Jodi works the graveyard shift and will show up to "rescue" you the first time you get beaten up by Security during the day. He is a manipulative sociopath who will present new options to get out of conflict with Security, but using them raises your Heat/Fine stats, which makes Security even more likely to go after you!

renderer, processor

a big part of "being serious about this project" is that i could no longer rely on doing things the quick and dirty way if i was gonna expand what this game could do. the other day i ran into a huge problem implementing something that sounded trivial (making text gradually fade into the screen) and realized i was going to have to Hal Wilkerson the problem

originally i was intercepting love.draw(), the engine's built-in function to redraw the screen every frame, and passing it along to a ton of different functions responsible for drawing their own bits of the screen. silly. dumb. foolish. the entire thing was a mess, a spiderweb of related functions that all called each other. i was going to need to build a central renderer to keep track of it all

unfortunately i also had the same problem with the game's underlying logic. love.update() is the processing counterpart to love.draw()'s visual focus, and i was using it the same way: if i needed a room to proffer its own information or a piece of dialogue to play, love.update() was calling its function every single frame, whether it needed to or not.

the solution was a central processor function to relegate tasks to these little subroutines. it works much like the renderer, acting as the nervous system that drives the game, sets appropriate flags to tell the renderer to fade things in/out, etc.

this was a huge pain in the ass to do, honestly, because up until this point i'd been in a total flow state, just hammering out new scenarios and actual gameplay activity. not being able to play the game was frustrating. it was like having to take my car apart during the work week! i'm not done with all this work, but i've finally gotten the game back to the point where i can see the rooms/dialogue/choices again, and now i can stop looking at VS Code like an anxious mother watching her toddler recover from the flu

the signal the signal the signal the signal the signal the signal

okay good, now step over here with me for a second

a long time ago, when i was a very little sunbeamstress, i found my mother playing a game called Knights of Xentar. this was known in japan as Dragon Knight III and as the catgirl spreading her legs on-screen would indicate, it was not for kids. mom, scandalized, uninstalled the game and forbade me from going into her office without knocking. she was unfortunately not as diligent about hiding the installation disks. i played a lot of knights of xentar

that game never really left me. as a small child the sexual content was fascinating but honestly not why i stayed; there was actually a half-decent RPG in this thing, a trend that japanese developers of the time relied on consistently - you come for the titties, you stay for the combat, worldbuilding, city builder mechanics, and baseball team management. i have no doubt it was some male gaze market capturing deal but that was a little opaque to me. even when they were on some hentai shit i just thought the girls looked cool and pretty. i still do

games like KoX were the norm, not the exception, on the PC-98, FM Towns/Marty, and other japanese computer systems. the thing is that these games were so fucking gorgeous. the really pretty ones were literal works of art and even the ugly ones had a kind of je ne sais quoi: a visual language that owed its existence to some function of the screen resolution, typically blocky "system" style fonts, and palette limitations.

and that era disparity was crazy. compare this pic from Domino Soldier Albion...

from this one from Doop

fucking doop. could you imagine getting mogged that hard on the same system by a game named doop. oh my god

if i share a few of my favorite screens, i bet you can easily and immediately identify the most important characteristics of their design:

i could look at this stuff for hours. i will forever mourn the design language of this era that was lost. most people don't even know it came and went. the push for minimalism in modern games is wild to me because you have all that space. make the text as small as you can and shove it into the corner. reduce the UI to dots or tiny wheels and don't even have it draw unless something in it changes. we spent one trillion dollars on these graphics, that's all i want the player to see. if we let those losers from UX have their way our game will look like apple hypercard

"fuck that," said the man in japan, working at the god's honest 640x400, "half of this screen should be a naked woman."

okay, back to what i was saying

another thing about Being Serious about my game is i no longer felt i could settle for the minimalist UI i'd created. that wasn't the kind of game that inspired me, nor was it the kind i was making.

i decided to make a new UI. while i was at it, i also knocked another item off my list: i wanted swan's sprite to be a little smaller, because she took up a LOT of the screen and i was also gonna have to draw a lot of clothing/alternate states for her. all of this is obviously not done but i'm really happy with it so far:

i'll be happy with it as a static image for the time being but eventually i hope to animate it. i want to put those cables all over the place, have them grow and increasingly suffocate the UI as you progress, and also have them writhe

that's all for today! thanks for reading. if you'll excuse me i'm gonna go fire up the Bazaar and get pissed off at the new character some more ♥

[sunbeamstress]

neon dollhouse 002

things i added to neon dollhouse since my last post:

- jodi, your next door neighbor, will verbally abuse swan if she bangs on his door while he's sleeping

- swan can take a job watching a cat for her other neigbor, and piss her off by taking her drugs

- swan can steal wallets

- swan will get naked in the shower. there is currently no way to put her clothes back on so good luck you are now on hard mode

- swan can kiss a cute mechanic while she pokes her hand around under her skirt

- swan's friends can glibly recommend she gives the system the middle finger and prostitutes herself instead

- swan can pet the cat

all of these things might sound like an exercise in simply writing passages, but each one of these represented a new piece of tech i had to put in just to accommodate it

the game needed to be aware of the npcs and the ways they feel about you, so now they are their own classes with custom APIs. they have schedules, days off, and different outfits based on where and when you find them. i didn't like swan showering in her clothes so now she has a body with limb slots that are properly aware of her clothing and their sprites. they report their names and whether or not they're wet or covered up by something

game dev really feels like sculpting marble; at first i have only the crude forms of a few static strings and some dummy functions that might throw a few graphics around. every time i need the game to *do* something i have to take up my hammer and chisel and find its precise shape through a homogenous slab of nothing. it's a little overwhelming at first - i need to make so many tools just to begin making the parts you actually play! but the further i go along, the less time i spend designing new tech and the more i spend lost in the fiction.

encounters

the biggest problem i was facing was that the game was static. you could go places and look at things, respond to choices as they arised, but that was about it. i needed a way to break up the narrative with interactivity, and i needed something to do with all these stats.

the game degrees of lewdity (probably the one that most shaped ND) had a simple answer: encounters, everywhere, whether you were trying to woo your boss for a promotion or just cross the street in peace.

my first attempt is going pretty good:

encounters can throw up custom stat gauges and use them to dictate the flow of the event. now if you walk the halls, you might run into security and have to avoid making them suspicious.

this was really fun to design! it's wild how i designed this guard, wrote all his lines, even did the math to determine when and why he chases swan, and i still felt scared when he went after me. immersive!

ND is using encounters the same way DoL does, as a way of throwing a monkey wrench into the careful dance of stat balancing the player is performing at all times. want to pick up that money? you'll get richer but security will want to detain you more. want to fuck the lead researcher? you'll get on her good side a lot faster but you'll leave the session in pain and exhaustion

encounters were a really important step to making the game feel more like the interactive story im dreaming of, I'm really excited they're in!

[sunbeamstress]

work in progress

[7777777awawawa7777777]

the point of art is not to be great but to make it transparently obvious that there is something wrong with you

[sunbeamstress]

neon dollhouse 001

game dev is a humbling experience; i can think of no quicker way to come to terms with your own limitations as an individual creator. godot was a little too much engine for me, but i'm hyperfluent in lua and LOVE 2D is right there, and

anyway this is neon dollhouse

unlike the last times i ever posted sprites and screenshots, there are no mockups here - these are screenshots taken from a real thing i am building

this is a game that looks like a visual novel but plays a little more like a roguelite sandbox. it is kindasorta about the experience of playing a robot girl in a society that isn't ready to see her or her kin as human yet, it is kindasorta about a city that rebuilt itself after an apocalypse, and it's also unapologetically about getting what you want either through manipulation, enduring abuse, wielding overwhelming classified firepower, and/or through being a submissive little whore

if you liked corruption of champions, or guiltily enjoyed degrees of lewdity but wished it wasnt like that, maybe there will be a mote of interest or two in neon dollhouse that you'll enjoy

it's gonna be a long time before this is playable, wish me luck ♥

[amandaterasu]

There you have it, my very unofficial (Neither the devs of Aetolia or the devs of FFXIV had a hand in making these slides, obviously) post on why you should try out Aetolia! Why comic sans? Legibility and memes. Check out this link if you want to learn more, it will take you to the game's site! A bunch of information about the game's lore is available on the website, but I'm also happy to answer questions in my DMs here or on Discord.

[sunbeamstress]

I'm almost angry at how good a comparison this is, the Kugane/Enorian likeness fuckin fries me

[sunbeamstress]

approx 4 hours, Pixaki (iPad)

[beemovieerotica]

mama....

[beemovieerotica]

ok!

[sunbeamstress]

[sunbeamstress]

hi! it's my two-year tranniversary (hrtiversary if u prefer?? i guess)!

life is looking a lot different from when i first started.

these days i take progesterone, bicalutimide, and estradiol in injectable form. i switched to the injections abt two months ago, and oh my god, i was not prepared for how fast things would change. feeling like i was over the hump of my transitional growth and then realizing i had only just started, that was one hell of a feeling. get on injections. get on injections. get on injections!!

other things i have learned:

the tried and true medical effects of transition are not nearly so dramatic as the mental change of allowing yourself to be yourself. i could go on and on about the curves and the breasts and whatever - but for me the most dramatic difference is that i am almost entirely immune to cringe or to embarrassment, and i have allowed myself to explore my own evolving tastes under these conditions

you will probably shrink, which is somehow one of the things i didn't know about when i started. i began transitioning at 6' 3" and i am now 6 feet even. my hands are a little smaller and my feet are a LOT smaller (from size 12 to size 9 1/2 - 10 in men's, and whatever the fuck that is in women's)

women's sizes are still impossible to learn. i just figured out how to identify what will fit by sight

speaking of which? your body's gonna redistribute its fat fairly early on - this happened to me, noticeably, perhaps only 6-7 months into the process. if you make a major shakeup to your medication and things begin to go into overdrive? i hope u have stretchy pants, because ur tossing out the ones that aren't

get laser. like as soon as you can.

i recommend you learn makeup, jewelry, and fashion, which is not as daunting as it sounds and is actually a lot of fun. but if you don't wanna do that, here is the Sunbeamstress Two-Step to looking Dramatically Hotter: put some eyeliner on, and pluck and trim your eyebrows. you can change SO MUCH of your face just by giving your eyes some valuable attention!

ok anyway i have nothing else to report, my life is too hellishly busy to work on game dev and i'm kind of just spending this time exploring myself at the moment, so that's what u get!

im gonna go back to being a horny little weirdo, love you!

[vykodlak]

high fantasy lost something, I think, when the typical protagonist became ‘’gruff dude in full leather/plate armor’’ and stopped being ‘’muscular yet somewhat gender ambiguous dude in no pants, titty artfully out’’

[puppygirllaika]

Single Use

the training is faster then they expect, merely six months of course work and another three in the simulator. When mechs were being proposed it was supposed to take years, years of grueling work, of practice, of getting to know your machine, but in the end there wasn't time. They were a rush job, and corners had to be cut. The machinery was simple, hydraulics, pneumatics, actuators, large steel plates and heavily jacketed wiring, building the body was the easy part. The corners they cut were on the interface. physical controls weren't enough, and the sensor helmets were inefficient. The nerve ports wired into the spinal column were the best long term solution, but they were five, maybe ten years from field testing, and there just wasn't time. we never had enough time.

Instead, mech pilots are trained in secret. Their fatalities are muddled into the infantry numbers. they take nine months to train, and we get six hours out of each. But it's worth it. it's the only way to fight an enemy like this. The pilots don't know that, of course. and every soldier whose stood out on the battlefield with nothing but a steel helmet and a few ceramic plates around their vitals would rather fight from the inside of a mech. We get a lot of volunteers. they don't know. If they did, we wouldn't stand a chance of winning.

It's disgusting, really. i threw up the first time i watched it happen, watched that bulbous probe smash through that poor girls skull, her excited smile twitching at the corners of her mouth, her trusting eyes fixed on mine, that expression frozen on her face as her consciousness was obliterated too fast for signals to crawl down her nerves to the muscles in her cheeks. She just kept smiling, as it used her. as the tendrils of the probe extended out, snaking through the folds of her brain to find their purchase, before locking in, and joining her simulated experience with the onboard systems. The clock ticked down. five hours, fifty nine minutes, fifty three seconds. Enough time for one short field mission, before her brain burned out, and the steel body would hunger for a new one.

I got used to it. got used to wishing them good luck, to sharing their smiles as they climbed into those cabs. I knew what the training videos said. "You're a triad, your machine, your mechanic, and you". Every single one thought I was there to be their friend. their support. The one who kept them going. I just did tune ups between each run. And I dragged their bodies to the chute. and cleaned their skull chips out of the cabin.

They say mech pilots aren't human. The rumors go that they're something far more... animalistic. some fusion built organic machine, divorced from humanity by their melding with the mechs, their prowess on the battlefield, and their unquenchable bloodlust. It's half true. They're not human, not by the time I meet them. They're bullets. I just load them into the gun.

[ddesole]

The Matrix (1999) dir. Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski

[sunbeamstress]

its not a gooner game i swear