Posted December 09, 2023 by keepherdev
Welcome back, Keepers!
For Alpha 0.13, attention has been given to making characters feel more alive, with the new personalities system, better looks, new animations for special states or conditions, and more!
Personalities
Characters now possess personalities that dictate how they will respond to certain events, interactions and conditions during the game!
Each personality is custom made, with their lines of dialogue being fully voiced. Animations, facial expressions and other behaviours can also be based on personality settings.
Over time, more personalities will be added, with more complex interactions and events between them!
Some new global animations have been added for special conditions such as characters crying, being wounded, trembling in fear, and more!
Characters will now dynamically shift focus between attention points relative to what is happening around them.
They may get distracted and look around, or look at you when you talk to them. If they're in a critical state and looking for a way out, they may desperately look around after it.
Slowly but surely, characters are feeling more alive and allowing for more immersion and attachment!
Graphical Improvements & Performance
Character's hair and skin shaders have been reworked. Hairs now have a more realistic texture and shine to them, while character skin now features pores and look a lot better under strong lights.
Body hair and nipple textures have been reworked as well. Pubes should now look a lot more realistic, and will be given even more attention later on.
A lot of the settings for High graphics quality have been reconfigured to fix issues with shadows and aliasing. Shadows are crispier and edges shold no longer stand out so much!
Performance has been given a lot of attention, with new LOD models for inactive or far away characters, pathfinding fixes, AI logic being toned down for characters offscreen and more.
Hopefully these should fix some of the performance issues previously affecting some players, especially on larger Dungeons. There will be more performance tricks coming in the future.
Now we can safely say the game both looks and performs better than ever!
Overworld Expeditions
You can now send your characters into expeditions or missions, where they can be assigned to bring food, search for treasure, study new technology or even kidnap new prisoners!
These missions can both succeed or fail, and can lead to some interesting events. Characters will gain levels and relation with the player after returning from missions.
It's a great way to level up new characters and having them like you, while still getting something useful from it!
This feature is a first small step into the future Overworld expansion features, where you'll be able to interact with the world's factions, characters and locations in more depth.
Rebalancing
Combat values have been reworked so that more strategies and weapons are viable.
New Ritual: Bind Imp
You can now perform a ritual to summon and bind Imps into servitude, providing an alternate strategy to filling your workforce in the early game.
Assignable Assistants
The Assistant is now a Dungeon servant and you can manually assign new characters to the role. More important roles coming soon!
Known Issues
In some occasions, the new character focus system can have them focusing into odd angles that cause them to bend into weird poses. It's being worked on for an Alpha 0.13.1!
Next up & Other News
As always, a big thanks to all the playtester patrons on Discord!
For Alpha 0.14, I wanted to try my hand at different body meshes, seeing as implementing the LOD one into the existing workflow went really well.
What this means is that I can finally experiment with adding stuff like Futas and Male characters into the game, and eventually Monsters and Beasts shortly after.
I'll also be reworking the current Race framework to allow for layering and more modularity with current systems.
This will allow for the future character editor, player avatar, character breeding and race layering/miscegenation mechanics.
At the moment, I'm not even 100% sure how I'll go about doing these, but I'll definitely be posting about it on Discord!
So feel free to check it out if you're interested in seeing how these turn out.
Thank you all! Have fun!