Just a little something I whipped together. There are more variations on my patreon MMD! or Enthusiast! tiers and above.

As i make my trek to selling on more mainstream platforms like steam with strict rules regarding character that appear to be minors, I’ve been studying why other games have gotten denied and/or banned. Steam takes into account literally everything, not the just the appearance of the character, but how the character acts, how they talk, what they wear and think about, what their affiliation is to other characters, all of it. it’s pretty wild tbh.

But with that in mind I’ve gone back and did an assessment of my own games and they have some very visible issues I can see now that I didn’t take into account earlier.

And no, I’m not about to remake those games.
But they will need editing.

One issue I found was Pattie calling Maiko senpai, I very much expect I would get dinged for this by a person reviewing Umichan Sentoryu looking for little stuff that might give reason to assume a character is a minor. Since “senpai” can be seen as a highschool anime trope. Even though senpai is also use in marital arts and the professional world, that is not the context in the game. I just have to be realistic and expect what they might have issues with.

I was also looking at diction Pattie and Leyah uses like “chu” and “nyan” might cause problems also. because adult speaks like that? It certainly doesn’t work in their favor. They already look pretty young also, especially Leyah when compared to the older sister zytra. So instead of just avoiding things that don’t in their favor. I want to also include things that DO work in their favor.

I talked to ttrop and wilson about this and we decided that the best way to keep Leyah’s personality more or less the same will be to have leyah speaking that way intentionally for some reason. Now if you know the lore, you know there is a reason already. Leyah has a lesser case of Khalei degeneration, however that won’t be known right away in the story(s) or even understood well. So instead that will be changed to leyah having a dream of being a popular idol. So she is constantly practicing talking “cute” so will be natural. So some of her dialogue now will include her saying that she is practicing talking like that, and how she wants to be an idol, etc.

Another issue i found specifically in Umicahn Sentoryu that i definitely wasn’t thinking about was the scene where Alma visits the House (How Carl first meets Alma) because of David’s antics at school.

This whole scene is definitely on high school level. Not college teacher is going to be visiting anyone’s house because of the behavior of a student. They’d just kick them out of class or the school, etc. The parents or student would work that out at the school not the other way around at their house. So I plan the change that scene to one where Alma shows up with some agents and is looking for David to arrest him. And she is not coming as a teacher, but as a enforcer for the law.

I think I will need to remove the David/Dizzy scene also. I think that was all the issues but if I need to remove the pattie and leyah interview scenes for some reason I’ll have several Violet animations to make up for it.

Joey’s sister Violet

For the past several months I’ve been mostly avoiding posting here for a few reasons that I will list below (I will resume again today though now that my schedule has a bit of break in it)

A. Worth it?
Many adult game devs either don’t have a website or don’t use it as a blog. I’ve had a site and blog for ages since i’m pretty OG. But I wanted to see if I really “needed” the site, considering the cost and technical mumbo jumbo i need to do to maintain it. And considering there so many other platforms to interact with fans/supporters on. I’ve been pretty active in the Discord. And Discord, followed by twitter as a back up, is the primary way to contact me currently. I also took into consideration that tumblr kicked the bucket a while ago. And that could really be any current social site really.

B. Time consuming.
As mentioned in A there is a lot of maintenance and monitoring the site for new comments. some of which actually takes me hours to reply to. And it takes several hours (on average 4) to make those lengthy informative posts with images and such. I always assume people would rather i be working on content (which I am very behind on as it is). On top of that I’m always running into something becoming out of date and in need of upgrade. Currently I need up the OS my site runs on, and update the version of php. which i’m pretty sure will break my website template and some plugins. so I need a new modern template, and also see what breaks. Hopefully the website even loads in first place. Because I did that it didn’t. I any case all of that is not game development and nearly a full time job as a system admin on it’s own.

So if the site is down in the near future, I’m very likely in the process of breaking something in the process up updating the website and plugins. please join the Discord (using the module on the right side of the page) or follow on twitter keep up with everything in the event the site is down.

Been a while since i made a post so I wanted to give some updates on projects. This will just an overview post and specific detail will be in the respective posts to follow.

Geenral
I’m currently in the process of catching up on 2D animations. this includes both Umichan and Aria related 2D animations. All these animations don’t have a destination game yet. I’ll likely just start posting some of them on social media that don’t have an obvious immediate game they could be used for. Or maybe all of them public at a bit lower quality I like see some others do. In any event, I want to begin making regular posts. not regular big posts like this, but smaller posts on patroen and twitter.

I get behind on animations because it’s quite a bit to work on various games (editing art, coding, bug testing, etc) and MMD that keeps up with a monthly schedule on patreon and keep up with animating a lot of animations. It’s really easy to burn out.

I will also be off and on breaking stuff doing much needed updates to the website.

Umichan (and related)

I’ve all but finished the game I was talking about this this post:

So what’s next?

for those not on the patreon, there will be a public version here as soon as I add in a few more needed dialogue scenes to fill in a few holes I rushed over. The game is considered a starting point so I really need to fill in those holes that were noticed in a discussion on discord about future games.

After than I plan to build and post the most recent web build of the UMCH Lite engine. This is something I’ve been working on for a while. Previous named UMAA (Umichan Maiko Agent Academy) and such

Umichan Maiko Agent Academy (prototype 3)

The current version I will post, checks all the boxes and tests everything out for that I will need to remake Umichan games how they used to be when they were made in flash. But also modern improvement like being able to port to mobile and mobile specific controls. I also took what worked in the VN games and added it here such as navigation through a menu instead of several on-screen buttons located in each area. I still need to populate it with characters and backgrounds but once i do that will be what i used to build VN style games for the time being.

The next, or at least one of the next games I plan to make will actually be a definitive game that combines the story from UMCH and High Stakes and beyond into a single game. The issues with tyranobuilder has always been running into total size constraints. But hopefully not I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Or rather what I plan to make is within the limits of the tool I plan to use instead. There is more Umichan info I need to post about but that will be covered in separate posts.

ARIA (and related)

I’ve worked a lot on the 3D Arielle project, some of the previous posts and info can be found here:

3D Arielle game project update 9

3D Arielle Project Mission 1 Video + H-Scene

I actually can’t post the current build until some licensees are taken care of, but I will have video commentary of mission 1 and 2 and a trailer.

I used DAZ studio to redo character models (again) and used blender to take the armor from the old models and apply it to the new models. I also updated nearly all the weapons and redesigned the locations used for missions 1-3. I also added a flight segment to the game to help it feel more like a city that might exist in the original ARIA flash game.

Since I have improved the 3D models. I also have a pipeline to add 3D sex into the game now and I have made a few dialogue scenes that tries to have some cinematic feel, making use of camera that give closeups on the characters and makes use of animation gestures to match what the characters are saying or thinking.

I also added a yoga segment to the game on a whim. This is similar to a view mode in some pervy game like DOAX. I will have a similar mode for dancing and the sex scenes. Certain button on the keyboard will allow you to toggle clothing and or control speeds and climax, etc. More info in the game will be in a separate update post.

I plan for the game to just have Arielle and Bri in it. I did remodel Phia and TT but can add them later if people want (I plan to show them at lest). It’s almost a crime to not have Phia and TT, but just having only Ari and Bri for this game makes development faster and less complicated. I think I can finish the game if spend several more weeks on it. This is ideal for me condensing I’ve already invested a lot into hi game and really have no idea how well it will do since a lot of people here currently in more invested into 2D Umichan stuff.

MMD (and related)

Since I’ve recently been re-familiarizing myself with blender to edit models for my games. I plan to take another swing at smoothing out some rough weight-paints on my current models in the boob area. I also plan to learn how to render (MMD) videos in blender and make use of cloth sim and possibly better physics. and while I’m working on that, I wanted to take a little detour and see if i can some some sfm style videos like i see many people with blender lately. learning how that’s is done and how to do it well, along with learning clothing sim in blender I hope will make my videos better.

this post redirects to the UMCH Lite prototype page.

A lot of progress has been made on the 3D Arielle game since my last post about it. Please keep in mind this is a side project so there are not regular updates. However, ever since the virus hit, I’ve really ramped up the time I’ve spent working on it. But I’ve also stopped working on it (for now) to finish some work in 2D projects first before the month ends. So as you can see it’s off and on.

I’ve basically overhauled the entire game. I redid the character and enemy models using DAZ studio. Basically making a base body and hair with a few sci-fi parts and editing the outfit from the existing models onto it in Blender. It took me a while to reach this point because I tried a lot of DAZ clothing and parts. Also I got better looking weapon models, and added parts where you get to fly in Ari’s ship while defeating enemy ships and capturing nodes, I added Ari’s apartment as a area you can walk around in and interact with Jeo and other stuff in there. One example is Ari can do yoga in there. It’s a type of view mode similar to any gravure watch mode in other some pervy game such as DOAX. I also updated all the areas the missions take place in, adding different buildings, objects and enemies and tried to make them all make sense based on the lore. I also added cinematic(ish) dialogue scenes that make use of different camera angles and animations to support what the characters are saying and/or thinking. I also made a new bomb for Ari (and blue agents) and made a few new enemy types. I also plan to add the enemy/boss challenge arena, and I’ll still have racing minigame in there also.

Having added all that, I did also decide to remove Phia and Tiffany from the game for now to keep the project from being something too large for me to finish in a reasonable amount of time. I did remodel Phia and Tiffany in DAZ when I was doing Arielle and Bri (and I even Maiko and Pattie but I will show in a different post), however editing their outfits to the daz body in blender and setting the characters up in unity (fixing textures, editing materials, correcting bones, adding their unique weapons, adding coding/components so they function in the the game, adding boob jiggle and hair physics) and all that takes a long time. The original game concept only had Ari and Bri. If the game does well I don’t mind doing the work to add Phia and Tiffany. I’d love to add them and I have the story that includes them worked out. However currently I have no idea how the game will be received so I want to see how that goes first. I even had the idea to have a second playthrough where you play as a created character. You can pick gender, skin color, hair and colors, khalei color (for passives), weapons and a bomb type.

I’d normally post a playable build of the game with a post like this however due to me still needed to sort out and pay some DAZ licenses fees, I can’t yet.

Instead I will show screenshots showing the updates. I also will have a trailer in a another post since this one will be image heavy.

Arielle Changes


These are the Arielle changes. The left is new, right is old (in case it isn’t obvious). The primary reason I redid the models was to improve the face, since most critique about what needs to improve was about the faces.

I took a swing at the faces earlier, but still wasn’t where I wanted it so this time I just did a redesign of Ari in general. Even though it’s a different, even younger look, from the 2D renders of Ari in existing games and art, I feel it hit right on the money of how she might look at point in the story and this setting (in my own style). Even though this is later in the ARIA story, Ari would still only be around 22 years old here. So that is the face and look I was going for.

I am missing not having an opacity map (which adds the dark and light details in the skin the old model had) but I think I might be be able to find and grab one in daz. I did a bit more than just swapping the armor over. I fixed the shoulder gear, waist gear, there are a lot more parts in general. The boobs are also weight painted a lot better and it uses several bones instead of just one. The new Ari is shorter than the old one but since i updated all of the models, they are all at this new height. and that height also matches the npc heights in the city area.

Bri Changes



I originally went for an asian look for Bri but pulled back on that a bit to land on how she looks now. I have some slight concerns about Bri seeming too young in appearance here for Steam. Although in the game she is the equivalent of 20 years old, she is a bit shorter and has smaller “body features” than Ari. So, if it’s a problem I should be able to remove any sex stuff with her in it for whatever platform it’s on and/or possibly have it as a patch or something. I’m also being very careful about how Bri acts and talks in the game because I know that plays a big part also. It’s a balance of wanting her to be animated and cute but not childish.

Bri wears the least armor out of the 4 girls on Arielle’s team so there is less equipment around the waist and legs. Kind of tricky updating the gear for a character that doesn’t really wear much to begin with but I like the final result I went with.

below are screenshots I took of Ari and Bri in a sandbox testing area. I also do all the model setup here after importing them from other software.

below are the updated weapon models for ari
MLaW (Mega Laser Weapon)

I had a unique custom made mega laser weapon model for Ari already but I decided to go something that looked similarly detailed as the other weapons. Same for Bri’s swords.

Rifle

Pistol

Ari’s grenade appears on her lower back area (not shown here). pistol on the leg and the other two guns on the back. In missions, all weapons she has are shown even when not in use, I didn’t wen to have weapons just suddenly appearing.

Below I am testing Bri and Ari ally AI .

Bri focuses on melee combat and Ari is more ranged. In earlier builds, Bri’s melee animations were bad and melee didn’t really work for her well. but I’ve worked on Bri’s animations quite a bit to make her viable as melee. The current version of her works really well as melee now both playing her manually and as an AI ally. She how has gap closer animations on the first and 3rd hit of her combo. her first and third hit also swing with both swords.

I also I have bit of AI working for Jeo but i’m not sure I’ll end up using it. Maybe for a different game.

Updates on some of the enemy agents:

Theses just a few of the males. however females are updated also.

these are the current enemies created in the game:
male yellow agent – normal
female yellow agent – normal

elite agent – blue suit mini boss (weapon and abilities may vary)

special agent enemy (blue,red,green) – special agent mini boss (weapon and abilities may vary)
smoke agent – blends in the with the environment. you can tell they are in the area if it’s really smoky.

male green agent – gun + shield (enemies in his platoon have a shield on chest also?) heals allies in range
female green agent – fast regen (no off-hand shield like male agent, but has small shields on armor/limbs)

male red agent – melee sword, rush ai logic
female red agent – sniper

operator + sentinel (blue,green) – tough sentinel has a lot of HP. kill operator and sentinel dies.
Mecha – big armor unit shooting explosive rockets. (elite or special agent pops out after it’s destroyed?)

There are some agents you’ll find in the town there don’t have helmets. Since there’s not many of them they likely will all play some interactive role in the game via the main story or minigame and stripclub stuff.

Hidden Special Agents (showing 2 of 3)

So for this game I plan to have 5 main story missions that takes place over 3 areas (with Phia and Tiffany I’d imagine 10 missions over 4-5 areas or so). In each of the 3 areas there will be a hidden special agent to find that is a more difficult to take out than the normal agents. Defeating them will unlock them in a challenge mode arena were you will need to defeat them in a more structured 2-phase boss fight. Beating them there will unlock stuff. I’m not sure what exactly yet though because I need to sort of what will unlock what. But there is plenty of stuff to choose from that can be unlocked. It could unlock their weapon, outfits, concept art, sex animations, dance animations, that character appears in the strips club, etc.

some screens from the Apartment

A lot of it is still template asset (I added it on a whim) but I have tried quite a bit to personalize it so far(and clean it up). It’s been updated more since these screenshots. I plan to do a lot more before I finish with it. I also want to make some Easter egg commercials on the TV. Some of the current ideas are having one with Zytra and one with Mira mostly from Umichan games.

Yoga screenshot
yoga has the option to toggle on/off clothes and move the camera around different ways so you watch ari stretch. Dancing will work similarly. I think for any 3d parts instead of toggle clothes (they will always be nude) that same button will manually switch the speed and climax states.

speaking of which, I have a image for that.
this a quick image from a test project where I try stuff out before importing it into the actual project. I have worked out a way to add 3D sex into the game but it’ll take a bit of time getting that going. I basically need to setup version of the character that uses a generic bone structure instead of humanoid one. It not as easy as other people make it seem. I’d imagine people who already come from 3D game backgrounds have already worked out a lot of the issues I was running into. I plan to use about 7 or animated positions exported from DAZ if I remember then all correctly.

next is the flying minigame

I wanted to have flying because ARIA’s origins are root in space combat theme games. This is isn’t quite space but it has a similar nostalgic feeling. I wanted to keep the main story flying segment fairly simple. capture one node, defeated one enemy, etc. the most you have to do currently is to capture 3 nodes all in one go. Also if your ship looses all HP you wont restart all the way over. Again the goal here is more nostalgic than difficultly. However I will have side activities that have more challenging flying combat to unlock stuff.

last screenshot I have to show is a screenshot from one of the dialogues in the game.
First I want to say the dialogue is mostly just placeholder. I suspect I will get better at multiple camera use and animations in 3D dialogue scenes the more I do them (or perhaps with better tools). Currently I have a few gestures animation that play during parts of the dialogue to support what they are saying. It could further improved with voice acting also if i decide to go that route. The one thing I don’t think I will do is add lip movement to these because I didn’t import and mouth morphs from DAZ, and because when in edited the model in blender I actually deleted all of the inside of the mouth to make the model seize smaller. I didn’t expect to do dialogue like this for this game but here I am.

I think that at least touches on everything so far. I plan to hopefully get more progress made in June. I’d say I’m 3-4 more weeks of working on this full time to finish. Not to be confused with 3-4 more weeks until I finish.

If you are into MMD check out these MMD hmv videos by JDuskhaven

Maiko

Zytra

I recently made a post that talks about updates and the current status of the 3D Arielle Project game. In the post I mentioned just using Arielle and Bri, however I did redo Phia and Tiffany also, along with Maiko and Pattie. Below are several DAZ renders of the models. Keep in mind I’m am crappy with DAZ.

Phia:

Really hard to find the right hair for Phia. But this was the closet most realistic look that matched the other characters. I could have put ribbons back in the hair but I decided not to. It’s not clear from these pics but she also has long hair in the back similar to Arielle, and of course a big ass.

Tiffany:

This is how Tiffany would look. I tried playing around with the teacher outfit but I doubt I’d use it. Similar to Ari and Bri, I’d drop all the clothing (including the glasses) and updated the gear from the old models to fit these.

This is a old early test render of Ari

Test render of Arielle team.

Maiko and Pattie:


I actually have no plans to use Pattie in any 3D game currently. But it’s likely I would use Maiko. Before I scaled the Arielle game back, Maiko was in the game as well. However unfortunately can’t use this hair in a 3D application as far as I’m aware (only 2D). But did find hair that, with a lot of editing I would be able to use for Maiko.

I did want to quickly remake crystal horror using Maiko at some point before updating my version of unity.

Crystal Horror

Testing cum stuff. I also tried to use a cafe environment but everything came out dark because I don’t know how to do lighting yet. But honestly, I’ve only been messing around with DAZ a little bit to test stuff out and it doesn’t seem too terribly complicated to make a game with the renders. It’s not surprising there are so many DAZ games lately.

this was the first hair I tried for Pattie but the main issue was it constantly had white spots in the hair when I did a render.

More Maiko stuff:

All this is more or less hypothetical. Just making different options for myself for after the 3D arielle game is done. I don’t know what I’ll be doing next with 3D just quite yet though. For right now, the only 3D stuff happening is the 3D Arielle game. Also keep in mind this is separate from 2D stuff. I plan to keep doing that also.

For any that don’t know, I did try making a 3D Umichan game back in 2015. I might have a look at it later because obviously now I actually have the ability to finish it.

Umichan 3D

Between Artificial Academy 2 and Koikatsu there a lot of character cards from Umichan and ARIA series games. I wanted to post some of the ones I know about.

https://illusioncards.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=umichan

https://illusioncards.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=advanced_rogue_intelligence_assault

more AA2 can be found here:

Selvira’s Artificial Academy 2 Umichan Characters

I plan to stress test the UMCH Lite engine to contain all 70+ characters and various backgrounds to see if it builds and see how it runs. I’m hoping this massive upfront work will allow me to make/update different games quickly. also combine some games into one larger game.

One game that will also be possible to take a look at is the Rookie. And this post is about a few ideas for revisiting that, assuming everything goes well.

previous ideas
the obvious would be to expand the story beyond the current ending.
Also I recall some requests to have endings for Remi and Phia.

recent ideas
I’d actually like to rework the game to include the agent teams to flesh out the school.
http://spiralvortexplay.com/svp/?s=team

Including guy and girl characters.

Currently I think you bump into a couple trainer girls at the start and you bump into different members of Arielle’s team during different parts of the game, including Jeo.

But now that more named guys for the Academy are made, they can be buddies with the rookie or cause problems for trying to romance the main girls, etc. This is the same for female character as well.

Also currently in the rookie if you don’t make the team, you are kind of in the limbo state but I could make it where you possibly join some other team now. I was thinking the team that Maiko joins later in the story.

Also in various other games, I have a few characters working for execs but it’s not really fleshed out well. So it would be nice to do that here.

in UMCH some of the execs do nefarious deeds that catches the Umichan characters off guard. It would be interesting to see the build up to those things here and/or from different perspective. Albert saying cringey stuff about Savori, Ace kidnapping stuff, and Natan stealing from Lynn, etc.

also the topic of wet t-shirt content came up somewhat recently in the discord and I think the game would be actually a good place for that seeing as how you already have competitive teams.

finally since I have made Umichan High Stakes I can continue the rookie story into that one from his perspective.

for 2D games I think I might switch to using 3D backgrounds. That way I can just make whatever I need easily. Also I have a lot places that are integrated into the mall but it’s really hard to find backgrounds to use for that.

I’ve basically fleshed out several areas of the mall here and posted some example pics of how I can make use of different angles for each area. Feel free to post thoughts.

I want to do the GemCo academy the same way also so everything can be consistent.

I plan to have 2-3 different cafe outfits but I’m wondering which one people prefer more.

vote in the poll:
https://www.strawpoll.me/20283444

below are comparisons

a few updates to the backgrounds, I added black outlines to the backgrounds to match the outlines the 2d characters have. this helps the background not clash as much.

I also got some feedback on the cafe so I deiced to make several improvements.

I still need to do the Kiosk and add in a few more areas and the backrooms of various places.

I think I will take out the grocery store in favor of the movie theater. I’ll likely also remove hallway as a designated area and just have that angle for dialogue scenes and such. Think about adding a little kids play area but we’ll see. That might be asking for trouble heh.

I’m in the process of not only working out backgrounds for upcoming Umichan projects, but also doing characters.

I just want to explain the workload.

There are currently 75 characters I plan to get loaded up into the engine.

each of those 75 characters will have about 7-10 facial expressions.

for example:
Normal,Mad,Happy,Sad,Surprise,Unique1,Unique2,Unique3
Maiko will likely have the most.

of these facial expressions. there are 3 possible eye directions they each can have.
left, forward (looking at player), right.

So I’ll need to edit over 1500 heads (75 x 7 x 3)…..

they also need to be spaced out evenly in a spritesheet. Below is an example of 3 expressions for Chris.

they need to be sorted this way so I can overlap them with the character art to change the face expressions.

Having described this process, I’m still looking at ways to tackle this. The workload would be considerably less if I separated out the eyes, mouth and eyebrows and rebuilt the face in the engine like I did in UMCC. But it’s more tricky to do that here. But I’ll still need to figure something out unless I want to be making heads for a while.

the issue is I actually forgot to consider changing faces on the fly when I made my dialogue system. UMCH didn’t have changing faces with the dialogue since I could easily just move to the next frame over to change the art. so I’m trying to make something to handle that now.

Just wanted to post some quick updates of what I am working on right now.

The UMCH Lite engine I have been working on is mostly done. There was a patreon release of it last month. I’ll have an online browser version here hopefully before or during the weekend. I finished importing all characters and their different pieces and parts so they can have different facial expressions and outfits. I also finished and imported a lot of the 3D backgrounds I talked about in earlier posts. I still need to work out how I will handle sounds and background music. This month I plan to recreate Umichan Sorani in the new engine after I get the sound stuff worked out. I will probably start on that in a few days from now.

Meanwhile I have been trying to grind to the finish line on the 3D Arielle game. I have done mission 3 and I’m in the middle of finishing mission 4 (out of 5 total). I also imported in all the 3D sex animations but only half are used in the game right now (since i’m not done yet). I finished the various optional areas and drag race portion of the game. There are also a several things like outfits to unlock. I’ll have a detailed post about that later once I finish a complete rough build of the game from start to finish. Similar to this post:

3D Arielle Project Update 10

The last mission is not that long it’s mostly planned to be just a boss fight.

so for 3D Arielle it’s looking like

a 3rd person cover shooter RPG base game with:

5 main story missions (3 have hidden bonus enemies)
3rd person flying shooter segments between missions 1-3
several dialogue scenes that advances the story
10 3D sex animations
13 arena challenges (5 requires unlocking)
drag race minigame
sexy yoga view mode
sexy dance view mode
4 unlockable outfits

I also plan to have various 2D unlockable sex animations once i get this base portion done.

Then I wanted to test the UMCH Lite engine out by recreating Umichan Sorani how I originally planned. Some may remember than game had a segment in there where Zytra runs into random characters in the mall and that encounter can play out different depending on the character. Well now there are a bunch of character in the engine so I wanted to make use of that. Also the game will be is proper 16:9 format and make use of all the additional zytra animations created since the Sorani VN game.

so sorry of lack of posting, It’s just a lot to do before the month ends. This is on top of MMD video content, and I’ve been dealing with car issues since nearly the start of the month.

Alright I’ve finished a lot of the 3D Arielle game. The main story is finished, and a lot of the side stuff is finished, and it’s even polished a bit. Maybe when/if this game get more interest, I can add in a different city areas and add Phia, Tiffany and Maiko back in, along with outfits for them and more story and animations. And after them, perhaps Luma team (Luma, Riley, Lynn, Rookie) including Cain and Yui into the story. Or just have then inf a different game. But for now I’m just working with a story that follows Arielle and Bri.

I will mention that this game won’t be perfect, but it will be fairly solid. At least compared to where western indie 3D adult games are at on average currently. And I mean actual finished games.

I plan to have gameplay later but for now I’ll go through some screenshots.

The City:

Before even starting to build anything in unity, I wanted the city to be populated with stuff going on, a lot of movement. There’s both ground and flying robots moving around, people walking around, trucks, ships flying in the sky, people standing around talking, billboards and neon lights blinking, etc. It’s quite lively but the trade-off for that is longer loading screen time when loading into the city and it could be laggy for older computers. I think if i ever add another hub area to the game like this city it would no have nearly as much stuff going on (but will still seem alive). However lower graphic setting could be a solution to any issues also. The Screenshots are in the area where you sign up to do Arena and the drag race minigames.

Also to help deal will possible load times and lag, there’s a little robot that follows Ari around and you can access the menu to change clothes and save/load without needed to zone into Ari’s apartment.

Arielle Combat:

Arielle’s combat is 3rd person cover shooter mechanics. You can’t hide behind everything but I tried to make the most obvious objects in the path of the main route have the ability to take cover in. Ari has 3 different gun, a pistol which may or may not be useful in most situations as you needs to get head shots with this. A automatic rifle, and heavy weapon that makes her move slow and not be able to take cover but it powerful. Also taking a suggest from the discord on what a “blue gemco agent” grenade would be, I made Ari’s grenade a electricity type grenade that forces enemies to disarm themselves, giving ari and opportunity to run in and gun them down without taking return fire. So Ari’s gameplay revolves around strategic use of the grenade and when to run in a shoot vs shoot from cover. Ari’s crosshair for each gun is also different and will turn red when her shots will hit the enemy.

Bri Combat:

Bri’s combat is 3rd person hack and slash but is also heavily risk vs reward. Bri only has melee range swords and a 3 hit combo along with her own unique grenade. Why it is risky is because Bri has fairly low health and usually needs to be closer to the enemy than Ari. Bri’s grenade however is super powerful if she holds onto it and run into range of the enemy. It will drain the health of any nearby enemies quickly but she can also throw it if you need to play carefully. Just enemy can simply move out of the grenades area of effect if throw. where holding is you can keep it close to the enemy (by keeping bri near the enemy) but rising talking a lot of damage because you wont be able to melee while bri is holding grenades. Bri and Ari definitely play a lot differently.

Story Scenes:

These are just a few lines from some of the scenes. Some of the dialogue scenes early on have gestures where the character has moments based on what they are saying or hearing. But later on I did both with that so much, with more polish I could add that in for every dialogue. But I don’t think it is a necessary requirement to enjoy the game.

Minigames:

Air Combat – The air combat segments of the game are mandatory to complete the main story. Also the controls might take a little getting used to. However for those reasons you can’t lose in these segments. If you ship HP falls to zero you simply respawn a full HP without the level restarting. All damage you have done is still retained. I was going to make a more extravagant air battle as a side activity, but i’m not sure how the air battle stuff is going to be received so I didn’t want to do too much with it. If i have another polish adding phase I wanted to make the ailerons of the wings move with the direction of the aircraft.

Drag Race – The drag race segment is designed to gain credits and for general fun. It is pretty straight forward, just shift to the next gear up gear when your engine is able to. It is straight race, no turns or a racetrack to navigate, so it’s just side view camera used here. I made it so if players have trouble winning, you can get a special powered up bike from a NPC in the strip club after getting to a certain part of the story.

Arena – Arena is the endgame and adds replayability to the game. There are various challenges ranging from both fun to actually challenging. At rank 3 (the highest rank) you will need to find secret special agents during mission 1-3 to unlock their respective arena challenges. Also the arena challenges have settings to play as Arielle or Bri and to use Ari or Bri as a npc ally, along with a timer so you can show how fast you completed the challenge and using which settings. These can be played with any unlocked outfit as well.

Sex Stuff:

There are total of 10 different sex animations in the game (so far?). All of them involves Arielle. I don’t have Bri in any of them. Just in case her appearance in this game or even past games causes some issue(s). Also the sex scenes you run into during the main story missions are skippable. This is was in case any content creators want to play and/or make videos of the game on a sfw platform. However some of the side sex stuff you would need to do to get the best bike in the game, and or to get easy credits.

Extra Stuff:

Arielle can dance in the strip club or do yoga at the apartment. For the dancing she will get 100 credits for every irl minute of time. You can also find art from ttrop and shikarii on some of the posters and advertisements in the city areas. The third image shows the 3 secret agents that appear on missions 1 through 3. From left to Right are Chanel, Lexi and Quinn. I might turn into 2D character also I’m not sure. There are some male agents I thinking about for that also. I also plan to have a separate art pack that has the images and stuff used for the loading screens and early concepts.

It’s been a while since I posted here on my site. Certain real life events caused me to be in kind of a slump for a while, and I think I’m finally just barely getting out of it.

However since my last post, I’ve published several games on Steam, got some new games going, got some remakes going, dabbled in all things Ai, got virt-a-mate stuff going, redesigned the logo, made new characters, maintained my site as best I could (despite not posting), and I’ve tried to be somewhat active in discord instead.

Also during that time, the social media climate has shifted. Twitter is now called X and new social media are coming into the picture. In that type of climate I want to have a stable place to post where I’m not always worried about algorithms, keywords, hashtags, signing up to new sites asap, and all kinds of stuff like that.

So I will start back posting here regularly. I have no shortage of things to make posts about. But that’s all for now, I don’t want to put everything into one post. But like the old school password, Vortex00IsBackAtIt. Well not fully, but I’m getting there. Resuming posting on the website again will help a lot I think.

My next few posts will likely be updates and current progress in various projects.

So ARIA Genesis has been released on Steam for a while now, and it’s sitting at mixed reviews. I’m not over the moon about it, but I accept that it’s probably where it should be, considering a lot of different factors.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1687250/ARIA_Genesis/

It was my first attempt at a feature complete large 3D game, which is really ambitious for one person.

I also want to make it clear that it is indeed just me, the names credited at the end of the Main Story is simply me crediting the creators of all the various assets I used to help make this game. None of the names listed actually helped me make this specific game in particular. I just felt it was right to credit the asset makers. At best, I had a few people I’ve known for a while online me test for bugs or give me some ideas here and there.

And the assets are what I wanted to talk about. In this post.

Everytime I take a glance at the Steam reviews for ARIA Genesis, aside from very exaggerated comments, or comments that are just factually wrong, the main pain points seem to be, navigating geometry, AI enemies are not interesting enough, the environments are bland, repetitive sex scenes, and lag issues.

So if you like good gameplay mechanics it’s really there, and if you like good sex stuff, it’s not the best in the world either. Fair enough.

I mainly make 2D VN games. So that might be why the game plays similar to a VN outside of combat, with looping sex animations, etc.

Some of the other issues are fundamentally tied to the assets I used to make the game.

I used a 3rd person shooter kit as its foundation. I won’t mention the kit because I don’t want to affect their sales in any way, even if it’s a small, or barely existent one.

But I used it because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. The kit is very modular and can do a lot. But I see the problem now is that I can’t have a lot, and keep the game running smoothly. I just need something simple. 

I don’t need my, for example sniper enemy, to be able to use 3 different kinds of melee weapons, hear footsteps, hear gunshots, detect when allies are in combat, be able to search the area script, be alerted by dead ally bodies (they disappear within 3 seconds in aria genesis), have various feet IK options (all surfaces you can fight enemies on are flat), be able to used pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, dual wield guns, used a shield, do unarmed combat, be able to be in a AI formation or not, have options for how high it can jump, how many grenades it can have, how often it circles around the player, have animation loaded for each weapon type, keep track of ammo and ammo counts, be able to jump and couch, etc. 

I just need the enemy to start shooting the player when it comes into a sight range, or after it gets shot.maybe a basic patrol at best. Maybe try to keep distance since it’s a sniper. I just don’t need all that other stuff running also.

I think because each AI in the kit has all that stuff loaded on it that I don’t ever use (but is required), it makes the game lag when there’s more than just a few enemies on the screen at a time. And I wanted ARIA to have some levels that have a lot of enemies. 

To test that theory. I made a smaller game project I’ll be calling for the time being ARIA SAC, Special Agent Certification. It’s a small game where I’ve coded the movement, and combat stuff myself. Everything coded (and loaded) on the enemies and the player is something I actually use.

And just with a single boss and 3 enemies in an arena (all non-humanoid), it feels way better and smoother than ARIA Genesis.If it has 4 enemies there, the game would already be lagging.

If possible I want to take the custom combat system I’ve made and swap it out with what’s in ARIA Genesis. I think that would fix a few of the problems.

As far as sex scenes go,they will probably remain like that. And the environment will probably remain that way as well in the interest of not having lag from too much stuff in the background.

I want to develop the ARIA SAC game into something complete also, where it just has a detailed non-combat warehouse area. And the combat arena which doesn’t need to be super detailed since it will have way more complex combat mechanics to focus on.

I’ll have more info on ARIA SAC later. For the time being I have been working on updates to ARIA Genesis to improve what I can. Below is my current list of changes/fixes/additions to the game that will be in the next patch. Along with some screenshots  below.

• Changed most areas from a skybox to a volumetric sky and clouds.
• Added an additional butt jiggle setting
• There is now an erect nipple toggle in the esc->settings->options menu (works for Arielle, Maiko and Phia) (does not work on alien missions where Arielle’s appearance is pre-set.)
• Certain places you can fall through the floor/wall have been fixed
• The screen now has a red vignette when your health starts getting too low.
• The parked spaceships in the city now despawn when the player is far enough away from them to help with fps
• enabled GPU instancing for various materials in the game to help with fps
• converted some models from A pose to T pose to work better with some of the animations.
• Arielle’s title screen idle animation updated
• Fixed enemy alien animations
• updated the alien starting area of the game, made traversing the landscape easier, and added a story component at the end. 
• added an additional segment after the starting alien area that expands on the lore of the game.
• added an additional segment after Mission 3 (where you go back to the GamCo facility with Bri) that very briefly expands on the lore of the game.
• getting Bri to open up now allows her to visit and have interactions in the restroom area.