Unity Cyrano - Sandbox Dating Sim (3D VR/Flatscreen Game) [Development Thread]

[NSFWgamedev69]

Greetings everyone, I'm new to this community, I hope I am doing this correctly. I was told this would be a good place to share my game progress as I am gamejam battle hardened gamedev and I'm eager to share my NSFW game with you all.

Overview: Cerano (Working Title) is a 3D Flatscreen or VR experience where you have to seduce the AI NPC during your dinner date.

Thread Updated: 2024 -04-26
Developer: You can find my games on

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Censored: NO
OS: Windows + VR
Language: English

Genre: Sandbox Sim

Spoiler: Developer Notes

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I'd like to post some video clips of the VR gameplay, jiggle physics and all that jazz but there seem to be a lot of rules regarding links to hosts etc. Where can I upload the videos to share with you all here? They are of course NSFW.

Everything is subject to change, but I have some pretty good ideas and tests already done for the direction I want to take the game.

If you have any questions about development or critiques I'm all ears!

 

[NSFWgamedev69]

I'm still trying to figure out the best format and workflow for updating progress on the game. Making progress on the game feels like the easy part, while making sure I cover all my bases on development without having to type up multiple devblogs in various places is still a work in progress.

Not sure where the best place is to upload videos and embed/share the videos here and on itch.io so I can share progress of development.

However, since the previous post didn't actually include any video of the game in motion with VR I tried this site Sendvid, though it takes hours to process through the queue? If anyone has any recommendations for sites to upload videos to that would be great!

Here is some early test footage of the boob mechanics working, jiggle physics and grab mechanics. This is a few days old now though so there are some mesh issues that have been resolved with her eyes.

Today, I made a lot of progress on the Flatscreen/VR switching back and forth front. I've enabled a start menu that allows me to detect if the player has their headset connected and if not it will switch to Flatscreen mode, if they decide to connect their headset after they can, and then click the Enable VR mode and it should connect up. Otherwise if they start in VR mode they can switch back to flatscreen mode if they prefer to play without VR mode.

The way I have set it up should allow me to build some really fun interactive menus in VR and some visually appealing menus in Flatscreen so that depending on which version you play you get a different interface that is tailored to that mode.

Once I figure out a good way to upload videos I will be posting more videos and ill try to take more screenshots as those are quite easy to upload and share.

 

[NSFWgamedev69]

I spent most of the day getting the table item interactions working in flatscreen. They already work in VR mode just fine where you can pickup and rotate the game objects any which way you like, however this isn't as simple in flatscreen. So I've made it so that you can pick up the object with the left mouse click, rotate it with the right mouse click and move it back and forth with the scroll wheel. You can also charge up a throw and hurl the items across the table or at the girl. If the objects fall off the table they respawn back on the table so you can never really lose any of the items.

Furthermore, I've added tool tip names to all the objects as I plan on implementing voice commands and I want her to react to the items you are picking up. This will make it so that you can mention the exact name of the object you are holding in your conversation and the NPC will be able to recognize what you are referring to.

At the end you have a brief glimpse of the temporary pause menu, where you can go back to the main menu or switch into VR mode if you so choose.

I'm not sure what the next task will be, its kind of a toss up between implementing the Satisfaction/Anger system and testing out some of the dynamic interactions with the NPC.

 

[NSFWgamedev69]

I've made major progress on the AI integration. This is probably the best part and most fun part so far, but it is also the part that may need to be cut depending on the reception and popularity of the game. It's a double edged sword in that I am using two separate AI platforms, one for the voices and one for the AI brains. This offers me the most amount of freedom to customize the voice to sound exactly how I want it to. However, the fact that its a different platform means I have a limit to how many words I can generate with that voice per month which is directly tied to the tier which I am subscribed at.

If I had a constant influx of money from sales or subscriptions to the game then it may offset the cost of running that voice and also the cost of running the LLM which powers the NPC. Those are of course issues I will have to figure out at some point, but more so if I am successful! So that is a problem for future successful gamedev me, right now I am focused on making the most interesting and fun experience as I can.

I think even without the AI there is a lot of fun things I can do with the sandbox and simulation so I'm not quite sweating it just yet.

Now for the fun stuff! I managed to get dynamic IK physics working for picking up objects in the game, however it is a little broken in that it only seems to work on the first try not on subsequent pickups. That's a bug that can be worked out in the future for sure, or I may go down the purely animation route as that might just be easier since the placement of the objects on the table respawn to their exact same location if they fall off onto the floor.

In the test video you can see a sample interaction I had with the NPC complimenting her and trying to get her to leave the restaurant with me. I will be setting up several triggers and motivations which will make it so that she has a much more dynamic conversation with the player and introduce a like/hate system so you can fail the date. Right now its pretty fun to see how the AI reacts to some of my more probing questions.

 

[NSFWgamedev69]

I spent a lot of back and forth working with the interactions and setting up the workflow for the game, but it's become clear that my current animation pipeline while workable is just too labor intensive and has too many steps/assets/software involved if I want to add in more granular details and expand upon in the future. So I've taken a slight setback and taken a step back to redo the rig for the main character. She is now a fully rigify rig and Ive spent much of the time weight painting her to get her to move correctly. This is a setback for sure, but I have retained all the blendshapes for the character and now she has a much more robust animation rig to move and setup.

I will still need to add some more custom bones for the booba and the bootay but the hard part is almost done. I think this will take a few more days to get it to where it was before within Unity, but it will be worth it and much easier to work with in game. If I can setup the workflow as I have planned it shouldn't be hard to add new animations/poses and then use those for other characters as well.

Two steps forward, one step back. We'll get there!