Others Love Inn [Development Thread]

[croco_nsfw]

So! This week I fixed a ton of little things that were bothering me, starting with the rotation of the character to where it's supposed to look. The method I used before, if the angle between the character's rotation and the object had a negative/positive difference, the character would do a stupid long arch to rotate. That's fixed now, here's a link with a visual representation of the problem and the solution.

Spoiler: Link explaining angle rotation methods

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I also wanted to finish the main models, areas and cameras of all bedrooms, plus the new bigger bedrooms of the east wing, with their own private onsens. This is your bedroom, and the onsen bath (in your rooms it's a goemonburo, the cylinder type) area is next to the one of the adjacent room. If there's someone on the bedroom next door taking a bath, you might be able to take a peek:

Last post I was talking about the mountain thingy, so here's the concept I did on monday and on the right is a working prototype I have been doing these last days ( very much a WIP, still missing UI and art). This is just a time sink, something to do to spend time, with rewards:


On my personal life, I'm starting to study hard on one of my last exams that I have the first week of february, so things will slow a bit these two weeks, but hopefully not too much. And then around april, I'll have some more exams. If I pass them I can get to work for the state. I would love to work on this full time, maybe in the future? Who knows!!
On sundays I work on this all day, so I think I'm gonna start to post on mondays. Have a good week my dudes!!

 

[Pinefuckingloveshentai]

A cute looking game!
Can't wait to see it's further development!

 

[croco_nsfw]

A cute looking game!
Can't wait to see it's further development!

Thanks a lot, glad you like it : )


Another busy week! Let's start with the title of the game, I've been battling with this since the beginning.
When I started I just named it Marimo, since I was catching up with One Piece, but it never was the intended final name.
I want something descriptive enough that you can guess what the game is about when it's up on Steam, even if that means being generic or having a lazy title. So the title should contain at least one of these: Low poly, ryokan (it's a jap hotel with hot springs, too niche?), onsen (hot spring), bath, doki doki (heart beats in jap), love, inn or residence.

So, how does "Love Inn" sound?

Basing myself on the fantastic nsfw game "Harem Hotel" (perfectly descriptive) and "Love Hina" (anime about a guy arriving to an all female hot spring residence).
Love Inn sounds good since it sounds as loving', but I would love some feedback. I did some sketches also for a Steam thumbnail, and Love Inn really goes well with the first sketch.



Also I started using Miro, a board website, to plan better in general. I have a lot of ideas for different characters, but I want to commit hard to get the first three girls ready for a demo.



I've been also doing some UI and menu work, there's now a relationships window, an options menu...



I'm really excited to share a demo with you guys, every bit of interest fuels me and I really appreciate it. See you next week with more updates!

 

[croco_nsfw]

Hey guys! The beginning of the week was great, I redid big chunks of the dialogue system, and now it's more robust and flexible. I try to keep my code short and simple, but that changed with the dialogue sytem, which is the longest class of the game (for now) with 363 lines of code. I've put so much work into it, I'm really proud of how it's shaping up.
I continued to work on schedules. It's taking some time since I'm having the characters have around 10 activities for the week. And thanks to the work on the dialogue system, now I can easily add text so they say some things relevant to their current activities. If there's no text asociated with the activity, they'll say some generic text related to time of day/day of week/lore-backstory.
You won't be able to spend time with them or start events if they have low mood/are angry at you. I'm thinking of ways to improve mood, so maybe gifts or something akin to that.



I decided to go 1st (low) person when you enter dialogue, since that will make everything easier when a character is sitting / laying down so our protagonist won't just hang around looking stupid.

Spoiler: 1st person high camera vs 3rd person camera

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In my personal life, a couple of days ago I got some bad news, and I felt pretty shitty, and I had to start studying 24/7 so I couldn't work on this.
But I can't keep my hands off this, so yesterday I fixed a thing that was bothering me for a while, so my mood improved.

Spoiler: Boring fix that you probably don't care about

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I guess a lot of you guys can relate, but when I'm doing something I like I become obsessed with it, I start my day thinking about it and go to sleep thinking about even more stuff to do or fix. This week I won't be able to work on this and it's already consuming me, so there won't be any news next monday, sorry about that. I'll at least plan all first events and write more dialogue. The good thing is, after this week, I will return to my -stay-in-house-all-day-working- schedule, so soon things will go fast : )
Goodbye to my good record tho:

 

[croco_nsfw]

Hello there!! I'm so glad to be back! I hate doing exams, I'd rather keep grinding this 24/7, but I'm almost done with my degree ( if everything goes well x).

When I'm away from the project for a couple of days, a lot of ideas and changes spring to mind. I felt the player (gameplay loop) was directionless, and had no real purpose other than talking to girls, which is weird considering he moves to the ryokan precisely because he has no job and can't get to university ( Love Hina plot). So I implemented this:


So you will be doing tasks around the ryokan, which has stats now. The stats of the player are being slowly replaced by other variables in the world. I don't really want the player to grind daily to keep the perfect stats to talk to specific girls. I'm moving to a more chill experience, so any grind will be permanent ( like climbing the mountain).

That doesn't apply to the task system tho. Everyday you will be able to choose what tasks you will be doing the next day. The ryokan now has stats, so the intention is to fill a bit of the day with these time sinks. The more you do them, the more money you make. If the stats get too low, everyone's mood towards you will worsen, as you are there to work on improving the place. If the stats are high, the mood of everyone will increase daily bit by bit ( aside from increasing it by other means, of course).
Reception work, which is mandatory from tuesday to saturday, will feature conversations with the characters of the ryokan.

I would love to add a small village eventually to the game, but since that's very far away from now, I still had the itch to add more exteriors, so I sketched this while I was studying.


The building on the right is a small restaurant that you'll be build if you spend X amount of money. You could work there to earn more money, plus it's a nice way to introduce more working characters. But that's another thing that'll be more relevant in the future. For now, I'm making the front entrance exterior:



It's missing textures and grass yet, but you get the general idea

Also these last couple of days, I've been working on making a script that is going to make my life so much easier when making events. Before, when I was making events I had the most unreliable and unorganized method ever. Now I have a cool script that manages the events into segments.
So each segment has a ton of functionality, like calling dialogue, starting animations, how to start and finish each segment, to raise / lower stats... So a character appears. SEGMENT. Then a characters starts talking. SEGMENT. The segments are chronologically put in an array, so each time the segment ends, the next starts.
Now that I have this, I'll be working this week entirely on events, which is the true content of the game.

I'll see you guys next week. As always, thanks for reading

 

[croco_nsfw]

Let's go! Another week down.

I wanted to try my event script this week and that's what I did! I'm working on the intro of the game, the arrival to the ryokan. And I'm finally liking the events and my writing. I'm constantly rewriting dialogue, in a good way. I write dialogue and the first thing I do the next day is to re-read it and change it, and I feel it's working, making things more natural. Even when I have days that I'm not very efficient, when I look back I'm pretty happy of how things are turning out.



I also adapted a script for clouds I had in another project. Not done in shaders, just PNGs that travel in a set direction and only emit shadows. When they reach a certain position, they reset. Only loads when you are outside ofc.
Since it's easier nowadays to render a lot of vertices instead of multiple transparent objects, I made a couple of grass meshes and populated some surfaces with them. Each mesh has 12 vertices, and I have more than 3000 meshes without any performance hit thanks to multimesh instance, a node in Godot that basically loads once all the meshes, so it's very efficient. And since multimesh also handle materials, I use a shader so the grass moves calmly. It has turned out better than I was expecting tbh.



I have a Radeon 6950 since my R9 390 died a couple of years ago, so I look into performance a lot, specially since I know a lot of people play with older computers and are used to play VNs. I also lowered the resolution of the game by two and upscaled after, so that helps a lot. But I have a bunch of options in the menu and plan to add more so people can do whatever they want.
As you can see I also added depth of field when talking to characters, I think it looks nice.

Back in December I remember I wanted to release a demo and open a Patreon, but it was painfully early. I've been improving basically everything and making my life easier for future me with better systems. I'm going to continue working on this either with or without Patreon, but if I can monetize this, I'd love to make this an actual job. I'll be looking into making a Discord soon so I can gather feedback in one place when I release the demo.

The first event with Keiko is basically done, the first one with Aya is also almost done, and now this week I'll focus in the first one for Chiharu and polish the other ones. I'll start working on your day to day "job" in the ryokan, and keep making assets.


If you are curious about my work space here it is. Scripts are in spanish tho. One day I'll get a second monitor XD

 

[Pinefuckingloveshentai]

woo!

 

[croco_nsfw]

Hello guys! TLDR: I fucked up.

Earlier last week, I did some small pixel art animations for the game:

Spoiler: PIXEL ANIMATIONS

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So what about it? It made me realize how much character I can show through a couple of pixels. I've struggled to do that through low poly, I just can't. It's so much easier to express things like eroticism or happiness in drawing, without having short animations loops that don't really feel natural.

Anyways, I tried other styles for the game, visual novel from 90s like Tokimeki Memorial or Welcome to Pia Carrot:



I was having some trouble picking how to do environments. In the one above, it would work like in Summertime Saga, having drawings and you could click on the characters to start conversation. So I tried making some chibi models. You can see the progression till I had some that I was happy with.



Then I moved into places. I tried top down 2D, but it f:

Spoiler: ISOMETRIC TRY

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So that was fun, but I can't separate isometric view from Summer Memories, I felt I was ripping it off. So I came back to low poly but this time with sprites. I haven't ported the conversation scripts from the original project yet, but I'd probably add the characters portraits when in dialogue.

View attachment 02.03.23.5.mp4

This has been some chaotic couple of days. I had already a style, but it was really difficult to make it horny. I'm a bit upset because I know some people liked it, but I would love to hear your thoughts. My gf prefers much more this style over the original one, so at least I can find some peace of mind in that XD

For now I'm gonna read Slam Dunk. Thank you for reading and caring.

 

[Marcypawn]

NOOOO! HOW COULD YOU!!
...
Just kidding
While I love me some low poly, I completely understand your difficulties in trying to make it expressive and appealing in a sexy way. I'm gonna miss the real uniqueness of the original low poly style, but I also really dig the new style! Mixing character sprites with a low poly environment is kinda the best of both worlds <3

 

[croco_nsfw]

NOOOO! HOW COULD YOU!!
...
Just kidding
While I love me some low poly, I completely understand your difficulties in trying to make it expressive and appealing in a sexy way. I'm gonna miss the real uniqueness of the original low poly style, but I also really dig the new style! Mixing character sprites with a low poly environment is kinda the best of both worlds <3

Thanks for your continued interest Marzipan! I would definitely be less motivated without you guys, I mean it. I feel like juggling when trying to make things right, sometimes it's easier, sometimes it's really hard XD that's life.



The old cast now into the new style Not sure if I like it more with or without the outline.



I fiddled with a prototype of a completely 2D version of this game, and I really liked the look, but I don't know. It feels less unique to me. Not that I should necessarily strive for that, as seen with the previous prototype XD
But for now I'm liking the 2.5D look. I'll have a trial of fire AKA making a lewd scene, so we can all judge it.

I don't know if I should open a new thread, it's the same game butttt not really.
Even with the changes, I hope the journey at least is entertaining, hopefully the game will be fun and horny in the end

 

[Tompte]

I think the 2.5D style looks great! I feel confident this game will come out looking great regardless if which style you end up going with.

The only thing that worries me about the 2D style is the additional burden of having to hand animate every single pixel. But from what you've shown so far I have no doubt you'll be able to pull it off. Art-wise it looks great and works well in the 3D environment.

There is something about your 3D style that is very endearing and inviting, and I believe will make people want to play it. It definitely stands out, for sure.

As for comparing the two, I think both have their strengths so I'd be fine with either one. I don't want to sway you in any direction. I just wanted to give you a pat on the shoulder. Keep up the good work.

 

[croco_nsfw]

I think the 2.5D style looks great! I feel confident this game will come out looking great regardless if which style you end up going with.

The only thing that worries me about the 2D style is the additional burden of having to hand animate every single pixel. But from what you've shown so far I have no doubt you'll be able to pull it off. Art-wise it looks great and works well in the 3D environment.

There is something about your 3D style that is very endearing and inviting, and I believe will make people want to play it. It definitely stands out, for sure.

As for comparing the two, I think both have their strengths so I'd be fine with either one. I don't want to sway you in any direction. I just wanted to give you a pat on the shoulder. Keep up the good work.

You are so kind, thanks a lot.

Believe it or not, I'm going faster with sprites rather than 3D, for technical reasons. I have a 12 year old graphic card (I know, I know XD), so exporting animations and fixing them was taking me more and more time as the project grew, it was getting unbearable. With sprites I'm zooming right now.

I appreciate your thoughtful comment Tompte


I'll tease some netorase plot. Keiko's married by the start of the game, and her husband was supposed to help with the ryokan. Instead he prefers to live in the city and cheat on Keiko, and only comes when he gets rejected by other girls. She does his naughty requests in fear of divorce, but now that you arrive things might change.

 

[Deleted member 5332487]

I also really liked the 2.5D concept, it looks more striking, although in a way I also liked the 3D because it had its touch, for me the environment that you had built gave a feeling of warmth, tranquility and with that effect of dots.

But going back to the 2.5D about the cast of characters I like the way they look and the outline theme in my opinion is good with the outline because it highlights a little more, because I feel that when the color tone of the character and the scene are almost identical how can you have the character blend with the scene.

about the perspective I really liked the one in the video fragment that the character moves from left to right, but also up and down, but keeping the last direction he was looking (that is if the character looks to the right and then goes up, the animation of walking to the right is executed, but the character will go up).

the perspective in isometric mmmm.... I don't know
I need to see more details
if the camera stays fixed in that perspective and if the character moves, how would be the controls? would it be necessary to press 2 buttons to go up? or configure the control to adapt to that perspective?

for now I like the one of the video fragment because, instead of making isometric an idea would be that the camera would turn to the 4 directions (forward, backward, left, right) and that the sprites would look towards the camera or free camera rotation also......although thinking about it turning the sprite 180° would make it look towards the other direction to the one that was seeing the character.... maybe it's too much of a mess just fixed it looks good like that

 

[Tompte]

if the camera stays fixed in that perspective and if the character moves, how would be the controls? would it be necessary to press 2 buttons to go up? or configure the control to adapt to that perspective?

Fixed camera controls were very common back in the days of early 3D games. It's been a solved problem for decades.

The most popular method is to maintain the character's in-world movement direction across camera switches, up until the player presses a different button or pushes the analog stick in a different direction. It's about reading the player's intent rather than perfectly abide by the buttons they're pressing. Some people find it confusing at first but you quickly get used to it.
There are plenty of

You must be registered to see the links

.

You could also use tank controls, which was the less popular method, or a simple point-and-click mouse control scheme.

 

[croco_nsfw]

I also really liked the 2.5D concept, it looks more striking, although in a way I also liked the 3D because it had its touch, for me the environment that you had built gave a feeling of warmth, tranquility and with that effect of dots.

But going back to the 2.5D about the cast of characters I like the way they look and the outline theme in my opinion is good with the outline because it highlights a little more, because I feel that when the color tone of the character and the scene are almost identical how can you have the character blend with the scene.

about the perspective I really liked the one in the video fragment that the character moves from left to right, but also up and down, but keeping the last direction he was looking (that is if the character looks to the right and then goes up, the animation of walking to the right is executed, but the character will go up).

the perspective in isometric mmmm.... I don't know
I need to see more details
if the camera stays fixed in that perspective and if the character moves, how would be the controls? would it be necessary to press 2 buttons to go up? or configure the control to adapt to that perspective?

for now I like the one of the video fragment because, instead of making isometric an idea would be that the camera would turn to the 4 directions (forward, backward, left, right) and that the sprites would look towards the camera or free camera rotation also......although thinking about it turning the sprite 180° would make it look towards the other direction to the one that was seeing the character.... maybe it's too much of a mess just fixed it looks good like that

Thanks a lot for the feedback! I also liked the atmosphere of the first project, the new one is a bit more "joyful" but with a bit of fog, air dot particles and warm lights, it's getting to that old feeling. And yeah, after playing for a bit I agree with needing an outline, I'm going with certain saturation tones for the whole game so it's cohesive between environment and characters, so colors end up mixing, so I'll add that.

What I'm trying to do with the camera is to have it static, so the whole scenario can fix in a single screen, I feel having it fit in a square is kind of aesthetic. If people don't like it I can change it without much problem, but I feel you can see more diagonally.

Fixed camera controls were very common back in the days of early 3D games. It's been a solved problem for decades.

The most popular method is to maintain the character's in-world movement direction across camera switches, up until the player presses a different button or pushes the analog stick in a different direction. It's about reading the player's intent rather than perfectly abide by the buttons they're pressing. Some people find it confusing at first but you quickly get used to it.
There are plenty of

You must be registered to see the links

.

You could also use tank controls, which was the less popular method, or a simple point-and-click mouse control scheme.

Yeah basically this. I'll work and tweak the controls until we all feel they are not janky.

I prototyped with tank controls but not the biggest fan nowadays. Feels so wrong having to manually turn around to change directions.
And man point-and-click are the main thing eroge JRPs devs use for their games and I don't know why it's so popular. I get so frustrated trying to get somewhere because they always have this weird collision layers.

When I release a demo you have my permission to bully me to polish controls until they feel ok XD


The game is coming along nicely, I've imported a lot of the old systems already without any problem. I also improved my schedule system, so now characters have a FREE tag. They will follow their schedule (so at noon monday Keiko will always be at reception), but during their FREE time, a random activity will be picked. So at night she'll maybe be in her bedroom, maybe she'll be at the toilet.

 

[croco_nsfw]

Hey guys quick update! Some things I discovered this week.

I adore doing sprites. It's really fun and I can make tons in a short time. Apparently I like designing characters so expect tons of them XD I'm redoing the intro to make it more interesting. : D



Also I'm having fun making scenarios, I spend a bit too much time on stupid details but I can't help it. I can make one of this quality in around two days. They still need a bit more polish but yeah.





And finally, I kind of hate doing portraits for characters. It's not that I hate them, but I don't know, I don't feel the same spark as with the sprites. I may be overthinking it.



I redid a big chunk of my dialogue system so it kind of works as a normal visual novel, since before the camera just had to point at the characters' faces and from fixed positions, and now I keep track of the position of the portraits and which one is speaking currently so the others fade a bit and so on. Felt so good when I finally got it working.

Anyway, the transition to the new project is going smoothly and fast, so I'm happy about that!

 

[croco_nsfw]

Hello there!

This week I was a bit busy because I had to send my professor the beginning of my undergraduate thesis, and she liked it! I'm so close to getting my law degree!

Anyway! I always liked drawing, but I'm super inconsistent and I was always bad at line art, so I didn't even try this time, but as I said last week, I was really unhappy with the pixel portraits. It didn't spark joy in me. So I kept at it, redrawing for days, until I got a style I'm actually proud of!




I'll do colors soon, but I wanted first to do a couple of white drawings to test in game. Here's the result!!

View attachment 20.03.23.mp4

Now I actually want to talk to characters. The dialogue used to be side by side, but I liked the variation I can add if the characters look at you / front. It's inspired by an old Love Hina dreamcast game:

Spoiler: LOVE HINA DREAMCAST

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Much better than pixel portraits, I'm even embarrassed by them, but I'll show you guys everything so the journey is shared.

Spoiler: OLD

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Let's keep going!

 

[croco_nsfw]

So I'm getting close to having an actual product again. This has been a very productive week!

We have a new character, Ume, Keiko's sister. I wanted someone that will have naughty scenes from the start with other villagers.



I blockout more places to see ingame the scale, so now the basic layout for the ryokan is done and all coded and connected in the engine. All it's missing is detail, props and textures. The second floor will come in the future when we need more rooms. For now we have 6 rooms, and 4 of them are occupied.



Also did the basic layout for the menu. The first tab already shows who's staying in the ryokan. Guests will come and go depending on which free rooms you currently have. So we have permanent residents, like Aya (the redhead), and people that will stay for just a couple of days. I feel it's a good system to have rotating cast to make things a bit more interesting.



I'll get this thing to you even if it's the last thing I do!! See you soon!!!

 

[Pinefuckingloveshentai]

I am really loving the new direction of the art style! Cannot WAIT to see how this evolves.

 

[croco_nsfw]

I am really loving the new direction of the art style! Cannot WAIT to see how this evolves.

Thanks a ton Pine, it means a lot <3