This chapter features whipping with a riding crop as the main focus, as the Princess promised at the end of Chapter 1. It is kind of a homage to Escalation.
Originally, was planning to release this on Christmas so there’s a bit of that theme going on. As the player is tied up, it is not as interactive as Chapter 1 but has a much longer story with voiced dialogues.
Planning for chapter 3 to have the world’s first 3d foot worship mini game, so stay tuned for that! I’m thinking of doing to do 1 interactive chapter with a mini game of some sort followed by 1 sort of reward/punishment/story chapter after it. Chapter 3 should come relatively quick, I am setting a tentative deadline of 3 weeks from now. Need to take a few days off, be on the look out for bugs in #2 that players report, promote/market the game for few days, do some tech experiments I really wanna do but have been putting off that are relevant for #4, and then, I’ll get deep into #3 development. The model required for it is ready, it needs animations, story/dialogue & actually making the mini game.
Improvements from chapter 1 & other features:
- Shadows on Princess! In #1, Princess’s body/clothes received no shadows which her look a bit flat. Starting #2, that’s not the case! This increases the perceived depth of her body quite a lot. There’s a few rough edges that I’ll be working on improving over time.
- Much higher quality clothing. Although, it’s not reflective like #1’s latex clothing, the overall quality and it has a lot of physics based moving parts. Ribbons, tail with physics, etc. Dynamic reflections are disabled by default now too as they’re really not needed for this, so the game should perform better for most users too!
- Most of the whipping sequence is motion captured animation! You’ll appreciate the fluidity and detail in this. I hired a professional animator for #1, but this time did the animations myself which was a huge undertaking in terms of learning. Still, I’ve tried to improve upon the standard set in #1. I’ve worked out animation workflow that’ll allow me to animate stuff myself faster going forward.
- Real time physics based riding crop! The whip is not just a static stick, it has a bounce & fluidity to it. And doesn’t go through your body when it hits it (this was always one thing that irked me about Escalation’s whipping sequences, kinda broke immersion.
- Physics is still a hard problem to solve so it’s not perfect but I’ve tested this extensively. Let me know if it’s wonky on your device!
- But this sets the initial foundation for a fully Physics based bull whip that I’d eventually like to have a scene/chapter with.
- Camera shakes when the riding crop hits you!
- Just the bare minimum VFX tbh and it’s disabled in VR for now (causes motion sickness). I want to add other effects that are VR friendly.
- Can be turned off in settings.
- The non-VR camera now centers Princess intelligently during dialogue choice lock. Instead of just keeping her face in the center, it tries to ensure you can see a lot more of her body during these.
Things i’d like to do for the chapter 3 & beyond:
- New locations! Chapter 3 is likely the last chapter in this particular location. One of the things I’m most excited about is working on more open worlds, going to take some time around #3’s work to flesh out this tech more.
- Actual locomotion i.e. freedom to move. You can’t freely move around the environments yet! This is coming soon and will be one of the main things I’d like to do in Chapter 4.
- Only 1 new music track this time, re-using 1 old one too. I’m kinda stuck with 2 tracks max as ios safari gives really limited memory for audio (only a few megabytes, and crashes the page without warning randomly). This is already cutting it close. But I need to switch the tracks up.
- More VFX effects that are VR friendly. Fast post processing is not possible on web based VR so it removes a whole lot of easy options that other games have, so I’ll need to be very creative with how we’ll handle/convey impacts/damage. I am kinda tempted to support some sort of camera shake to VR for the dare devils as an additional option. But need other VFX effects for all devices any way.
