slaen

Rough sculpt of a low level inquisitor

I'm still sort of fleshing out the overall design.  Trying to get an imposing silhouette and have a sort of religious fanatic tone to the design.  Heavily taking inspiration from Warhammer Night Goblins.  I'm thinking the robe edges will be torn and frayed and I'm going to try adding metal studs, leather patches, and random chunky stitches all over the place.  I dunno any th...

Town Portals

They're mostly working in game right now.  The player will be able to find or buy scrolls of town portal in the world.  Using one will open up placement mode and they'll be able to spawn a portal anywhere in the world or interior areas. That'll automatically grab the nearest portal destination - which will most likely just be a portal spot on the edge of the nearest town.  The pl...

Dungeon block outs

Mostly just working on the layouts and a few extra rooms for these 2 dungeons.  The top image is going to be the frog's lair and the bottom image is going to be one of the mines in the hills bordering the swamp.  

I'm trying to figure out a bunch of stuff with the frog dungeon.  Like seeing if a grid based tileset structure can feel like it has enough variation and not feel...

Swamp town stuff

With the jump to Unreal 5 there were a lot of things that had to be changed, rewritten, and updated.  So this week I really focused on getting things back together and running again.  

• The day / night cycle has been revamped to work with the new lighting features and has been streamlined to hopefully run better.
• Fog got reworked so now the coloration can be adjust...
  2023-04-19 21:19:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Mushroom sculpting...

Taking it a little easier this week and recharging from animation and stress at the day job.  So I've been sculpting mushrooms!  The clothing is just so I don't need to worry about the NSFW filters here getting upset over some simple mushrooms.  

I think for the most part they'll be stationary and have an area of effect spore attack that deals lust damage to the player. &nb...

More animations!

Still cruising through frog dude animations.  I'm not totally sold on his grapple?  The blockout is a little too plain.  Maybe do something with his tongue?  Like have him running it over his lips or maybe even over the player's face?  Would that be too much?

It's funny there were a few other positions that I started working on and then realized they just didn't w...

Frog Dude Scene Animations

I need to re-export his face rig again I forgot one of the constraints.  

But yeah, I'm cruising along on his animations.  Trying to knock out the base cycles and then I'll move onto more frog specific stuff.  His tongue scenes should be fun but might take a bit of experimentation with getting his rig to look right.  It'll be good practice for any tentacle heavy charac...

More animations and some environment work

I might have spent too much time on this one animation loop.  There's still secondary motion that I want to go back and fix, like the tail especially, but I think this loop works pretty well.  

And I've also been working on the blockouts for the swamp town buildings.  These are for a smoke den, a general store, and the deputy's house.  

I tried to hook up the ani...

Environment detailing pass

I've been working on detailing the main road through the swamp.  I'm almost all the way to the town along the road.  There's still a ton of polish to do but I think it's starting to give the right vibe.  The fog volumes and some fx work will also really help sell the scene I think.

I also worked on the save / load system a bit.  NPCs will save to individual external fi...

Female imp anim test and some swamp stuff

Ok, she's only got a super basic animation on her right now but I think this will work alright for the female imp?  Her setup isn't anything fancy.  She has the same collision cylinder as the other characters and is technically still "on the ground" and not actually flying.  But instead of putting a bunch of time into figuring out a flying controller and AI stuff I think this wil...

Frog tongue attack wip and some environment work

Got some animations roughed in for the tongue attack and adjusted all the projectile and fx points to line up correctly.   Still need to update the animations to the new rig with facial expressions though.  

And I've also been trying to jam through the tile sets for the swamp town and for the frog dungeon.  It's all still gray box stage but this will let me get a feel ...

The joys of placeholder art

Ok so the animated gif is showing the mechanics for the frogs tongue attack.  It'll be a ranged attack that if it hits the player will pull the player to the frog.  Then the frog will probably have a grapple attack to follow up.  

But so far it's all temporary assets.  The center of the projectile is using the lust potion so I could see where things are.  The pink...

A bit of prop sculpting

Super stressful week.  At the day job, over the weekend, rumors started going around about a handful of high level people at the studio being let go.  Then early in the week everyone got an email saying that they would be setting up individual meetings.  Keep an eye on your schedule because they could pop up at any time!  No pressure!  Then the number of people in Slack...

Frog anims

Getting there.  Finished up the 2nd melee swing (the right most anim), animated the 3rd melee swing (middle), and a hit reaction (left).  Only a few more vanilla animations to go!

Had a little bit of time of time to work on some environment assets mostly just foliage texturing.

And I grabbed that animated text plugin.  2023-02-09 00:52:50 +0000 UTC View Post

Female imp rig test and landscape work

Worked on the female imp rig a bit this week.  I quickly retargeted some animations to see how she's looking in game and to test out the new foot setup for high heels.  So far I think she's looking pretty good.  Still need to put joints in her wings and tail and then give her some proper animations.  

I was also flying around the map and whenever I would quit out or tr...

More frog animations and some female imp textures

Still chipping away at the frog animations.  These are 2 out of his 3 melee attack anims.  The one on the right still needs a bunch of polish.  There's still a sprinting animation, a hit reaction, the tongue attack, and his scene animations left to do.  

And I also took a bit of time to recharge from all of the animation work by painting the textures on the female imp ...

Frog work

The gif might take a second to load.  But most of the rig is ready to go for the frog dude and I'm working on his basic animation cycles right now.  I still need to do the blendshapes and facial rig setup.  But he's getting there.  

I also ran into the engine crash / freezing my computer again but this time it was outside of editing niagara fx stuff.  So I started...

Frog dude progress

Super quick rig and animation test in the above gif.  I quickly retargeted on of the minotaur's animations over to this guy to get him moving.  Seems like most everything is working alright, other than him looking down and really grumpy.  But that'll get fixed once I start working on his custom animations.

I also did some quick textures for his loincloth stuff and a polish ...

Frog texture pass

I put together the skin material and did a really quick color pass on this guy.  Still need to do a proper detail pass on the skin and finish up his clothing but I really like how his skin is turning out.  

I started blocking out the frog's dungeon area.  It's still just gray cubes at this point so nothing fancy to look at but I'm planning out the content for each room and ...

More frog sculpting

Had a bit of time to do a detail pass on this guy.  Still need to do one more to tighten up a few details and finish his loincloth stuff.  

And I wanted to wish everyone happy holidays and a happy new year!  And thanks for following and supporting Feign!  See you in the new year!

Environment roughs

Started roughing out some environment stuff.  Most everything in both screenshots is placeholder still.  But I wanted to get some foliage ready for the swamp and also start working on a tileset for the frog dungeon. 

Still a lot to do but I think the general ambience is starting to come through.  I'm starting to really like the new lighting features in UE5.  

Frog girls!

I was sort of hesitant about adding frog girls into the game but once I started on the sculpt and got a bit of feedback I really started liking the way they look.  

I'm thinking both frogs will have some sort of tongue strike attack.  Which means I'll need to figure out the rigging and add enough joints for each frog to be able to wrap the player up.  

Also playing wi...

Swamp Tavern block out

I'm up visiting the family right now so I have to take a break from the NSFW sculpting and stuff for a bit.  But I have been working on upgrading everything to the new UE5 nanite and lumen systems.  The difference in reflection quality is already making a world of difference.  At some point I'll need to go back and tweak all the old textures to read correctly with the updated lig...

Alraune WIP

Last reminder: payments are set to resume the beginning of December, which is this Thursday.  I just don't want anyone to get caught by surprise.

The Alraune.  She's a little early on in the process and I'm mostly figuring out where to place the leaves and how those will work with rigging and animations.  I'll most likely do a few simpler flowers to use as ...

Swamp area wips

Quick reminder: payments are set to resume the beginning of December.

And it's been close to 30 days that the build has been out which means 1.14.8 open to all patrons!  

Worked a bit on the swamp town block out.  Pretty much everything is still placeholder but ...

Made the jump to UE5

Just a heads up - payments are set to resume the beginning of December.  If you have any questions or concerns please send me a message.  

So the screenshot.  I brought everything over into UE5.  There were a few bugs and things to fix but it went pretty smooth.  The lighting still needs to be switched over to the new lighting system Lumen and all...

Xandra's outfit wip 1

Trying to recharge a little bit creatively by doing some fun stuff.  This is going to be the outfit for Xandra, the tavern owner in Redtree.  I'm still working on the larger shapes and figuring out details but I think the general idea is there.  I do need to figure out her boots or shoes still.  Heels maybe?  

I'm going to chip away on this and on the new swamp ar...

Version 1.14.8 Build Notes

Finally...

Link to the build - currently available to $10+ tiers.

Ok first thing - the Patreon payments are still paused right now.  They are not set to resume until December 1st.  I'll see how much I can get done in November and might pause them again.  I'll keep everyone posted.  But...

Version 1.14.8

Download link 

And I'm back! (mostly)

I got super lucky with the hurricane and didn't get hit by the worst of it.  So that's awesome.  The downside is I lost a couple weeks worth of time working on Feign and also at the day job.  So now I'm playing catch up with the day job.  Capitalism pauses for no one after all.  But I'm going to steal a bit of time and start running the build for Feign here once I get a...