Progress update - 25/2/25

There's been quite a bit of movement in the game recently, and I've also been looking at a public release to get the Demo version in line with the current release, however where development is now makes it pretty tough to accomplish.

We know there's a few bugs in the paid version of the game, and we've actually already fixed most of them, however the major issue is that development continued between the release and getting the bug reports, and we'd already implemented some major changes we couldn't roll back.

The main problem is that the Character Builder and all the enemies and player character models have been updated fully, and all the systems rewritten to work with them. We're quite a way in, but a way off from a release as there's still capture and takedown animations to be redone to enable the game to play fully. I've started looking into reverting the version in our Version Control so we can go back, do the fixes on the old version and release from there, but it seems to be a very touchy process and I'm having to be very careful it doesn't impact the current state of development.

But what has changed?

The current  game state has a few major updates. First off the character builder has been tweaked.

The major changes are the new character models, the ability to change certain colours and a toggle for both clothing and erections so you can customise them a bit. We've also fixed how the character builder loads and got rid of the character popping in suddenly and some of the camera issues.

One major change for player characters, is that we've removed the Squirrel. The plan is that all characters should use identical skeletons, so we'll have a male and a female skeleton. As the Squirrel is an older model, she has a unique skeleton and doesn't match the character style. So for the time being, she's been sidelined. The selection now is Male Maned Wolf or German Shepherd, and Female Husky and Coyote.

The intent is to get the squirrel updated as soon as possible after the current workload is completed, but it will not be in the next full release.

Pineridge

A bit of a minor change here, but the landscape around the tunnel entrance in Pineridge and the distant terrain has been massively improved. This will get rolled out to the rest of the level as it gets completed. It's a sort of thing to do when I'm fed up animating. Also in this picture is a demonstration of the new fur textures for the characters. No more thin, shitty hair!

Other stuff

There's some tweaks going on to the Inventory, so gender relevant items will always show first. So if you pick up a lot of male and female clothes, the ones you can use will be top of the list. The ones you can't use will be sellable. Shops are in-progress.

Basically, it's pretty busy. My hope is that I can get the rollback working soon, do the relevant bugfixes and get the release released in short order, then move back to the current updates. I've got no real timeline on the next proper release with the new characters. We're hoping to eliminate the major bugs and annoyances with this next release so it might take a little longer.

Finally

We've now got a Bluesky account. I hope to remember to update it, but will mostly be firing progress screenshots over there as I go.