Skunkfrakker & Veelicious
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Equigon reveal and the return to normal posting! Hi Everyone..
🕑 Added 2021-02-24 06:11:00 +0000 UTCEquigon reveal and the return to normal posting!
Hi Everyone!
Thank you for your patience while I finished some things! It took longer than expected but I've been posting on Twitter about what I'm up to/what's causing the delays. Thanks for your patience and I apologize for any concern that may have caused.
Everyone gets the video this time! Please watch it! If you'd rather read though, here's my writeup <3
Timestamps:
- Start to 3:48 --Intro, apologizing, setting up the trailer.
- 3:48 to 6:00 --Equigon reveal trailer.
- 6:00 to End --Breaking down the trailer to discuss my art design thoughts as well as all the features it demonstrates.
If you want the hyper-short version that’s just the Equigon reveal video, that’s right here:
Regarding why the delay on posting: I was sick of posting "next thing's right around the corner" but then failing to actually turn that corner. I hate failing, and I felt like I was failing every week which was messing me up. Why I was failing can be traced to simple scheduling issues that I didn’t resolve properly that led to me just falling apart. Covid forcing me to become a home school teacher 5 days a week is where it started, and that was in about October. I tried just cutting back on sleep to compensate for losing a portion of every day, but that was apparently the wrong thing to do. As time went on this made me slow and stupid. Being slow and stupid added more stress because I am anxious about being behind or late on things, which made me slower and stupider, which added more stress, etc... You get it. It's a downward spiral. I thought I was sick with something and even went to the doctor, had blood drawn--the whole nine. He said the bloodwork was fine: I was just very depressed.
Me? DEPRESSED? I have the coolest fucking job on earth. I make art using math and science! You know that gag from Mulan where the ghost goes "Well we can't ALL be acupuncturists!" -- I have a running gag with a family member (a dental hygienist!) who throws that at me, but changes it to "Well we can't ALL be horse pornographers!"
My family's weird. Or am I weird? Oh that's right everyone's weird, but some people pretend they're not <3.
In any case I had to do something to solve that, and that something was to finish something major and to drop to about 60 hours a week by cutting out most communication/video production activities so I could stay working. I also arranged a tutor to handle home school for me 3 of the 5 days a week, and she starts next week. Obviously not communicating isn’t a good long-term solution but it got me over the slump and let me finish a ton of major things while I got my head on straight. Thanks for your patience with me, and I apologize.
Anyway, my goal was to finish major things, and finish major things I did! Let's take a look.
The most significant thing is that I made an original game inside the Besti SDK. The idea with Besti X is that it is a creative toolkit and a content platform, and I think one of the best ways to demonstrate that is by making an off-the-wall crazyass video game out of it. With the exception of the scoring system and some database things I wrote, Equigon is something you can make yourself in the Besti SDK without writing a line of code. Tutorials on how I did things so you can do them yourself are on the way, and most of Equigon is going to be included with the Besti SDK so you can see how I did things using the included tools.
To make the game I had to expand Besti X greatly, so I did. The Besti SDK has new powers like:
- The ability to make cutscenes between levels. (Demonstrated in Equigon by the cutscene that loads when you start a ranked online match, or an untimed/offline game.)
- The ability to break apart your scenes and have them automatically load you into them based on where you are or any other trigger. For example: say you have a farm with a well. If you go down the well, instead of having the well share the same memory as the farm, you can have it unload the farm and load in the well when you go inside it. This lets things get way more complicated without hurting performance. (Demonstrated in Equigon when the cutscene puts you inside of the Equigon capsule.)
- Easier-to-create one-off characters with their own behavior patterns and reactions to things.(Demonstrated in Equigon with the logic behind calling a new horse to a stall.)
- Making choices by looking at things, which can do whatever you want them to do. (Demonstrated in Equigon in the setup process, where I have you look at a sign to set your height calibration.)
- The ability to make your own unique control schemes that perform functions specific to your game.(Demonstrated in Equigon in the cutscene, where it remaps all your buttons to skip the cutscene before it ends.)
- The ability to take simple animations and make them interactive VR/2D experiences super easily.(I'm going to make a cartoon to demonstrate this and put it in the Besti SDK so you can look at what to do to take any Blender/Max/Maya/etc... animation and convert it into a Besti scene in like 10 minutes.)
- The ability to save your own custom data used by your scenes which can be loaded later. This can be a string, an integer, a floating point number, or a boolean value (Demonstrated in Equigon in the way it stores your personal best score, as well as whether or not you’ve done the initial setup process.)
I also improved core things, too, like:
- The theme system is more robust.
- Teleporting works better.
- The "interact with a penis" system (and general penis interaction concepts like being able to grab them with your hands or face.) Male avatars will use this extensively.
- The physics are much better. There’s self-interacting physics, now, as well as major improvements to how you interact with other physical things.
So what's this new game? It's Equigon. I love it. Please watch at least the reveal trailer. I'm not even going to try to explain Equigon in words because a video does such a better job, so instead of doing that, how about I break down the design process, instead? Here's what I did from a game design perspective.
I started by taking a game concept that most people understand. In Equigon's case, it's the carnival game "Whac-A-Mole"
I then modified "Whac-A-Mole" by adding concepts that I perceive as fun to the core concept. In this case, I added the following ideas:
#1: The gameplay loop of Whac-A-Mole is lame and not very expandable, so let’s spice it up. Instead of the challenge originating from not knowing where the mole was going to be, I make the challenge what you do when the "mole" (a giant horse dick in Equigon's case) appears, and make you decide strategically how many "moles" you want to deal with at once. Each "mole" in Equigon is essentially a puzzle that must be solved. In Equigon's case it only has two main puzzles (the horse is horny or the horse needs to pee), but they require very different actions that you need to be quick to perform. They also have random modifications in the form of status effects which change how you deal with them slightly. Maximizing your score requires strategy and skill, which increases its replayability. This also allows me to improve the game in the future by simply adding additional puzzles. I've already designed more puzzles for the next update, such as:
- The horse is a girl requiring you to go through a different stimulation process.
- The horse requires a device attached or removed from it, first.
- The horse is a Nirik type of creature you need to "dowse" first by having another penis cum on it.
- The horse is actually a canine which requires using a hand and your face at the same time (this was submitted by someone with a Diamond Dog OC and I love the idea!)
- etc...
It's so open for improvement that I have hundreds of options that I can think of off the top of my head, and that's an awesome thing.
#2: I love e-sports: Let's make an e-sport out of it. I set it up to have a global leaderboard, so the whole community can compete online. You can't have an e-sport without a big tournament, so we're starting "Season 1" of the tournament on launch day. Season 2 will change the game, and of course, create new winners. I'll think of fabulous prizes for launch day. That leads to the next item which is...
#3: I love running contests, but they're so time-consuming to design and build. No longer. Every "season" of Equigon is a new contest, with minor but impactful changes to the game to change it from season to season. We'll perpetually be running a contest now <3 If people like it we can even do a "Grand Finals" or an "Invitational" type thing at a furry convention who will have us every year once those are a thing again. I have an adults-only panel scheduled at Babscon, for example, whenever that starts up again. Wouldn't that be a fucking blast to do at the panel? I can tell you that sounds like the best fucking panel, ever. Two people in VR headsets going head to head in a 16-player Equigon bracket while a couple people commentate the action? Holy shit this is my (very strange) dream.
Despite the visuals of Equigon, it's not particularly titillating. That's by design because I have a more titillating thing that's just waiting on me to make a few animations. That’s the thing I’ve been working on where you help the stallion fuck the tied up pony and have some agency over how he does that (Human version of that’s in the works, too, if you’re wondering when the next extreme-content specific thing is on its way.) Anyway the code's 100% done thanks to Equigon and it will also work in 2D. Equigon technically works in 2D, it's just stupid because it's a physical puzzle solving game. Visually seeing the things in Equigon happening isn't fun in the same way it is in VR to actually do it. I could make a button that solves the puzzle for you, for example, but I think everyone would be better served by making something sexy that works in 2D instead. If you want to you can hack 2D on by changing the command line and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I suggest you hold off a moment if you're a 2D user because the very next thing works in 2D and it will work equally well as it does in VR at doing what it's supposed to do (being sexy.)
I need to do some web stuff to support Equigon, and I need to program the credits sequence for Besti X still, so I'm putting the launch day and start of Season 1 of the Equigon tournament as March 22nd. In my head I'm like "That's a week of work, tops" but I'm trying to do better at scheduling so I'm putting it out farther so I'm not a ball of stress. I also need some time to catch up on emails. The credits in Besti X are going to be fun in themselves so please look forward to that. The goal is to make people WANT to go into the credits because it's fun, and I have a pretty good yet simple idea on how to do that <3
Why not release it now if it works? I really want to put something out that's "done" from the beginning. I want it to work for most people, and I want it to do what it's supposed to do out of the box. I want to have the first few updates to it just be small bug/exploit fixes so I can continue making new content most of the time. It will also be pirated at a 40-to-1 rate and most people pirate the first version, and I don't want Equigon to be "that buggy game about dicks." This is important to me emotionally so please be patient <3 Getting this out when it's done lets me go 100% into the other stuff that's also mostly done, and what's great is that finishing Equigon also works on Besti X because it lets me improve the tools/code at the same time. It's all connected. March should see the release of the Besti SDK, a new build of Besti 9, a new build of Besti X, and Equigon. That's a big month!
Other stuff:
- Besti 9's new version comes out on March first along with new keys. I made a new build of Besti 9. Surprise!
- If I finish the credits sequence early I'll release Equigon early.
- I have the office almost done. I'm super excited to show it to you and move out there. I have an insulation dude coming out next week because it's freezing out there but then I get to moooooove! Excited!
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I'm also setting up a way to join with crypto if you'd rather have some anonymity/save some dough and still support the projects we're working on. Did you know that modern gaming computers can conjure about $20/week right now? Might be cool for the folks who want that/have the hardware for it. Lord knows you can't buy the hardware right now (because people with buy-bots ALSO know you can generate $20/week on about $1 of electricity), but if you already have a good GPU, it might be a useful option for you. People certainly ask me for it a lot, so I think it's a good idea. I’ll let you know when this is live here and on Twitter.
Normally each one of those things would be a couple paragraphs but this is just way too long. <3 Let me stop here and I'll talk more about that next time.
Enjoy the video <3
I'll get back to you if you've emailed me ASAP <3
Thank you for your patience with me <3
Check Twitter for the day-by-day updates on what I'm working on.
More shortly <3
--Skunk <3
Here's the Besti X changelog for I did in version 20.
Besti X Version 20 (Not yet released)
Fixed layering issue in the Equigon main menu.
Made a new material/texture for the Equigon second menu. Wanted to reduce material requirements to improve performance on Quest in Equigon. Effort saves 4 draw calls.
Fixed some kind of weird Visual Studio issue that was causing the debug system to not work. Deleting and regenerating everything internal seems to have mended it though I don't know why it wasn't working to begin with.
Created the player attributes class to store physical attributes about the player (height, arm length, etc...) Stores it as an unencrypted JSON file inside of the game's preferences folder called playerattributes.horse.
Modified the logic behind saving/loading to compensate for a corrupted or incompatible save file in the preferences directory.
Rewrote the mathematics for the teleport system to compensate for a weird SteamVR behavior. The position of the SteamVR play area is given after the main code loop for a given frame, whereas the position of an Oculus play area is given at the beginning of a frame. This was causing movement on the first frame to not work properly on SteamVR. Instead of re-ordering this which will break other aspects of SteamVR, I re-wrote the mathematics of how we position the player to not ask the play area where it is as a mathematical basis for where the player should be. I now have the mathematical basis as a fixed point in space (0,0,0) and move relative to that for all platforms. Now the destination is absolute instead of relative, and as a consequence teleportation on SteamVR works as well as it does on Oculus and I do so without weird if conditionals related specifically to SteamVR.
Created the Standalone Experiences Menu Controller. This will have a Besti SDK front end that lets you configure it specifically to whatever standalone experience you're creating if it is outside the typical Besti X experience. You can use this to get users to answer questions you need answers to for your experience.
SceneControl (the program that sets up Besti X scenes) is now passed a reference to the entry point. This is helpful for other programs that may want to reference that, without needing to search the scene (which is pretty slow.)
Metadata about that point is also given in case it's a fixed position scene where your head is what is positioned rather than the floor under your feet.
Wrote the flexible recenter function for standalone scenes. If it's a roomscale scene, the user will be placed back at the entry position facing the direction indicated by the entry position. If it's a fixed position scene, it recalculates how to position your head back in the correct spot and moves you there.
Wrote a data processor to take two given strings, compare them to all loaded SDK module scenes, and permit loading that scene by name and creator name. This permits users to create multiple, interconnected SDK scenes without forcing the user to load them through the menu. Instead they can be loaded from within other scenes. Conceptually you can use this to break up scenes, for instance, say you have a farm and a well. Inside the well there is a vast cave system. Instead of having the cave system loaded, you can load that scene when a user jumps in the well, and when the user climbs back out, you can load the farm again. The reason we also check creator name is to reduce the probability that an identically named scene will be loaded if it shares the same name. The scene name used is the first given language name of the scene. If a scene has names in multiple languages, this will only consider the one placed first.
Added a function to the in-game menu and Scene generation SDK to hide scenes from the menu. If you have multiple interconnected scenes, you probably don't want every one showing up separately on the menu. Now you can specify in the BestiSDK if the scene should show in the menu or not. It's called 'Hide in Places Menu?' and you check it to hide it. There's a tutorial tooltip for it if you hover over it.
Added this new function to the IBMI write processor.
Added this new function to the log generator to notify you that it was set.
Added this new function to the internal asset manager database.
Added this new function to IBMI read processor
Added this new function to the in-game menu generation system.
Fixed a written error in the character compiler log file.
Wrote a new height scanner system that uses the retained value for height if available, and creates a retained value to be stored in PlayerAttributes if not (or if a new one is requested.)
Set up menu function to measure the player for Equigon/BreedingSim's menus.
Created a global event that causes whatever the active avatar is to re-check its size against the size database. This lets us update the character's size without redeploying the character. Character deployment involves a lot of math whereas rescaling is super simple.
Wrote a test routine for the new scene loader. Worked great
Wrote a test routine for the recenter function. Worked great.
Created an audio track for the second menu in Equigon
Created some ambient sound effects for the second menu in Equigon
Wrote a test routine for the new avatar assignment changes. Works great
Wrote a test for the rapid rescale function (and made Veelicious squat and move around for 15 minutes). Works great.
Made a nice new material for the Equigon Arena interior
Made a bunch of awesome semen splat textures for the environment.
Wrote an experiment to test a material optimization for Quest. Works.
Redesigned Equigon Arena's mesh to take advantage of the optimization I came up with.
Set up a test to make sure that works. Huzzah! It works.
Finished the lighting using the new concept. Beautiful!
Made a new shader for the Equigon dicks. Light enough to run on a Quest but powerful enough to do what I need it to do.
Created the animation/behaviors of the in-game user communication system.
Created the "Stall Empty" pop-up entity.
Fixed an audio processing bug in the equigon second menu.
Made some abstract impregnation artwork.
Testing various systems/bug hunting
Wrote an updated mirror handler for Besti X. Now it behaves more like a mirror with 3D depth and stuff.
Wrote the BestiSDK tool MirrorSurface to create mirrors in the BestiSDK.
Added the Mirror tool to the SDK scene examples scene.
Set a Graphics Quality Marker on the mirror example because it murders performance on Potato. That scene is way too complicated to have a mirror in it.
Wrote the internal processor for the mirror tool.
Added options for the mirror renderer that are tied to your GPU setting. Medium and Potato have reduced fidelity, Ultra has increased fidelity but you'd better have a fucking monster GPU.
Fixed a multiplication issue. Was supposed to be generating a variable, but instead passed zero, and then multiplied that into a more complicated formula. Always zero! Fixed now.
put the mirror in the Equigon menu area.
Ported over the FuzzySelect interaction system so you don't need to use the cursor to make choices in Equigon
The math will be useful but it's going to take a while to make a tool for this. I'm going to hard-code it for now.
Ported over the arbitrary particle explosion system.
Modified the particle explosion system to use a more SDK friendly design. I'll make a tool for making particle explosions in the BestiSDK eventually.
Modified how it loads particles in, doing so after the initialization scene has started rather than during that load. This lets the process start faster and overall speeds up the loading process. I pre-load these to not cause a framedrop the first time it's used.
Added a new control option that can be mapped to a button that recenters you. In Roomscale scenes, this teleports you back to where you started. In fixed position scenes, this teleports you such that your head is at the desired start position.
Added recenter to the internal fast menu system. Now it's always available.
Set up a "Created with the Besti SDK" menu that is available in the theme manager system.
Set up a "Stand up and clear your play area menu that is available in the theme manager system.
Set up a photosensitivity warning in the theme manager system.
Created the FSM that handles the menu/intro system
Wrote a better keyboard program for in-game typing with a vr controller. Upper and lower case now, with auto-capitalization of the first character.
Modified the VR 2D raycaster to increase its efficiency during creation. I also added a little routine to sanity check the setup and auto-fix it if it's created incorrectly.
Made lightshow animations for Equigon
Made some additional penis animations for Equigon
Made the new animator FSM for the equigon dick systems.
Made additional art assets for Equigon UI. Some of them are pretty funny.
Rendered a little fire animation for bonus stuff.
Set up MULTIPLIER BONUS with fire animation. Gwahahah.
Made a mobile-friendly urine particle system.
Made a mobile-friendly cum particle system.
Stress-tested the system on Oculus Quest.
Implemented a few optimizations to ensure we're at maximum framerate. The mirror is probably the hardest thing to render and there's not a lot I can do about that. Lowering the resolution of the mirror brings it to a stable framerate though.
Fixed a memory leak caused by the mobile semen.
Added a dripping particle effect to add some additional visual indication that a character is close.
Added a goopy leak that occurs during ejaculation to make it more visually interesting.
Added all of these particle systems to the penis handler.
Added discrete score tallies for various fluids that have been consumed.
Set up reporters for all fluids consumed that matches realistic expectations.
Made more art assets for bonus effects, such as extra large, magical, stinky, needs to pee, hard to please and easy to please.
Set up those art assets to deploy at sensible times.
Fixed a variety of deployment issues.
Significantly improved the potential energy system. Now you can instill potential energy by touching it.
Modified the sticky magnetic function to add additional capabilities to it. Specifically I've made it so objects can be set to be sticky magnetic only when grabbed.
Added haptic events for when the horse cums while you're holding it. This happens whether or not the spray of semen is visible (it is not visible if you are consuming it, for example)
Made some events and additional handlers for mouth grabbing the penis to have it direct towards your mouth.
Made an auto-release mechanism for when you back your head off the penis sufficiently to make it exit your mouth.
Made some logic improvements to several of the raycaster systems to make them easier to manage for me.
Made the penises not respond to a typical grab raycast. We'll add a new one for 2D that handles that.
Created a new physical button function that can be used in the BestiSDK.
Wrote a skit to be played between the announcer and the character I play.
Recorded voice performances
Modified the scene controller to fix a potential bug.
Set up the BestiSDK InSceneEvent tool. This allows you to make a variety of things happen in a scene, be they system events or custom events.
Made the timer system to govern the timed game mode.
Made the cool end-game countdown to display all the neat data it collected.
Made an internal custom save data system so I can record your personal best score.
Wrote appropriate entries for that so it can be called and processed.
Fixed a body physics bug that was causing a variety of problems.
Finished the tool to allow you to remap the controls for a scene.
Finished the tool to allow special functions to be assigned to buttons, permitting you to perform tasks in-game with physical button presses.
Wrote the animation event tool to let you create finite state machines that execute your unique game logic.
Modified the BestiSDK formatting tools to wrap the subheader for folks who are on a 16x9 monitor and have a smaller inspector bar than I do.
Wrote cute and interfaces for the new FSM tools.
Added additional menu modes for when using a controller override setup that disables switching control profiles for the scene.
Fixed a bug in the theme system related to the menu.
Clarified some tooltips in a variety of BestiSDK tools.
Clarified the drop-down options in the FastMenu tool
Tied the recenter function into the overall physics rules because that's really what dictates how it works, rather than a sensitive sequence of bools that were getting complicated. Instead it's now governed by the physics settings putting all the logic in one place rather than being scattered across 3 scripts. Eliminates around 80 lines of code and makes it easier to add new camera concepts in the future.
Fixed an issue with the BestiSDK event system's function of loading scenes by name. Made it so you also need to provide a creator name so there's less probability of loading the incorrect scene if you're using a bunch of Besti SDK modules. This needs an extremely specific mode added for commercial modules but this will do for now because I need to make an online service to "lease" unique numbers to do that in a real way.
Make the leaderboard system work.
Make the intro sequence load an avatar.
Configure the rest of the intro cutscene and make it load the new scene at the end of the animation and if any VR button is pressed.
Random bug fixes.
