Happy April Fools! (2018)

Happy April's Fools, guys! Sorry, I didn't prepare a joke this time, so take a heartfelt wish for your well-being and enjoyment on the first day of April. It's been a long time since I last made a blog post. But the game's not dead. I'm not dead. But I'll at least explain in this post below why I haven't been posting anything or giving progress updates.

Now as all of you may know, this is my first project. And I have this stupid idea in my head that my first project must be something that's good and presentable to the world (even though it's pretty much just porn, shut up.). Which quite frankly, is a VERY bad idea. A first project should never be your magnum opus. So if you're an aspiring creator that want to create something and if there's any lesson that I've learned and can teach you, it's to start out small, and not with something like this.

I say all that, but I'm still gonna follow through on it. I know, I know, sunk cost fallacy yadda yadda. But fuck you. I want to make this game. (I know someone is gonna feel personally attacked, but that fuck you is me being facetious.)

As for the reason why I haven't posted anything at all, it basically boils down to how I don't want my things to look shit. Which is a tough thing to do because to me, "not shit" is apparently defined as "perfect." (Again, it's a bad practice. Don't do it. It's bad for business and I'm trying to stop myself from doing it.) Because of that, a lot of times I have to go back on something I worked on earlier to tweak it, fix it up and whatnot. Basically, almost nothing is ever finalized. Which is why I'm hesitant to post any progress updates for fear that more changes are required and I have to make another update for the same upda-

My life is a mess.

So anyway, I'll try to make more progress updates from here on out, be more active on social media and whatnot. As a friendly reminder, I'm still pretty active on Discord, so come find me there. And while I still can't promise you the wait will be worth it, I hope you'll at least look forward to it.

And just before you guys accuse me of having done nothing for the past 2 years or so, which to be fair, is technically true since I keep revising everything, here's a teaser of the battlesprite.

Unity port tease/progress update

So since I'm back from my long ass hiatus (more details here), I figured I might as well tease you guys with some progress updates. I'll occasionally update this post with new stuff, so check back frequently. On the other hand, I usually post these things on the Discord channel first, so if you absolutely can't wait to see progress updates, go there.

Do note that these are not the final product since they still need more tweaks. This post is more about what you can vaguely expect to see in the game. So assume things will be different in one way or another in the final implementation.

How busts look
(Fucked up resizing the left bust, ignore the white artifacts pl0x)

Expressions for the busts.
(Frown is technically displeased in this case but I'm obviously very fluent in English.)

Expression sketches of Ryugami.

WIP CG for Imps.

Happy April's Fool! (April Fools 2017)

Hi. So, happy April Fools everyone. I was going to make an elaborate joke about Captivity getting a 2 episode OVA by some made up anime studio or some shit, but I ultimately decided against it. It makes for a good laugh, but I didn't want to draw an authentic anime looking cover art for an April's Fool joke. So there ya go. I didn't do it. But once again, Happy April's Fool! And if you're into pranks, don't let the them get out of hand!

We now has a Discord!

So, I've made a Discord server. I know not everyone follow me twitter or whatever, and I know quite a few of you guys likes dev/community interaction. So you guys can come on Discord and chat with me (and others) about whatever real time as long as I'm online! Bear in mind that while I know my games are adult in nature, due to Discord's TOS, I can't allow explicit content. You can still talk about stuffs but try not to go overly descriptive.

https://discord.gg/beQeBSW

A quick random SFW art~

I should be posting this on Twitter instead, but eh, whatever.

And yes, the port to Unity is still on-going. Though I've been spending most of my time on Epoch Point because I want to get that out as soon as possible. Welp, see you guys next post!

EDIT: I apparently wrote SWF instead of SFW.

Epoch Point is now a thing!

Project Rhenium, the sidescrolling survival action shooter I mentioned in the previous post? Welp, Epoch Point is now a thing. I usually codename my projects whenever I don't want to reveal the game's actual name before actually committing to it. So now that I've revealed its name, it's now a thing I'm committing to.

As this is captivity-hrpg, I won't be posting any news, updates or whatever about Epoch Point here. So, I've made a new dev blog dedicated to Epoch Point. https://epochpoint-hassg.blogspot.com/ This link - and a new option on the menu bar on top - will take you to Epoch Point's dev blog. There's nothing there yet, but keep an eye out!

And if anyone's wonder what does "hassg" stands for, it stands for "hentai action shooter sidescrolling game." Kinda like how "hrpg" on this blog stands for "hentai role-playing game." I know "hassg" sounds kinda odd, but the alternative would be "hsasg," which is probably worse on the tongue.

Unity port and Project Rhenium?!

Hi. So, yeah. Once again, apologies for delaying the update again. God, I need to get my shit together. For those who don't know, I made an announcement in the form of a post on the LoK thread about porting the game over to Unity. Because RPG Maker is so incredibly hard to use and messy with what I want to do with the game, I finally gave in and decided to port the game over to Unity. And don't worry about how much this'll change the game, I can assure you not much? The game is still 2D, top-down and is a RPG. Hopefully better in every way on Unity.

And remembered what happened to Project Iodine? I basically canceled that. But now, Project Rhenium! Why? Because I wanna make a side-scrolling survival shooter. I decided that this will be a great side project I can work on as it's not narrative heavy and I can give you guys something to play while I port Captivity over to Unity. But yeah, go over to the thread and tell me what you guys think.

Chinese New Year is kinda over, so back to work!

Quick update: Tl:dr, update within a week. I don't have much to say today, but basically Chinese New Year is kinda over, so I'm gonna get back to work. Chinese New Year technically lasts much longer than just like a week, but everyone's pretty much back to work/school, so yeah, I'm doing the same.

Yay! Moar WIP CGs (AKA holy shit I suck at drawing)

Ohai there. Not much to say today except I've got another WIP CG for you. This H-scene is where if you sleep during the night Kyle will randomly climb onto your bed and do bed stuff to you. I've just noticed how much rapey CGs I've been drawing recently. Maybe I should draw a consensual lesbian h-scene with Kerry next?

But yeah, that's it for today. As always, any feedback is appreciated.

(I hope this is the) Final design for Player

This is either the 3rd or 4th iteration of Player's design. Player characters designs - at least for me - are difficult to settle on because you don't want the players to get tired of looking at them. But this will HOPEFULLY be the final design. I'd hate to redesign her again.

So a few things I changed/different from the WIP CG in pre-build 4.4 is namely the hairstyle. Aside from giving her random strands of hair that curls upwards to her right, the previous random ahoge (cowlick) never really sat well with me, so I changed that to a slightly more natural looking one. Other than that, she still retains the vest coat, but now with extra belts. That half skirt thingy is now on her left. And finally I removed the gloves because I realized it looked terrible. (By the way, anatomy's a god damn bitch.)

With that out of the way, the other news is that the update is coming along nicely. I should hopefully be able to release pre-build 5 sometime in January provided I'm not scheduled more shifts. God I hate working in retail. Anyway, that's it for today and happy new years eves!

Merry Christmas! (Christmas 2016)

Merry Christmas everyone! While I apologize for not having the update ready yet, I drew a quick portrait for the occasion. I've missed the chance to draw a bunny outfit for Easter and skimpy costume for Halloween, but I don't wanna miss what is essentially the last Holiday of the year. So here you go, a somewhat sexy Christmas outfit for you guys. I only drew a portrait because I only have a few hours left before the clock hits 12.

You might also notice her hairstyle looks a little different, that's because I've decided to touch up the design of her hairstyle a little. Because with the characters I've had planned and some designed, the Player character looks literally the least interesting. So I touched it up a little. The thing with designing protagonists is that you don't want them to look too overwhelming and make other characters unnoticeable or making them too underwhelming and make the protagonist look shitty. So yeah, there ya go. I'm still not entirely satisfied with the hairstyle though, so expect it to be tweaked further.

That's it for today, see you guys next year!

New project announcement! (HIATUS/CANCELED)

 UPDATE: Project Iodine is now on hiatus/canceled until further notice.

Apologies for the lack of progress updates for the past 2 weeks. I've been busy with work and couldn't find much time to work on the game. And whenever I found the time to work on the game, I feel burned out from working on the same damn thing over and over. I know game development is a long and tedious process and most who work in this field don't really have much freedom to decide on which project they work on. While this isn't necessarily true for every studio, most studio have to commit to a project long term because of their contract with their publisher or for some various other reason.

But since that's not the case for me (luckily), I'm announcing a new project under the working title of Project Iodine! Instead of a 10 hour long story-driven epic, Project Iodine is more or less content and player driven. In the reins of games like (ordered based on inspiration) RimWorld, Sheltered, State of Decay and more, Project Iodine will be a zombie survival base building simulator top-down shooter hentai game. Instead of being story-driven, you can play for as long as you like as you feel like it. It's still gonna be built on RPG Maker MV because I'm an asshole and want to see how far I can push the engine. I made a thread with some details on LoK, so check it out.

Here's a little design of the main menu. The background changes depending on which button you have selected. Not all of the backgrounds are as pornographic as this though.

I'm somehow both great and terrible at the same time at drawing hands.

This is a much smaller scaled project and hopefully it'll take some of the burned out feeling I've got from working on Captivity for so long. That said, I'll still attempt to get enough new content in by the end of the month to release pre-build 5. But yeah, that's it for today!

Yay! Plugin's done!

So you may or may not have known, I recently requested someone I know to write a plugin to make animating the text windows easier. It's pretty much done now. Right now it's just to keep an eye out for any bugs and still needing to add a missing function. I'm working on converting the old common events to the plugin's commands. This is going to make eventing SO much cleaner. So here's a big thanks to YSlayer! And check out his game: A land of Flowers (A VX Ace game). It's basically yuri ecchi (and the game may or may not have my illustrations in the future), so if you're interested in that, check that out.

And that's it for today! I'll work on converting the old stuff to the new one. And once that's done, I'll work on the maps and hopefully have an update with new content/story by the end of November? See you next post!

Guess what time it is?

No, not update time unfortunately. I just wanna make the title of this post relevant to its content. But worry not! I am slowly chucking away at it. In fact, I've just rewritten the time system entirely from the ground up with pure eventing. I know I'm an narcissistic asshole who likes self-deprecating humor (if you haven't figure that out by now), but I'm honestly REALLY impressed with myself this time. Technical stuff below, but other than that, I'm also brainstorming a way to keep track of NPC locations so if you say, enter a building, the NPCs outside will "keep moving," and when you go outside again, the NPCs will remember how long it has passed since you entered a building and be properly adjusted to a distance based on that info. Yeah, once again, complicated. Because NPCs in RPG Makers aren't built to be kept track of like NPCs in Harvest Moons, Rune Factories and Stardew Valley. (An excuse for me to mention Stardew Valley. The characters isn't as fun as Harvest Moons' or Rune Factory's, but still a great game. Give it a try if you like Harvest Moon or Rune Factory.)

So, on to the technical stuff. The time system I previously used is a 3rd party plugin by Moghunter/Atelier Rgss. It has several problems with it and since I can't program, I can't make edits myself. So I looked into another plugin, and this one's from Hudell. But just like Moghunter's, it has its own share of problems. Namely, Moghunter's hour hand in the clock HUD doesn't move. Yes. It bothers me (that being said, I've decided to not include an analog clock HUD anyway). It also doesn't properly fix overflowing values, but I haven't checked Hudell's to see if it does the same. And Hudell's is also written in a way that keeps the clock running despite tabbing out of the game. Which as you might guess, is kind of a problem. So, it's obvious that some sort of change is needed (insert political joke here). And the result is me completely rewriting the system that's fully tailored to the game's needs. Okay, it's a time system. There's not much features you can add to a time system. But the idea is that it runs independently from the other systems, and if some other event make changes to the time, the time system itself will make the proper adjustments if something went wrong. Like auto correcting overflowing values! If say, I'm doing something stupid like adding 323 minutes instead of 5 hours and 23 minutes, the system will be smart enough to do the calculations to determine 323 minutes = 5 hours and 23 minutes, and adds the values properly. With a system like this, I don't have to add a conditional branch to fix overflowing values every time I manipulate some other time value. Generally speaking, it just makes events cleaner for me to manage and write.

The system sounds like it's very complicated, but truthfully, it's a very elegantly written solution. I've optimized it to all hell and made sure it doesn't do unnecessary calculations and waste computing power. If only I could say the same for the other existing systems in place... The animated text windows is made up of 8 fucking common events and choice boxes is made up of 4 fucking ones. Like, what the hell? So yeah, that's about it for today I guess. See you guys later!

What's going on?

Hi guys. Apologies for the huge lack of any sort of progress update for the past 2 weeks or so. I've been really busy with part time work and all. Y'know when I took a part time job, I expected to have time in between shifts to work on the game, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Now a little background on my financial situation so you'd have an idea of what I'm up to. I'm not in a tight need for money or in some sort of debt. In fact, I still live with my family (I'm 20, what you'd expect?). That being said, I still have to pay for my own bills and food. Mostly because I'm insistent on refusing to go to college. I have that to thank for not having to pay off student loans for the next 10 to 20 years out of college. It's funny to think about how education was made more affordable than ever (relative to other times in history) but the entire system is designed to capitalize as much as possible off the students. But I digress, I apologize for the lack of updates, follow me on twitter, and yaddi yaddi yadda. See you next time!

Quick progress update (and crossbows?)

Eh, yep. Going slowly. I've been working on the maps for a bit, but I've got nothing to show yet. I'll post a teaser or something when I've got something pretty to show. I've been spending what little free time I've had on anime and shit. (Technically I've also been watching animes during my part time work, but that's beside the point.) I've written the class descriptions for Priest and Shinobi, so check that out I guess. The picture doesn't reflect this yet, but I've added Operator as an advancement class to Sniper. So now we have Sniper for long range, Enforcer for short range, and Operator for mid range. And now I have no idea what to do with crossbows. Most classes already filled a unique role of some kind, and I don't really want redundancy with the classes (e.g two classes that are basically the same in terms of functionality). So I don't know, I may just remove crossbows entirely. I literally do not see a reason to have it in the game if rifles does the same thing. Lemme know what you guys think.

Here we go again (AND TWITTER!)

Yep. I broke the blog again. I reverted the back to the old template. Again. I can never seem to find a good template that suits this blog.

For some good news though, I've implemented the twitter feed! So yeah, it's on the right, you can keep track of my shenanigans now. The tweets I'll be making won't be 100% relevant to Captivity, so keep that in mind. Other than that, here's the direct link to my twitter: https://twitter.com/x3Darkie Follow me and do twitter stuffs and enjoy your stay, I guess?

Also, I'm still working on the class descriptions. There's lots of em. ._.

Classes, how do they work?!

No, I don't mean school. I'm that one guy who doesn't go to school. I'm referring to the classes of the game. But anyway, I'm done with designing the classes for the game (emphasis on designed, not implemented). I've had a rough idea of how it works in the conceptual stage of the game, but I've now only been able to finally give it a proper look and refine the concept. A lot of research went into these classes. Making sure the names have some sort of context to their skillset and so on. I've also had to make sure none of the classes' names are the same as another game(s) so people can't say I ripped them off (though I'm pretty sure you can't exactly rip off an idea).

Now the way classes work in Captivity and its in-universe MMO is for all intents and purposes, mostly for roleplaying and narrative purposes. You probably noticed some of these classes crosses another archetype. And that's because they are for creating specialized roles and allowing some unique dialogues depending on which class you are. With the branching setup of this monstrosity, the idea is that the 3rd advancement classes, whether or not the skillset is vastly different and/or contradictory, will still have some sort of semblance and relevance to its preceding advancement class.

Since Captivity is more of turn-based tactical combat system and not an actual action RPG, the in-universe explanation is that a class - and weapons, but that's a topic for another day - system like this encourages players to setup their skills in a way that suit their playstyles, creating unique roles for themselves and giving them a degree of customization. For example, say someone chose to be a Sniper, and they want to continue playing as a Sniper late-game without bothering much with Enforcer's skills. They can do that by putting mainly Sniper skills and perhaps some of Enforcer's buffs and passives into their hotbar, they are now a Sniper "main." (Look it up if you don't know what a main means.) But the other guy, he wants to be more of a close-mid ranged Enforcer, he does that by just putting Enforcer skills in his hotbar (and also Sniper buffs and passives), and bam. They're now a Enforcer main. There's also Sniper/Enforcer hybrids. Which is just a person putting both Sniper and Enforcer skills into their hotbar for versatility but sacrificing some skills since you can only put so much skills into a hotbar, you'd have to pick and choose. Of course, none of this matters in Captivity, since Captivity is turn based combat. This just simply allow for some unique personalities and characters to exist for roleplaying and narrative purpose.

This also may or may not be a system I came up with in my MapleStory days as a kid who wants to be a game designer growing up (granted I was 15, but I'm pretty sure 15's still considered a kid). I've only got the chance now to actually refine it to something that's plausible and makes fucking sense. I'm breaking up this post after the picture since it'd be too long to be in the main page. Click read more to read the class descriptions (Will actually start writing after I take a break). One of the notable changes I made while revamping this system is changing the 2nd advancement level from 40 to 30 and merging Marksman into Sniper. Because I can't think of 2 more unique class that could be advanced from a crossbow for Marksman and rifle for Sniper, I just merge the two together and split them in the 3rd advancement. Unless someone can come up with a better idea than me, consider this class tree final.

Progress?

I've begun laying the groundwork for the maps. And I'm having a hard time working with the default assets. SO MANY THINGS ARE LACKING! I'll eventually replace them with my own graphics, but for now, the default will hopefully be able to at least slightly portray how I envisioned them to be. Just slightly.

If you read the character submission page before and saw the "more guilds coming soon" thingy and been waiting for me to finish it, then you'll now see that I've finally fully updated it! So go check it out if you wanna submit a character! (And before someone asks, yes, the Foundation is obviously a rip off of the Round Table Alliance from Log Horizon. Because running an oligarchic nation is fun! (I also may or may not have spoiled the Player's involvement or possibly lack thereof in the Foundation based on that information. Shh.))

Also, another WIP of the manga!

This is obviously not done yet. I cleaned it up a bit and duplicated every layer to darken the lines so it's easier to see. But that's it for today! Progress have been slow lately due to the lack of a graphics card and among many other things. And I may or may not write another dev talk tomorrow. We'll see. But yep, see ya!

Whoop~ Random sketch of a shower scene

I hate drawing on a laptop with a tiny keyboard and non-1080p. It makes me sad. This h-scene will randomly trigger if you take a shower while Kyle/Nosferatu is home. But I'll probably make it so that the first time has a 100% chance to trigger while the future repeat scenes are random. Kyle definitely did not keep his promise about not touching you, did he?

Clean version

Notes version

Bear in mind that this is still an early sketch and not final. I normally sketch something first and fix things that doesn't look right, but in extreme cases I may have to resketch an entire thing. And then I'll start linearting. After that, the painting. Most of the time I also fix stuffs during the lineart and painting phase. I uploaded 2 versions of the sketch. One of them have notes I laid down just to remind me what needed to be fixed. Figured someone might find that interesting. But that's it for today, see ya! (Also, I don't like how this blog template display images. I may have to find another one. Again. >_>) (Yay! I fixed it! Had to scour the internet to find the solution. Basically had to reverse engineer the damn code just to find out a line have been removed which caused the images to fill up the entire post. Now I just have to find what's causing the letter padding or whatever that's filling the sentences to the end of a post. I can't explain this shit. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, help me. D: )