RPG Patreon Active Renfield

[KleptoLizard]

Finally having another team member makes things so much easier.
I can focus on long-term design concerns while Gambino tests the context menu, fills in all the needed parameters and refines the camera movement code.



10/28 - Making supplemental charts for expression combinations
11/7 - Reviewing the new codebase by Gambino. My old code looks like Yandere Sim by comparison.

 

[KleptoLizard]

Gambino is wrapping up the character creator / exporter.
Meanwhile I'm working on more mid-to-long term features.
RF will have more than just tools for manual modding.
More like an actual "G.E.C.K." from Fallout lore:
a kit that you turn on and it creates your ideal world.

Players/modders will load up the kit and enter in the presets.
Then a Daggerfall-like procedural system generates the play area.
After playing with the terrain generation I'm confident that users will find it satisfactory.
It can generate a zone the size of Skyrim or Cyrodiil in a minute or so thanks to it running on the GPU.

The settlements and dungeons will likewise be generated and placed.
Persistent NPCs will then be spawned, followed by the placing of generic NPC spawners.
Generic NPCs function like animals in Minecraft; they will despawn if left alone.
But if you find someone who catches your fancy they will persist if you interact with them.
After all the base content is generated you can go back and manually place things.

My next major goal is to finish the culture generator.
This system will allow players to spawn a world with people drawn from various historical periods.
You select a year and an ethno-linguistic identity and the system will name and equip NPCs accordingly.
There's several hundred civilizational snapshots on the list at the moment.

The time periods are divided up into approximate eras.
Note that these labels are loose/arbitrary and actual historians might balk at how they've been rounded off.

-Chariot Era 3000bce-500bce
-Classical Era 500bce-500ce
-Dark Age Era 500-1000
-Medieval Era 1000-1500
-Renaissance Era 1500-1750
-Napoleonic Era 1750-1900
-Industrial Era 1900-1950ce

Using this system you can create a world with a human culture based on the Diadochi Hellenic kingdoms.
Then add an Orc culture based on Early Mesopotamians.
You could also create "distant" cultures, "emerging" cultures and "lost" cultures.
A mod might have a largely European-ish play area but feature a distant Asian culture.
Meaning you'd occasionally run across the odd katana at the market or meet some travelers.

Emerging cultures would represent migrations of new peoples or a new fashion/technology in the extant population.
Lost cultures would be devoid of people but their stuff would be found in ruins.
The templates will be easy to make and edit in common file formats.
You could make Tolkienesque cultures or splice different fantasy/historical/alternate history settings together.

Finding affordable weapon meshes for the different periods isn't difficult.
But clothing needs to be processed to conform to body changes and can be a cost/efficiency bottleneck.
This is the primary reason behind the listed eras;
If I make single uniform for the Napoleonic era, players can edit the textures to differentiate between French and Austrians etc.

Returning to the issue of weapons, the material tier system of the Elder Scrolls games made many of the "foreign" weapons ineffectual.
A scimitar doesn't scale and so is only good for display after a certain level.
RF's system will allow any weapon to be of any tier with the option of tinting the submeshes according to substance.

 

[KleptoLizard]

The camera controls are all in place and the card import/export serialization is nearly done.
While Gambino finishes up the short-term technical features, I'm focusing on long-term world building tools.

Starting with the premade characters themselves, each type of asset will be shareable via cards.
These are very similar to the Illusion cards except that anything can be exported, not just characters/outfits.
Then you just pop all the cards you want into a module folder and it becomes a "deck" that the world will draw from.
It's a bit reminiscent of how worlds were created in the Myst games.

Furthermore the cards will have keywords with hashes associated with them that let you
create all sorts of dynamic dependencies and interactions so cards can take cues from one another.
Recall any example of the "And You Were There!" trope.
A card could be for an alien character but then upon detecting a Theme card that indicates a modern mundane
setting it will strip the character of its alien features, leaving their human equivalent in place.
The opposite can also be true; you can take a stack of ordinary human characters
and it can load them randomly assigned as fantasy or sci-fi races.

We're aiming to make the easiest possible tools to mod and develop mods.
What's more, with the procedural terrain and quest generating systems you'll be able
to create entire custom worlds with the snap of a finger.
Additionally each card component will always have a fallback behavior to minimize crashing.
If you've created a shield card that relies on another card for a borrowed texture
the game won't simply crash to desktop. (even if the shield ends up an unsightly bright pink)

As always, let me know if anyone has questions.

11/24 - Developing mod templates for various popular fantasy settings.
These should help players quickly create custom themes for their personalized module-worlds.
Obviously copyright prevents me from adding certain material directly to a paid product
so much of this content will be presented as parody/tribute media or released as free mods separately.

There are innumerable settings that would be well-received, but we have to cut off the list somewhere.
I've narrowed it down to these 12:

1 Conan / Hyborea
2 Cosmere
3 Dragon Age / Thedas
4 Elder Scrolls / Tamriel
5 Final Fantasy (various entries)
6 Game of Thrones / SoIaF
7 Lord of the Rings / Middle-Earth
8 Star Wars
9 Warhammer 40k
10 Warhammer Fantasy
11 Wheel of Time / Randland
12 Witcher

11/26 - Working on an injectable morph solution.
11/28 - Reworking / updating H-scenario templates.

 

[KleptoLizard]

There's this amazing package of map and world building tools I'm saving up for.
In the meantime I'm studying the documentation and features.
With this we can create tools for players to create their own
realms from any combination of historical or fictional maps.

Multiple instanced areas can also coexist like Minecraft's Nether and End,
Elder Scrolls' planes of Oblivion, or the Warrens of the Malazan novels.
Slap some fantasy maps from anywhere on the net onto a globe.
Then set the colors to correspond to different biomes,
micromanaging individual regions as you require.
In the case of maps that overrun the edge, you can designate an invisible wall
or have a simple procedural system flesh out the geometry of the "there-be-dragons" areas.

You could put Westeros across the sea from Three Kingdoms-era China.
Or have the Pre-Columbian Americas on the same planet as Kalimdor & Northrend.
You can read about the map suite here:

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When coupled with the terrain generator, even the sky is no limit.

I know the demo client keeps getting delayed but we've both been working
around the clock through the holiday season to finish things up.
We appreciate everyone's patience.

[Actraiser map from SNESMaps, made by Rick N. Bruns]
[Middle-Earth map from Tolkien Gateway, made by John Howe]

12/4 - Organizing ethnicity preset templates according to real world yDNA haplogroups.
12/6 - Organizing maps for contemporary civilizations by region for the historical templates.
Added The First Law to the fantasy preset templates.
12/8 - Determining boundary snapshots for Napoleonic-era scenarios.

 

[KleptoLizard]

Making more progress every day. Especially with wearables.
Once the hair and clothing have been fully configured
with their corresponding transparency textures and shaders
the serialization for the character cards can be completed.

In addition to the one-slider-one-morph blendshape controls
Gambino is experimenting with a more modern system
involving pulling at the geometry directly a la Fallout 4.

While IllusionSoft games had an option to load either a character,
an outfit, or both, our system will ultimately be much more modular.
Individual body parts can be transplanted or lerped between samples.

12/12 - Making spaceship templates for scifi scenarios
12/14 - Practice with C/C# outside of the Unity environment
12/16 - Creating further templates for spaceships, ships at sea, stations & ports, arcologies/superstructures, all manner of aerial vehicles.
12/18 - Testing scriptable rendering pipelines

 

[KleptoLizard]

We experienced a minor version control-related mishap, but we are back on track.
Gambino is remaking the serialization for all the customization options,
also remaking the character creator UI and finally improving the general look of the whole project.

As Christmas approaches, work might slow for a couple of days
but we hope to launch the character editor with all its functionality in the upcoming week.

I've also been investigating a site called World Anvil.
Apparently over a million people use it for homebrew TTRPG settings and other creative projects.
It so happens that with the keys that come with the paid version you can download all the data in JSON format.
So this will allow us to piggyback on their interface, tools and community.

At the simplest level this will allow you to make a module that has all the world information in a series of menus.
But it can also feed map layers into the terrain generator to spawn a world to run around in.
They also advertise support for many major TTRPG systems, although it's not clear exactly what all that entails.
On the site they have a chart of 45+ systems but by ripping the full list from the html I made a document showing all of them.

You must be registered to see the links

12/22 - World Anvil tests & tutorials
12/24 - HTML coding practice
12/26 - CSS drills
12/28 - Working on new improved H-text generator using latest UI system
12/30 - Organizing fonts for CJK+C text (Chinese, Japanese, Korean + Cyrillic)

 

[KleptoLizard]

The demo ekes closer to presentability while I work on the longer-term content creation tools.
My investigation into World Anvil showed that it has a lot of promise.
However we'll be focused on integrating a bridge with RenPy first.
Modders will be able to convert a functioning RenPy visual novel into a Renfield scenario.

I'm also working on a new version of my H-text generator like the one used in the original Renfield prototype made in RPGMaker.
However this one will be more sophisticated and scale off the sensitivity of the actors using a content creator-determined formula.
It will be displayed either in the dialogue box or as billboarded speech bubble barks around the characters.
Camera raycasting will keep them out of the way as much as possible.

1/4 - Work on crafting and city building systems
1/6 - Focusing on Chinese localization
1/8 - Reading "What People Wore When" for costume research
1/10 - Reading intelligence reports from IISS & CSIS for more realistic modern scenarios
1/12 - Reading "World Cultures: A Global Mosaic, 5th Edition" for research.
Sorting building prefabs for the construction kit.
1/14 - Working on a smart cursor for building interface.
1/16 - Gambino just sent over the test client. I confirmed the serialization is working.
Just a few more tweaks and the Character Creator proof-of-concept will be ready.
1/18 - Working on tools to assist interior/exterior structural integration.

 

[Mashi]

Not too bad man. Been watching you work on this for years, it's always nice when a project starts coming to a close.

 

[KleptoLizard]

Here's the new Character Creator.
Everyone is welcome to use this thread to share characters.

You must be registered to see the links

1/22 - Exporting poses for the Character Creator and updating core combat logic suite.
1/24 - Reimplementing wearable conform code and other features from previous CC version.
1/26 - Reading The Encyclopedia of Ships, practicing Chinese localization, prepping furry/scaly/drow skins for CC.
1/28 - Installing the class selection system and filling out the final alchemy chart.
1/30 - Collating animation data and tags for it.

 

[KleptoLizard]

The

You must be registered to see the links

is here.
It's been really tough getting word out about this project so please don't hesitate to share the client or the characters you make.
We still have to:
- Add the male figure
- Get clothes and hair to conform (right now they break quite easily)
- Add submesh colorization
- Add the poses and idle animations (there's hundreds of them and they all blend, creating countless possibilities)
- Add bone scaling (at the moment the sliders only change the mesh itself)
- Add more skin and eye options (we've got several human skins along with some beastfolk)
If anyone has questions please ask away.

2/4 - Collating loads of item, spell and other object data into spreadsheets.
2/6 - Organizing bestiary.
2/8 - More bestiary data entry. Over 800 types.

 

[KleptoLizard]

Gambino has made a significant breakthrough with the clothing code.
If any of you are familiar with Caliente's tools for Skyrim clothing this is similar in function.
But where Skyrim only needs 2 Blendshapes (from skinny to heavy) we have hundreds.
This is an important step towards letting players make and customize their own clothes.

A quick summary from Gambino:

"We go through each BlendShape in the base body mesh, extract all the vertex frame data
and cull any values that are not over a threshold, indicated by the colors in the second image.
We select a particular cloth piece, and project it to the body surface.
Using a search radius around the projected vertex, anchor points are created to properly translate the BlendShape.
In some cases, the search radius is not big enough to contain any vertex in the body mesh, so it leaves orphan points.
The data in these points is later averaged with adjacent vertices. Finally the data is added to the cloth mesh."

2/12 - Filling in inventory database
2/14 - Filling out spell database
2/16 - More spell data and spellcrafting formulas
2/18 - Working on cooking & fishing

 

[KleptoLizard]

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. " - Douglas Adams

The new animation playback system is taking longer than we'd thought so we're re-installing the old one for now.
This means the new H-scene client should be ready by the end of the month.
It has various issues as you can imagine.
We're testing various ways to polish and tighten the look, feel and function of it.

While the system I originally made could automatically adjust for differences in bone length,
Gambino has been working on a computationally efficient way of adjusting for blendshapes.
He also insisted we move up the timetable at which futanari characters are included.

By the way, I've been using 2 Twitter/X accounts for updates but I'm retiring one as redundant.
From now on social media updates and stream go-live notifications will be posted solely on

You must be registered to see the links

Don't be shy; you can ask questions about Renfield here, on X, or on the stream at Twitch.tv

2/22 - Reading The Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Mythology
2/24 - Still reading about mythology while Gambino is nearly ready to release the updated H-scene demo

 

[KleptoLizard]

Gambino's making great progress on the H-scene playback system.
In the meantime, here's a brief layout of our audio solution.

-SFX
Sound effects were easy; there's a near-bottomless supply of license-free sfx files.
Just gigs and gigs of various Foley effects for all occasions.

-Voice
Getting the voice files was one of the most frustrating, sometimes downright demoralizing, tasks of the entire project.
My first major attempt at getting voices for the adult scenes was an expensive failure.
The volunteers' audio was just far too muddy with all sorts of white noise/static/background disturbances/peaks/inconsistent volume.
I half expected to hear them say "this is a Librivox recording" in the middle of the moaning samples.
They also tried to emulate what adult film actresses do down to the letter which included a lot of awful hissing.
Had to sit there for _hours_ with headphones and the sound timeline open just editing out these sharp intakes of breath across teeth.

This was years ago but nowadays there are far more options for hiring professional voice actors.
Japanese VAs work in a buyer's market and would've been relatively easy to procure, but RF's default theme is a sort of Pseudo-European Fantasy.
Therefore I needed voices which would make a better match.
I've already talked with several actresses and reviewed their work, leaving me much more confident that the future will bring RF some high-quality, high-variety voice options.
But at the moment I simply don't have the money.

-Music
I've collected a soundtrack composed of 127 individual tracks including all sorts of music and ambience.
We started out with a huge repository of royalty-free music and had tournament-style elimination voting on a livestream.
So these were the viewers' favorites out of I forget how many thousands of tracks.

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On an unrelated note, I tried to stream Enderal the other day but couldn't get far due to technical issues.
The SureAI team was certainly very talented and ambitious.
In particular they had such a good sense of scene composition in their levels.

My one criticism is that they felt the need to have their own "Helgen".
I feel lengthy unskippable introductions can be agonizing even if they are well done.
It's a trend that plagues AAA development and it's unfortunate when indie/mod devs get bitten by the same mosquito.

Renfield's default adventure mode starts you off right inside the gate of the capital city, facing inwards.
To your left is an NPC that can give you an orientation but you don't have to talk to him at all. (Ed didn't want to talk you anyway)
You can head straight into the town and just start flirting with the girls and looking for a day job.
Or you can just pivot right on your heel, head outside into the field to roam around.
I want to make a true roleplayer's roleplaying game that divorces itself from the creeping Ubisoftification of the genre.

3/4 - Reorganizing backups
3/6 - More inventory data entry
3/8 - Had to replace a faulty drive and load everything from a backup. No data was lost.

 

[KleptoLizard]

You must be registered to see the links

Many people who have backed the project have yet to claim their rewards.
I don't plan to get into the habit of doing commercials here but I feel
that perhaps I should explain what the Patron rewards are more clearly.
First thing: you are entitled to rewards if you've _ever_ donated.
If you were a $1 backer and canceled years ago, you still get your rewards.

Every backer gets a plot of land out of 256 available on the overworld map.
You can then make all sorts of changes to that land depending on your donation.
If anyone watched the Twitch stream when we were playing various party-based RPGs,
it's the same concept; the donor makes choices which personalize their domain.

In this way not only do I hope to give backers a unique reward for their support,
but in the process we make a vast continent seem like it's truly made of many unique cultures/biomes.
I've put together a quick mock-up image to illustrate the possibilities.
Each tile represents an instanced outdoor zone the approximate size of the walkable area in Skyrim.

Now obviously to make 256 side-by-side complete overhauls would be a tremendous undertaking.
But what we can do is just add thematic element over time per the donor's requests.
Imagine starting off in zone 3-5 and the Patron is a big fan of Dragon's Dogma.
So they put in an Everfall of their own.

Then you wander down to the southeast into a Code Vein-flavored area.
The cities are all in ruins and there are vampires warring against each other.
Southeast again and now the cities are named after towns in Oregon and there are zombies everywhere.
A little further and you have a place that seems normal at first,
but contains a facility where researchers are experimenting with all sorts of captured monsters.

I used images of popular games in the mock-up just so you can clearly see the general idea.
However donors are free to write all sorts of original settings and setting elements.
In conclusion, make sure if you are a backer that you respond to me on Patreon.
As always let me know if anyone has questions, Patron or not.

3/12 - Diversifying overworld regions
3/14 - Reorganizing data storage
3/16 - Working on content downloading/streaming code. Thinking about a system somewhere between Sven Co-op and Tabletop Simulator.
3/18 - Working on multiplayer modes / lobby system

 

[KleptoLizard]

The core animation scene gets ever closer to completion.
Meanwhile I'm fleshing out various modes of play.
Specifically focusing on non-combat roleplaying.
Certain rpgs make it possible to progress just through smooth talk and cunning.

While strictly speaking non-violent adventure games aren't that few in number,
it's only in a few instances like Age of Decadence where the violent and non-violent
approaches run parallel to one another with both paths being fully fleshed out.
Imagine if Myst or Riven or any old Sierra click-em-up* were actually combat-heavy games
but by employing stealth, persuasion and manipulation of puzzle/trap elements
you beat them much in the same manner as normal.
Conversely, imagine if you could talk your way through every Max Payne game,
hoodwinking all the mobsters and not blowing your cover even to the very end.

Another specter that has always hung over me when considering game design is the civil war diplomacy scene in Skyrim.
Imagine if the war proceeded dynamically even if you weren't present and you affected the outcome via espionage and verbal ploys.
Such a thing is already possible in Romance of the Three Kingdoms games where you can make a far greater difference
to the war's outcome on the debate stage, and hiring the most talented people, compared to the battlefield.

There's absolutely no obligation to go dungeon crawling if you don't feel like it.
There are over 100 professions from peddler to farmer, from beggar to prostitute.
RF will also feature a complex haggling system that still allows batch buying and selling.
Now you can reenact the "ten-shekels-you-must-be-mad" scene to your heart's content.

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Also, I had someone contact me with some specific technical questions about the game.
I'm grateful for the engagement but please ask publicly so everyone can see the answers.
One of their key concerns was possible performance issues due to the high number of blendshapes per model.
We actually tested a wargame prototype in Unity using the exact models used in RF
and were able to have dozens of them on screen simultaneously with no issue.

With 50% LOD models and lower res textures we were able to push that into 100s.
Now of course with all the other objects being rendered in an exploration-focused game,
along with overhead from animations, these numbers are certain to come down at runtime.
But in game development as in life there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Users can configure the fidelity of the models, LOD distances and total on-screen population per their systems.

By all means let me know if there are other issues, design or practical, players have concerns about.

*I invented the term "click-em-up" to describe the genre formerly known as "point-and-click" and you have to pay me every time you use it.
This includes if you read the post aloud.

3/22 - Working on German localization
3/24 - Working on vehicles and large mountable creatures
3/26 - Sorting the new Sonniss files for 2024
3/28 - Our coder has gotten really sick and so I'm taking over for him until he recovers
3/30 - Running time-lapsed simulations of the dynamic economy code

 

[KleptoLizard]

Posting this on the 2nd of April so nobody suspects April Fool's shenanigans.
Yet another irritating delay has come up.
The coder I brought on has gotten really sick so I'll have to take over development again.
It's not all bad news since he's made the UI and asset streaming far more user-friendly and performant than I could have.
I'll finish according to the convention he set and we'll FINALLY have that demo that has seemed only two weeks away for years.

4/4 - My neighbor's house caught fire and I quickly ran out to help extinguish it with an ordinary garden hose.
I held it off for several minutes and wetted the ground and the eaves of my own house.
When the first responders arrived with their proper equipment they told me to leave because I might breathe in dangerous fumes.
Now I know how the Astra Militarum feels when the Astartes roll up.

Anyway my house is untouched along with all the equipment and data.
Gambino sent me all the necessary files and I got a ton of data entry done today.

4/6 - Converting old random result tables into the new format
4/8 - Gambino has largely recovered. Turns out it was Dengue fever.

 

[KleptoLizard]

Gambino has recovered from his illness but is still swamped by a backlog from his day job.
So he's supplied me with a list of tasks related to the demo client that won't get in the way of his rebuilding of the animation rig system.
Anyone who's worked on a coding team knows how easy it is to have too many cooks in the kitchen stepping on each other's toes.
But now our responsibilities have been delineated clearly enough for a merger of our two branches in about a week.

For years now this project has consisted of me working on content creation, then bouncing off some fiddly technical issue,
then more content creation, then another technical snag, then an endless torrent of unforeseen delays and budget problems.
But we're not giving up no matter what. And once this core system is functional the massive backlog of content can flow in.
The H-systems and assets had to be built largely by ourselves however the actual Adventure/RPG systems are based on a collection of plugins dedicated to each aspect of such games.
Therefore the development of the actual GAME-game won't take nearly as long to achieve functionality.

4/12 - Adding skin assets to serialization system
4/14 - Creating new character class to encompass the wearables / serialization data along with the RPG elements
4/16 - Creating magic item loot tables. Refactoring AI combat targeting system. C# practice with predicates.
4/18 - Studying bot creation for Twitch & Discord, app integration with Google Sheets

 

[KleptoLizard]

Gambino says he'll be ready to fully rejoin the project by tomorrow.He has a new improved rig system for the H-scene playback.
I'm kicking myself for not being more productive on the character creator client but when there's
so much to do on a project this size, everything feels like a distraction from everything else.

Pictured is some experiments I've been running with terrain generation and various preset systems.
This one used a grayscale map of Iliac Bay and some levels from DOOM 1 & 2.
Using our quick-gen system you can crank out a customized fantasy world in the time it takes to generate a map for Civilization.
And indeed many of the options are similar: Pick a landmass, pick the cultures, pick various game world conditions, etc.

I'll be transferring my files back to Gambino so he can merge the branches.
We're closer than ever.

- EDIT: I've heard growing rumors about adult project pages being taken down on Patreon.
Rest assured that I backup the donor pledges every month so there is never a danger of losing backer rewards, no matter what happens to the actual page.

4/22 - Coding tests and stat checks for various RPG situations