Dev Update #1 - Emotion Blend Shapes

Happy March!! 

We've got so many updates for you that we've broken them into a numbered series to make it easy to follow along and not miss anything!

Let's talk about emotions!

For a while, we've been wanting to bring expressions to our models so that their interactions with you feel much more intimate and personal.  We've now built an emotion system for the game with custom blendshapes and a set of expressions tailored to each Mistress. 

To get to this point, we had to ask Just Jeff, our resident artist, to go back into the models and add in the bones to create custom blendshapes. Then, we had to hand manipulate each of the individual blendshapes (e.g., upper_lid_up or lower_lip_down) to get just the right expression for each Mistress. I mean, Yuki's expressive personality wasn't going to use emotional expressions that would work for the much-toned-down Headmistress. 

The devil really is in the is in the details!

When we were setting these, we used a reference sheet for what are often referred to as basic human emotions (this set contains 6, but some contain 8). Because our Mistresses are often aroused and amused, we added those two emotions, as well.

We knew our first attempt had fallen pretty far short when we trialed the new emotions in parts of the game and found ourselves wincing at how they turned out. Ugggh!

Mistress Yuki was of particular concern because of the number of comments about her having an uncanny valley effect on people. Perhaps that is because of her exceptionally saucer like doll eyes!! You can see what we think are her final emotions in the gif above. 

So, we kept fiddling and trying until we found what we think is just the right level of expressiveness for each Mistress. We won't really know until we finish adding them to every scene and go back and play through that content. 

To get this working in the game...

We're going to need to go back through all of the Ink scripts that run the game and add in /command lines that tell the game when to trigger the emotion.

Deviant made it possible to do so in two different ways, which makes my life MUCH easier as the writer.

The first is to simply insert the emotion where we want it with /emotion <emotion>.

The second is to combine emotions into the /performance command, which is what triggers the animations: /perform <action> <emotion>.

And my clever little devil has even added in the ability to set the emotin at different percentages to allow for more subtle expressions to be displayed: /perform <action> <emotion> <percent value>.

I think he deserves a special treat for that, don't you? 😘

Mine truly,