Greetings and salutations,

Battle Succubi has been on itch.io for one year now, and in development for about 18 months. This is an appropriate moment to take a look back and see how things have progressed.

I started out with some models made using Make Human, a free 3D human modeling application. This application has built in support for different game engine rigs/armatures, such as Unity and Unreal. There are also add-ons for male genitals and breasts.

This went well at first. I made a number of male and female models, imported them into Blender and got to work animating. I didn't have an exact idea for the gameplay, number of animations, or anything. Eventually, I came up with the idea of combining sex play and the rogue-like action of Hades or Cult of the Lamb. By this point, I had 10-20 different sex animations, but I ran into many issues when I imported my models into Unity. There were problems getting the genitals to animate consistently, sometimes there were odd rotation switches that I didn't know how to fix, and there were ugly kinks at wrists, knees, and hips for various positions.

I eventually discovered SmutBase, which is a website that hosts NSFW 3D assets: mostly, these are 3D models and textures to go with famous movie, TV show, game, or anime characters. Want to make an animation of Harry Potter fucking Elsa from Frozen in the ass, while Catwoman gets fucked by a donkey? SmutBase is your place to get those models.

I found models of Geralt and Yennifer from The Witcher, and started again with the animations. Again, I encountered some issues and abandoned the models. Eventually, I found a model of Ethan Winters from Resident Evil and 2B from Nier: Automata, and I eventually made in the neighborhood of 200 animations.

Things were going well on the Unity side as well. After deciding to make a rogue-like and base management game similar to Cult of the Lamb, I had begun setting up a third person controller, learning how to use the new Input System in Unity, and began development on an attribute and ability, and status effect system.

As I progressed further in making the animations, I noticed more and more issues. For one, 2B's eyes never appeared in her head and I couldn't figure out how to fix the issue. They would always remain stuck in the same standing T-pose position. There were also issues with Ethan's mouth key frames. For some reason, his lip bones would randomly lag behind where they should be, leading to these spikes jutting out of his mouth. Further, the export times from Blender and the import times in Unity kept ballooning. The base Blender file with 2B and Ethan is about 1 Gb in size, and exporting one model took about 45 minutes at the end. Importing into Unity 2019 took a similar amount of time.

I went back to SmutBase and found some different models and began animating from the beginning. This time, I made a spreadsheet containing all the animations I planed to make and I began checking them off when they were finished. Currently, I have all the heterosexual animations completed for one male model and one female model, although knowing myself, I will probably expand these in the future. There are lesbian animations and both MMF and FFM coming in the future.

At the same time as working on the sex animations and sex systems in the game, I've been trying to flesh out the combat side of things. 

After doing a game jam recently where I used the Gameplay Ability System in Unreal, I realized that I had been reinventing the wheel for the last 8 months. Oh well! At least I have control over how it works and I don't have to deal with C++.

Let's take a look at updates. There have been 13 updated versions of Battle Succubi since it first appeared on itch.io on December 31, 2022.

Doesn't seem like much, but take a look at the commit history. I started committing in August 2022, and 2022 saw 41 commits. There have been 85 commits in 2023. So although it has been updated approximately once a month, it has been updated internally about 1.7 times a week since August 2022.

You can see the per month commit history below.

Below, you can see the commits per weekday. Of course, there are a lot of commits on the weekend. Wednesday has been one of my days off since April, 2023, so there are also many commits then as well.

There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 lines of code in the project.

Since we are also beginning a new year, let's take a look ahead and see what the future has in store.

I've been working part-time for most of 2023, and Battle Succubi has been a side project during the last year of development. From March of 2024, I'll be starting at a new company and working full time, so there will be less time to devote to Battle Succubi, but it will not be abandoned. I plan on continuing it as a side project for the foreseeable future.

Here are a few things you can look forward to. I've purchased some behavior tree add-ons for Unity, which will let me craft more complicated behaviors for the enemies, especially the bosses. 

Below, you can see some different visual effects I've been working on. These will appear when different status effects are applied to characters, weapons, or the environment for area of effect damage or status effects.

Below you can see a preview of the new models and their animations. There is now jiggle physics affecting the balls, breasts, and hair of the characters. I've abandoned the procedurally generated hair from before, and I'm just applying physical forces to the hair rigs and meshes.

I think that's about it for now. It's hard to believe that a whole year has gone by already. Thank you everyone for your interest in the project, and I hope you enjoy the newest version of Battle Succubi.