November Devlog - Catgirl Creation & Vtuber? (Patreon)

Hello and welcome back to another Catgirl Care devlog! This has been another month with a large number of commissions but I've been sneaking in time to focus on game development along the way.

I've been waiting on IKModifier3D (coming in Godot 4.6!) before working more on character animation so most of what I've been working on this month has been systems for character creation which are fairly complicated. They're also intentionally fairly easy to use for players so they're not very flashy at the moment. That said, what I've developed is very powerful and I'm excited to show it off.

Let's dive in!

Catgirl Creator

One of my goals for Catgirl Care is for it to be very easy to mod. As part of that, I feel that creating a very modular character customization suite is important. One of the ways that I've been working towards this is through the use of custom Resource scripts.

These resources instruct the catgirl's armature on what scenes to spawn (typically 3D models like her body, hair, outfit) and the customization of the spawned scenes. Customization is done through NodePaths which allow for nearly any property to be selected and adjusted in the character creator. This includes things like colors as wells as slider values (height, breasts, etc.) and the potential for more complex customization like texture swapping or decals.

So far I've built tools allowing for colors, sliders, and some custom gradient shaders.

Most of the colors you can customize use a color palette swapping shader that I wrote using Godot's gradients so I felt it would also be fun to support proper custom gradients. It was a bit more difficult to add than I expected but you can now have full control over the gradients on any surface that supports them (though Texture2DArray!).

When creating a customizable item for a catgirl, it may be necessary to share colors from other scenes or other items within the same scene. To support this, I've added "property rules" which allow the character creator to send updates from one property to another. This link can also be broken to allow for things like heterochromia (which is more common in cats) or hidden properties (for example: the face and body use different materials so the skin color is secretly linked).

While I haven't taken the time to make the character creator look pretty, the functionality is coming along great. I plan to create a custom color picker and add proper keyboard/controller support at some point as well as some proper UI theming to make everything look nice. I'm also planning to start building out support for reset values and saving/loading soon.

VTuber?

While this Patreon isn't primarily for my twitch stream (which I do mostly for fun), I do feel like it's worth sharing the WIP for the VTuber assistant I've been working on recently. She's an android with a cute lab coat and twintails.

Unfortunately, I haven't finalized her name yet. I've been tempted to go with "Sweet Tea" since I'm "Sour Lemonade" but she looks more like a "Green Tea" at the moment which feels like an odd name. Maybe her name is "Sweet Tea" and I can give her different designs based on other types of tea (with the default being green)? I'm not sure yet.

The plan is to build a system like Neuro-sama where she can chat with me and viewers while I play games n such. That said, I'm fairly against using any form of copyright infringing generative AI in my work so I'm trying to find a usable LLM and cute-sounding TTS voice where both are built on public domain or appropriately licensed data. It's harder to find this stuff than you'd expect but it does exist. If anyone knows more about that the world of machine learning and wants to help me out (especially if you're good at fine-tuning models), reach out!

If I don't end up giving her a personality (due to a lack of ethical AI resources most likely), I still plan to make the VTuber as a mascot for the stream. I'll likely be a lemon battery on her head which would be fun. Also, she'll be OK for the usual art including lewds, commission ideas, polls, etc.

Also, it's worth stressing: I don't use generative AI anywhere in my art or games. The entire VTuber idea revolves around ethically trained models used for silly entertainment and would be limited to that - separate from my art, soundtracks, code, etc.

What's Next?

My current focus is on Catgirl Care. I want to get the demo done but I'm aware that it may be a little before I have anything playable ready due to needing to wait on the next Godot update and the level of polish I'm after.

The VTuber is just a "for fun" idea so I'm not going to make any promises now. She's lower priority and may see some redesigns but I'm sure I'll eventually add her to my regular roster of characters.

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Anyhow, thanks as always for your support, everyone! I'm expecting this next month will be a busy one and having your support should help keep me focused. I'm still generally jazzed about working on Catgirl Care after all this time, so I'm hoping I'll have a lot to show off in next month's devlog.