March Devlog - Catgirl Petting (Patreon)

Hello there and welcome to the March devlog!

March has been a good month for me, with a healthy balance of art and gamedev. On the art side, the Mococo pic I drew got more attention than I expected which was a pleasant boost. I've also finished setting up Sweet Tea's base systems, allowing her to use her synonym system and some basic animations. I'm working on a YouTube video to showcase Sweet Tea's development, so I'll leave that out of this devlog for now.

As for gamedev, a lot of the systems I built for Catgirl Care are starting to come together in a fun playable state. I've felt several times this month that everything I originally envisioned for the project all the way back when I canceled the original visual novel's development is not only finally possible but coming to life.

Let's dive into what I worked on this month!

If you haven't yet, read up on the changes to the commission bank from last month!

Loading Improvements

One of the things I'm always working on is optimizations. I'll think up a simple way to improve the loading or memory management of something and if it's not too much work, I'll take some time to add it in.

In this case, I've improved the loading for custom catgirl appearances, especially on the character creation screen. Most of the time, catgirl appearances will load during loading screens but refreshing the catgirl's appearance in loading screens causes the parameters to reload which used to cause a significant hitch. Now the parameters load in over multiple frames which is much smoother.

The additional improvements to catgirl appearance loading should also improve loading catgirls everywhere else, though there's still more room to smooth out loading.

First Person Added with Catgirl Interactions

I talked a bit last time about adding navigation to the catgirls. I've since improved that system and the catgirls are pretty good at getting where they need to go (with multiple stuck-prevention systems). That said, the static overhead camera was difficult to work with.

I've always planned for Catgirl Care to be in first person even as a visual novel, so I've started to build the first-person player controller. Right now it's very basic but just being able to walk around with a catgirl has already made things much more immersive.

This was also a good time to add some interaction with the catgirl. When you press the interaction key on a catgirl, you now enter an interaction state where the catgirl stops and you can choose what you want to do using the radial menu I made. Currently you can only chat and pet catgirls but the system is built as a state machine so just about anything could be added.

When chatting with a catgirl, a dialogue system pops up. Some of you may remember this as the system from Rockin' Resort and you'd be right! I took some time to upgrade my implementation of Inkle's Ink and added into Catgirl Care. Initially, I was planning to add a unique dialogues system but the visual novel system I built is more than capable enough to handle talking with catgirls.

It's worth mentioning the main upgrade to my dialogue implementation: external functions. I didn't know about Ink's external function system originally so I created my own approach using the tag system. While that works and I'll still use that approach for a couple features like option hints, I always felt like I was guessing how to write my own function calls.

The new system uses real functions with named variables the way that I'm used to and it's much cleaner. I even took the time to port Rockin' Resort's scripts over to the new system!

The last thing I'd like to mention from the first person interactions is petting. Right now, it's a very simple implementation but it works fairly nicely already. Some visual feedback will need to be added along with the catgirl's expression (I added expressions! They work like they do in Rockin' Resort!) but it's nice to be able to pet a catgirl. This is a very important feature.

What's Next?

I want to start proper work on the catgirl state machine soon and set up catgirls so that they can interact with their environment. If I can add in that, then I'll probably start working on the demo environment.

I also have some plans for YouTube content coming soon but that's fairly separate from my art and gamedev currently. If everything works out there, expect more info it in a future devlog!

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Thanks for supporting my projects, by the way! Your support has been huge in giving me time to build up the skills needed for a project as big as Catgirl Care while also keeping me drawing regularly. I'm hoping to be able to show you all a lot more in this upcoming month! Thanks again!