Others Seduction Defense Force [DevLog]

Seduction Defense Force!

As an SDF Commander, it is your duty to defend innocent villagers against the unending hordes of vicious monsters. Since the hordes are unending, it's a good thing that all SDF personnel are possessed of a special talent: lust magic! So throw yourself into the front lines, fuck those monsters, and use the collected lust to build your army and repel the invaders!




If any of this sounds fun or awesome or exciting to you, pop in and say something! I (like many creatives) thrive on interaction and the idea that others will like what I create.

Some progress!

The basic enemy template progresses from right to left in a straight line. The basic tower shoots at them, but can't keep up.
So you gotta get in there and fight yourself!!

Too bad the combat is uh..... well, it needs some refinement...


But hey, at least the bones of a system are here. Besides, the combat is a lot less important in a game like this. It's more of a stopgap. Ideally you'll have enough towers to handle everything and spend all your time fucking the monsters for extra lust/mana/whatever.

Next up on the dev list is my personal LEAST FAVORITE task when making any game: the meta structure and user interface. I just don't get much joy out of programming and implementing resource bars/gauges, win/loss mechanics, round structures, and MENUS! Dear god, the menus. Just kill me now...

But it must be done!

Some more progress!

We now have a semblance of a menu! While the gif below probably doesn't LOOK impressive, there's actually a ton of background work that goes into making something as simple as "press tab to open the summoning menu."

The important stuff for this little update is that the game is now a pseudo-state-machine. Certain functions will be suspended (or fail to start completely) if the game is in the wrong phase. The pausing that you're seeing here is moving the game from "fight" to "command" and back again.

The other thing that's important here is that Gamemaker doesn't have ANY built-in user interface stuff, so I have to program it all by hand. My big triumph here is making those buttons highlight (using assets purchased from itch.io because I hate drawing UI even more than I hate programming it). I'm also proud of the cascading structure of my menus and buttons, wherein my menus construct their own buttons according to pre-programmed criteria and all I have to do to get the menu is instantiate its object.

Anyway here's the gif:


As you can see, it needs refinement. The oversized tower sprites will be fixed by me making button-specific tower sprites instead of being lazy and just slapping the existing sprite in there.

More progress!

There's some weirdness deforming the menu buttons a little, but that's only noticeable to me because I can see what it's SUPPOSED to look like in the room editor.

In any case, you can now pause the game, select a tower (there's only one, but there's five buttons for it lmao), and place it on the map! You can't place it beyond the borders of the room, and you can't place it inside another tower's bounding box.
It doesn't consume any resources yet. There aren't any resources at all yet, in fact. But that'll be easy enough to implement, tbh. For now, behold the glorious gif!


Next up is those pesky resources and other such things.

Even more progress!

This one is a big one: the wave and spawn systems. These are probably the most important systems for a tower defense game, and they can be pretty complicated so I'm glad they're out of the way for now.

Basically, I've made a gamestate manager that keeps track of waves and a wave manager that spawns everything in the current wave. It's important to have the enemies spawn in a reasonably natural-looking pattern and pace, as well as have multiple enemy types evenly distributed. Without going into all the annoying math and index management, I'll just say I accomplished this and I have a solid headache.

Behold the gif!


I can't upload longer gifs than this, so you'll just have to trust me that waves 2-7 work just as well. Additionally, I've implemented a per-round HP. If you let 5 monsters through in a single wave, you lose. That's functioning, too.

Next up I've gotta jump back into the User Interface Hellhole to get the wave HP, wave percentage, and wave number all displaying on screen.

Guys I need you to understand the pain and suffering I endured today. I don't know how to communicate it to you properly, but today's progress was purchased with blood, sweat, and tears.

Mostly tears. So many tears.

Today I built the upgrading system for towers and the upgrade tree for the SDF commander. It involved a lot of finagling precise positioning, wracking my brain to visualize data structures, and all those tears I mentioned. The result is the following:

• A structure that holds 9 upgrades per tower and 9 upgrades for the Commander
• Information boxes that automatically resize themselves to hold their contents, within limitations you specify
• Hovering over an upgrade button changes the text in the info box so you know what it is
• That doesn't sound like much
• But please understand that in Gamemaker I had to build all of that functionality FROM SCRATCH
• My friend who uses Godot says that program has a bunch of built-in GUI stuff
• Gamemaker doesn't yet

Anyway, behold the gif!

The little number beneath her feet is her ATK, so you can see that it's improving with the upgrades haha

So tomorrow is probably going to focus on the towers. I've decided that they'll be Wind, Ice, Fire, and Earth, and I know what each one will do, roughly speaking. I'll at least want to get the "Basic Tower" renamed to wind, and maybe do some more crappy programmer art for it.

Speaking of programmer art, I'll have something pretty cool to show you guys in a few days that ISN'T programmer art. Look forward to it. I'm very excited.

More progress!

Unfortunately, the progress isn't nearly as visible as normal. Most of it was backend work, setting things up for when I go into content mode and just add iterations of things. I had to rip code out of the basic tower and modularize it so I can make the different elements of tower, for instance. I also had to clean up the code for projectiles (adding support for projectile angles as well), create a VFX manager object, start structuring out the data saving system, and decide on the SDF Commander's stats.

For the record, here are her stats with notes on what they do/will do:

Why yes, I *AM* gonna make you upgrade yourself to take that massive minotaur!

As for the visible part that I can turn into a gif... Since I did all that work to allow me to make differentiated towers, here's the Wind Tower, shooting Wind Bullets.

Behold, the gif!


Finally, here's a sneak peek at the cool thing I mentioned the other day:


Next up? I think I'll program the Ice, Fire, and Earth Towers, complete with crappy programmer art (and some from itch.io asset packs). We're rapidly approaching the point where the systems are complete and I need art to bring the project together.

I'm sure you're surprised to hear that I've made...........

more progress.

Today a couple of things happened. One, I got some WIP sprites from the ARTIST I'm COMMISSIONING!!!! That's right, babey, we've got actual custom art coming this project's way. As you can obviously see in the gif, I'm just using placeholder sketches that the artist so kindly provided. Once she's got all her colors and pixels, the Commander is gonna be gorgeous.
Now the attack animation isn't the world's stupidest-looking sword rotating awkwardly!

Other than getting those WIP sprites and making the necessary change to integrate them, I also made a "stunned" status for enemies so I can implement mechanics to stop them temporarily, made AoE projectiles, and combined the two into Ice Towers! As you can see, they deal their damage in an area around impact, temporarily freezing/stunning the enemies it damages.

So yeah, behold the gif!


Next up are the fire and earth towers! I'm probably also going to build a more elegant "status" system that'll give every enemy a list of statuses that they process each frame. It'd be cool to implement a "burning" status, for instance!

Progress is pretty eclectic today. For one thing, I've completed the BASIC functionality for both Fire and Earth Towers (only earth pictured below, sorry I forgor). I've also gotten upgrade trees completed in their most basic form for the Wind and Ice towers. Then, I've been working on replacing the ugly system messages with nicer transitions.

Behold, the gifs!




Still haven't gotten around to statuses yet, but that's okay because that's not part of the "MVP" scope.
Unfortunately for me, I'm gonna have to descend the bloody steps to GUI Hell again. Gotta make a main menu and get some other common video game scaffolding around this game.

But the fact that I'm about to work on a main menu means one very important thing: there are no more game systems to build for the MVP version. It's all content and polish from here: more enemies, more art, more refinement for existing systems. I think I'll be about ready to start distributing playtest copies once the following requirements are met:

• Main Menu is functional
• The first two enemies are animated (not the sex)
• The Commander's non-sex animations are complete
• The towers have better sprites, animation optional

Anyway, that's all for this post. The next few posts might be less exciting because there won't be as much "new" stuff to see. Thanks for reading this far, and hope to see you in the next one!

Some progress, even if it isn't super exciting. I suspect that the majority of gamedev is actually not exciting for the average player, and this update is some of that. But hey, you're reading this, so you can't be the average player, can you?

Basically we're getting that "video game scaffolding" I mentioned the other day. Some basic transition sequences, the world's most basic menu. Oh, and we've got some placeholder music in there from a pack I got on HumbleBundle a couple years back. You obviously can't hear it, but the main menu is capable of changing the volume, so that's nice.

Behold the gif.


So yeah, not exactly titillating, is it?

Ah well. Can't be a game dev if I only program the fun parts haha...

Some small progress!

Today I finally bit the bullet and made placeholder sprites for the remaining "base game" monsters. I need to be able to program out an entire 7 days of defense, so I needed placeholders for all the monsters to be introduced during those 7 days.

Behold the gif!

I *promise* the art that releases with the game will be sexier, lol. Can you guess what the monsters are based on my crappy programmer art?

Other than that (which took me a while because I'm bad at art), I also programmed in "tags" so that I can make towers and monsters behave differently depending on the tags of whoever's interacting. For instance, Earth Towers will not target creatures tagged as "flying," and Slimes will take extra damage from damage tagged as "Ice."

Next thing I'm working on is getting "days" implemented. That means a WHOLE LOT of data entry, as the contents of each wave have to be input manually. 7 days x 7 waves = 49 waves. Day 1 looks like this:
Days 2-7 will each add an additional monster to those lines, so it's gonna get tedious to program. Pray for me.

More progress! AND AND AND it's my favorite progress so far, because guess what! SDF Commander Freya is fully animated! (idle, run, summon, attack, no NSFW yet)
BEHOLD!!!!


She's gorgeous! She's the work of the excellent CatSkull (@CatSkull on VGen). I'll be working with him for all of the characters and lewd pixel art for this project.

Another thing I've done is I've implemented the "days" system. In the next gif you'll see that the "Ready!" wipe includes a notification of which day it is. At the moment I haven't suffered through all the data entry of getting waves done for each and every day, so you can only play through Day 2 atm. BUT! All I have to do is set up the waves and then set "max_days" to 7 and boom, all 7 days.

Behold the gif!


You may also have noticed the third thing: the flying enemies are immune to ice towers! I'm going to be changing Ice and Fire projectiles to be more like artillery shots than bullets (travel in an arc, hit the ground and explode) so that this makes more sense. But its important for the various monsters to respond differently to different tower types so that the game has SOME strategy to it. I know this is a hentai game, but I want there to be some GAME in the hentai game, y'know?

Anyway, super looking forward to sharing more progress with you. Once I get all these gat-dayum waves plotted out, I think I'll work on a gallery mode so that as you seduce the monsters you unlock their scene permanently.

Progress!

So, I kinda cheated. I mostly just...... copypasted my way through the wave data. So it it balanced? Nope! Is it well-crafted? Also nope! Is it in any way a challenge? Now way! Is it pleasant to play at the moment? Absolutely not!

But *technically* you can play all through all seven days, and I'm going to count that as a victory.

Behold, the gif!


You may notice that among the many balance issues is a pretty big one: ice towers are OP as hell. Those manticores are supposed to be the second-most-dangerous enemy, and they're just permanently locked back there at the entrance. Not a single thing they can do about it.

But really I can't do much about balance until playtesting happens. And I don't really want to do playtesting until I've got more than bad programmer placeholder art for at least a couple monsters.

Anyway, I'm also currently working on a cutscene system so that we can get some plot going on before each day of defending. That's still in the early stages, though, and is even MORE art-dependent than everything else I'm doing.

lol. lmao, even.

Ayo, some more progress.

I've made it so that there is a cutscene before/between each day of defense. Right now there's just a dumb meme floating there, but in the future these will be proper cutscenes that explain who you are, where you are, what's going on, how to play, etc etc etc.

Behold the gif! video because gifs actually have terrible compression!

I'm gonna be really annoyed if that video doesn't embed properly. Hope it does~!

Anyway, I am super running out of things to do without more art. This thread might slow down quite a bit in the coming days.

EDIT: wtf is that embedding situation??? If you're gonna make me use google drive, at least make google drive work... *grumble grumble*

Got some more progress, and since the gif isn't long it'll be an actual gif this time. Won't have to deal with Google's ass video sharing....

Anyway, I built the gallery. It doesn't have locked vs. unlocked yet, and I've only put two monsters in there. But hey, it's a gallery with the normal options you'd expect for a gallery. It's gonna be ridiculously easy to add the rest of the monsters to it. Which I won't do until I have their art.

Behold the gif!


Now is *really* where the devlog slows down. I'm having CatSkull (the animation artist) and some other friends do testing. Did you know that it's really freaking hard to find testers thanks to that garbage "test my game" scam/hack? Hate those guys for real.

As testing reveals things for me to work on, I'll work on them. But pretty much from now on the game's progress is an art thingy. On that note! Catskull is making progress on the Kobold!

Look at him go! I have sketches for the sexy times, but I won't spoil those. You guys can see them when they're done.

Small update:
I've made programmer art for the background and for the towers. It's funny, but the game actually looks so much better now. Turns out even if you suck at art, SOME art is better than NO art.

Behold, the jpeg!


Guess which stuff was made by a professional artist lol

Ladies and gentlemen, today is a wonderful day. Today is the day I get to show you the first animation for Seduction Defense Force!

Behold!


Catskull has delivered this, the first of 8 sexy animations for the base SDF experience. Doesn't it look great???

I had to refactor the animation engine so that the commander was running the show instead of the monster. That's what allowed me to use Catskull's great idea of having her kick the kobold off her at the end and have him go flying backward.

And the best part is that Catskull is working on the Slime and Harpy even as we speak. This game is well and truly going somewhere, folks!

Now, as for some actual programming-type progress, I've spent most of today banging my head against the wall trying to make arcing projectiles. I tried to use a regular parabolic formula in a thousand variations, but it REFUSED to work. Then I found a way to get what I want with sine. By equating the overall distance traveled by the projectile to pi, I was able to use a sine wave to get an arcing projectile. It's not perfect, but at this point I don't care. It's working.

Behold, the gif!


The arcing projectile is to help a little bit with verisimilitude. It's easier to believe that a turret can't hit flying creatures when said turret fires projectiles that explode on the ground, right? RIGHT?? I hope so, because this cost me blood, sweat, and tears.

A small update:

I added a collision layer so that you can't just... wander off the screen forever. And you can't walk into the back wall. Etc etc.
I also identified and fixed a bug where a monster counted as defeated during sex, so the round would finish before he did!

No gif to behold, as the changes this time around are pretty run-of-the-mill.

Next thing on the list, I think, is to rework the UI. Right now the UI is made from a pixel-art pack I had laying around. Problem is, it's meant for one of those Blasphemous-lookin' Souls-like platformers. It's lower resolution than I'd like. So I've gotta get my hands on some assets a bit closer to HD. But once I've got that, I'll have something to show off again!

Oh, and Catskull is hard at work on the Slime and Harpy animations. Look forward to those!

Update!

I've finished the main UI rework. I hated every second of it, but I think it looks way better now.

Also, here's a little update on the slime!


Next thing I'm working on (now that the monster of a UI rework is out of the way) is a more interesting failstate than "ur HP hit zero lol."

What I'm gonna do instead is lean into the fiction of the game a little. You're the Commander of the Seduction Defense Force, a mercenary outfit that villages (or whomever, but a village for now) hire to defend against monster onslaughts. It's not just you in the SDF, otherwise it wouldn't be a Force, it's just be you!

So you've got some soldiers handling things in the village while you fight on the front lines with your sex and elemental magic. When monsters get past you, it's time for your soldiers to earn their pay! Monsters that pass you will cause "chaos" until they are killed. If the "chaos" gets too high, it means that you have to abandon the front line and help clear them out yourself. Since the frontline won't just wait for you, this means the villagers have to flee/retreat whatever, and thus it's a failstate.

Simply put, each monster will have a "chaos per second" value. Your soldiers will have a "monsters killed per second" value. The monster will cause chaos until killed, raising your gauge. Once it's killed, your soldiers will "restore order," slowly reducing the gauge. If the gauge fills up, you lose!

I'm exited to implement this because it'll give me a LOT more levers to pull with regards to the game being fun and also challenging. I'm imagining recruiting new mercenaries, upgrading their equipment, getting training manuals to increase efficiency...

Does that sound fun to you? It sounds fun to me!