Giddyup explorers! Another issue of our developer diary series is ready for ya butts.

Humies and their humie ways.

So we have done the possible, we have built, textured, and rigged the first batch of human characters for Sapphire Safari.

From left to right… 

•  Professor Frida: Main quest giver and photo judge. Voiced by the lovely KumBomb.
• Jamie: The female playable protag.
• Oscar: The male playable protag.
• Bunny: For scale.

Oscar is playable in-game right now with our internal builds, with Jamie coming soon. In terms of clothing, we are doing it as layers so during the intimacy scenes the player can choose what to remove and the system can remove items that get in the way. It is not likely for v008 that we will get the torn clothing options in, but expect that each character will have a “post-ravaging” look as well with the default appearance soon.

Animal bonding fitting just right!

The internal build is progressing really smoothly, with the focus mostly on making penetration partners working with the IK Doll system. It looks great right now, the next steps include making animations work with the bodies and then face shapes.

Lot’s more to build on from this point but getting everything lined up and working out of the box is the first step!

Expedition retirement screen

An extremely important UX issue we have for Sapphire Safari is what happens when the player finishes exploring whatever island they are currently on. How all the systems need to come together to both reinforce game mechanics and respect the player’s time and independence. No one likes extreme hand-holding, that's for damn sure. So here is our first proposed user flow for that experience. Likely to change, or not, who knows.

1. player clicks retire in the menu, with a confirmation prompt
2. the screen fades, and opens up on Professor Frida, Frida displays run statistics (expedition length [game time], number of photos taken, number of interactions, distance traveled, number of species identified)
3. the monpedia/quest submission page, highlights entries that can be submitted, if an entry exists already, compare the new photo and the old
4. after approving everything, the player is shown the familiarity bars for affected species growing and any unlocks for that growth
5. Frida judges the 10 highest-scored photos and displays them in a gallery, players can favorite and shares photos on steam API or social media, following this another screen similar to page 2 shows the PP being added to the research level, leveling up unlocks new island locations

As I mentioned earlier, we will likely change the layout and maybe even the flow depending on feedback and game feel. Not sure when this will be ready for public consumption but the work on the flow has already started.

Another staff member added!

The last point I want to bring up is the addition of a third programmer to the development staff of Sapphire Safari. His role is mostly as a supporter to the main staff since it is a part-time position, his first task is coming up with a scoring system for the photographs that do not reward players who take dog-shit photos. We all know what I mean by that, the absolute minimum quality. We want to reward good composition and artistic focus. This work will span over a couple of builds most likely.

And that's all! Thanks for reading!

Much love,
Kinky