Sapphire Safari (Early Access)
Mystery Island v016
Hello explorers! As the development team breathes a sigh of relief at the final build of v016 has been completed the task now turns to me to write this - what will likely be a massive - release post.
So three and a half months of development time, what exactly did we accomplish? The game you all knew as Sapphire Safari has drastically changed. Gone are the small islands, the core loop map building, and the tiny user flow. In its place is a fully-fledged open-world photography game!
The Island
Floating in a currently unannounced area of remote ocean is Sapphire Island, home to a whopping 6 surface-level biomes that the player can (in the entire completed version of the game that is) explore at their leisure. Our focus from now, until our Early Access launch on Steam is the first area—the Plains. Rolling green hills, broken up with a spattering of rocky cairns, home to 9 total species of Monster Girl. The Plains are roughly 1km x .5km in size, offering a decent variety of landscapes and backdrops for photo opportunities.
Some notable areas within the plains are:
The flower fields - primarily this will be a spawn location for Monster Girl known as the Bee (released in a future patch). Flowers dominate this area, offering a very colorful backdrop for photos and the like.
The marshlands - another primary area for a water-based predator known as the Crocodile (released in a future patch). The marsh offers a unique place for plains creatures of all sizes to play in the water and bathe.
The wading pools - tucked away in a corner of the Plains biome is the wading pools, a cool and relaxing place to offer a chance of relaxation for the locals.
With a lot more to discover, the basics for the Plains are all in. Future patches will see content growing out of what we’ve already built, and those looking closely at the environment will be able to spot some “exciting” developments for the game.
The Locals
As mentioned above the first biome will be home to a total of 9 species of Monster Girl, v016 however will only feature 6 with three more coming in future updates.
Fox (medium classification)
A generally sly predator found within the plains biome, they are most active during the night where they use the night as a cover to find their targets.
Snake (medium classification)
A predator known for devouring their Prey found within the plains biome. They are most active during the day when the sun's rays warm their blood making them more active.
Deer (medium classification)
A species found plentiful in the plains biome of Sapphire Island, normally roaming around other deer, they are easy to startle but tend to be less weary of repeated human contact.
Sheep (medium classification)
A unique species, which can be found sporting a large variety of fur designs and colors. They have a herd mentality, sticking close to other sheep to protect themselves from predators.
Bat (small classification)
Found primarily at night feasting on fruits. The bat can be found all over the island, while winged, they cannot sustain flight.
Rabbit (small classification) A creature of boundless energy, curiosity, and lust. The rabbit can be seen in many varieties across the island.
The Systems
Photo Submission
This is our biggest change from the previous system, now you will need to submit your photos for judging as you fill-up the photo inventory. Just hit “X” at any time you’re within range of a Radio Beacon and the submission process will begin.
Each photo that qualifies for the Species Encyclopedia, Bounties, Main/Side Quests, or Events will be shown with the option to submit that photo once for whatever category it fits into. In some cases you’ll need to decide which result better suits your needs. This system will be expanded upon in the next coming patches with the Encyclopedia (formally known as Monpedia) upgrades.
Bounties For this patch, the AI is quite limited and won’t offer many opportunities for cataloging their behaviors. So for this patch, we have turned off Monpedia and focused our energy on turning on V1 of the bounty system.
Found within one of the tents in the Campsite is the bounty computer which will offer the player a chance to find and take randomly generated photo quests. These can be submitted via the photo submission tool and the rewards claimed back at the same terminal.
Tutorials
A massively requested feature, we have taken the time to enable our tutorial system in Sapphire Safari. Hitting particular zones or doing things in the game will sometimes pop up tutorials. These can always be reread in the Escape Pause Menu.
Radio Beacons
Radio towers are our new gameplay system. The goal here is to extend a network to allow you to upload photos further and further away from your base Campsite. In future versions unmasking new areas of the map will also unveil activities and unexplored sites of interest you’ll be able to visit.
Sex and Observers
Currently, the only way to activate the sex system in Sapphire Safari is to throw the lust bomb into monster girls on the island. To do this, hit “Q” to equip the lust bomb (it looks like a pink ball) and use Mouse 1 to enter aiming mode.
Releasing the button will throw the bomb and instantly activate the sex mode on affected monster girls. Here the new system will be shown, It will take pairings of Futa x Female, Futa x Futa, and Female x Female along with allowing other monster girls to observe the sex happening in front of them. Participants can join and leave as they like, and observers once they are stimulated enough will throw themselves into the orgy happening before them.
The animation loops we are using currently are only a second or two long, and we have more Futa-enabled animations than Female ones, so please keep that in mind. For the best results, you will need to enable a good amount of Futa spawns in your game.
Day/Night Cycle
Sapphire Safari now has a fully functional day and night cycle on the island. The entire process takes 1 real-life hour to go from Dawn to Dusk, however, within the Campsite you will have a tool to help skip to your desired time of day.
Right now, the time has no effect on monster spawns or the events around the island. That will change in future patches.
Early Narrative Tools
There is now a brand new introduction and character selection cutscene, this intro shows the player being dropped off on the island and shows off the new hologram communication device that will feature in Sapphire Safar along with just a smidge of context for the reasons you’re here right now.
Naturally, more narrative is coming, in fact, the entire script for the first biome is 95% done!
The Fixes
There are so many changes and additions to v016 that it would be pointless to list them all, but for those who don’t wanna read the small novel above here is the TLDR.
Additions:
- New island map: Content locked to plains biome.
- Fox monster girl added
- Sheep monster girl added
- Snake monster girl added
- Tutorial system added
- Holowatch system added
- Bounty system added
- 80+ general actions added to the plains biome.
- Day/Night cycle added
- Fog of War added
- Map system added
- GPS system added
- Radio beacon towers added
- Climbing system added
- Futa physics and growth system added
- Stealth system added
- Sound and noise systems added
- 15+ monster girl reactions added
- Hip-bound camera physics system added
- Fast travel system added
- Save system and respawn system enabled
Changes:
- Rebindings menu bugs fixed
- Throwing animations and camera control fixed
- Player model blurry fov fixed
- Camera ads stutter and shift fixed
- Photo scoring adjusted
- Photo submission v2 added
- Doll system v5 added
- Re-added player hat to 3rd person camera
- Social buttons reconfigured
- ADS screen adjusted
- Research level and familiarity popups added
- Camera autofocus adjusted to fix constant blurriness
- Focus finder attached to monster girl head correctly
Known Issues
A massive patch like v016 won't be without its own issues, Here is a list of currently known bugs that will likely affect some players.
- Player characters have bone alignment issues.
- Monster girls will not react to the player, due to their sight tech being turned off for stability.
- Monster girls will sometimes unload themselves from the world, they will basically pop out of existence.
- The camera focus during sex scenes is hard to control.
Both issues will be fixed in the next few patches.
Conclusion
Man, what a massive patch this ended up being. Going forward we won’t be doing something so ‘intense’ anymore. The strain it put on us, and the wait time all our supporters had to endure was not something we wanted to take on. Since we are getting closer to our eventual Steam Early Access launch the next few patches will throw away the concept of “one a month” Instead we will be launching patches the moment new content is ready. So a lot of them will be small upgrades to things, and some might be the inclusion of one new system.
The results will bring more time to get feedback on the new stuff faster, and you all will get the content on a higher frequency.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy v016. A lot of sleepless nights went into this one. Please be sure to send us your feedback! We are eager to know what everyone thinks!
Cheers, Kinky
Comments
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How does the "growth system" operate? I havent seen any info about it either on here or in game, aside from being listed
Do you mean the familiarity mechanic? Basically as you fill in the monpedia for a species you'll be able to get closer and interact with them. But first we have to build the monpedia out which is what we are working on atm.
I'm referring to
Listed under additions. Is it like character/model growth, familiarity like you'd mentioned, or something else?
Pretty sure I talked about it in the post. But dong size are randomized on spawn and they grow erect when they get into sex. The physics effects the flaccid penis.
What about Male x Female?
There is a male player character with a few other male npcs no male furries though.
Hes not in the changes though. "Here the new system will be shown, It will take pairings of Futa x Female, Futa x Futa, and Female x Female along with allowing other monster girls to observe the sex happening in front of them."
Why dont you mention him at all. Male protag are more popular you know. Dont know why you would leave him out
Because the player and monster interactions are not in this patch.
So hes getting less content then?
Huh? Not really, he can take any slots like anyone else. If you want to play the male character and get topped by a sheep with a fat penis you can.
After playing around in this new build I have some thoughts I'd like to share. Firstly is just a big personal gripe of mine; I think the game really was more unique with the first person camera. The transition from third person to the camera zoom is really janky. I guess the move to the larger open world and the semi-platforming sections in the new build probably wouldn't have worked super well with first person, but it's just my preference.
For the new content, the new map seems cool. There's a radio tower that's out of bounds. Is that intentional? I spent a good five minutes running around the map boundary, trying to get to it.
The camera feels worse than it ever has before; photos are almost always out of focus, and if they are focused, then it won't recognize subjects in frame. And even if it does, it's almost impossible to get anything other than an F anyway. Kind of related, but there are bounties in the system for types of girls who aren't in the game. I got one for a photo of a Monkii.
The animations are pretty janky and basically none of the models actually sync up. The lust bomb seems to have a 50/50 chance to actually affect girls it hits or phase through the world. The rocks don't do anything at all. Finally, the girls seem to have absolutely no AI right now.
Despite this all, I'm looking forward to new updates. This build seems a little bare bones, but the framework will hopefully lead to some pretty cool stuff. To end with some positivity, I'm actually really interested in that desert area with the giant footprints and claw marks. Hoping for giant dinosaur girls.
Hey, thanks for the feedback let me address some of the points you brought up.
The third-person camera for us adds a lot more possible content and roleplaying to the game, stuff like costumes, and seeing the character you chose. However we might bring it back as a variable option in the future, but building it would mean we have finished all other mechanics and systems.
Yeah, the out-of-bounds radio tower was intentional, perhaps I can remove the icon for the next patch to remove confusion, we are just not sure what we want to do with that space on the island so we are leaving it unaddressed for now. It is part of the plains, so it will definitely be designed before our early access launch.
The camera will be re-addressed in a future patch, the next one which is the monpedia overhaul will fix the issues you're having with monster girls not being recognized by the photos. It is a matter of "tagging" the girls and tagging their reactions/behaviors. Which is all the monpedia is about. Scoring will come with post monpedia overhaul though, we have a system in mind that will make a lot more game sense than it does currently. As for the monkii on the bounty, that is something we missed, we checked for them before launch but it seems we missed some.
So currently the lust bomb does not work if the girl is slightly aware of you aka actively searching, I am not happy with the behavior atm so it will be addressed. Same with rocks, it just needs to have a reaction to the item hitting it during animations. Something we will polish as we develop. The animations during sex will also be getting a touch-up, we mostly added in these ones to get the system operational, we didn't have the time we wanted to polish, and that would take extra weeks we didn't want to delay. They actually do have AI but we had to remove their eyesight for the launch at the last minute. It was causing massive stuttering due to them constantly searching for things like the player and interaction points. This will likely be the very first micro patch for the game, we know how we wanna fix it, it just needs to be built. Basically, the eyesight is a really old unreal tool we are using that is not designed to handle the number of roaming ai we have. Just gotta build around it tbh.
I am glad you can see past all the issues, this patch is a massive overhaul of the game foundation, and it is something we can quickly elevate ontop of. GIve us another 4-5 months and it will be a fantastic experience.
I think you should add to the notes that in exchange for adding the fox, sheep and snake monster girls, you removed the tigress, monkey and skully monster girls.
They will still be in the game, just not in the plains area. But yeah you make a valid point. I will address it in the next patch we do.
eeee bro e visto que al jungar muchas moster girl se empiesa a trabar el juego empiesan cuando se juntan como 5
Is it time to play again?
Do I get to be a futa now??
No futa player just yet.
Sadge.
But I am patient, I will pull through!
that must be like a lot of effort in this update, keep up the great work!!
doesnt seem like i can submit photos after doing it the first time
even after manually deleting the photos im not allowed to take any more
maybe this update shouldve stayed in development another few months :///
You need to be in range of radio towers. There are tutorials in the game explaining this. Open your map. Press m to do it. Any exposed zones can allow photo submissions.
I'm gonna be brutally honest. These past updates have been big dissapointments. You guys add one new big thing and in turn break/remove stuff that was in the previous versions. Its been feeling like 1 step forward 2 steps back for a good while now. I would prefer if you could finally nail down what you want to do with the game not suddenly try and make it something different every few months and then focus on that vision. With the current build its been no different: We got a sweet new open world map with a bunch of upgrade stations that currently do not work yet taking photos has become worse then its ever been with camera rarely recognizing any girls and even if it does it still gives you an F on every picture you take. Sex Animations yet again looking like a mess and now the player can't even join in. And even the behaviour of girls is still broken with them not really noticing you being there at all unless you step on a twig on purpose. It just doesnt feel like any feesible progress has been made at all and like mentioned this has been the case for the last few updates. This is also the reason why i stopped my patreon subscription, i just don't see any actual progress being made. I'm not trying to shit on you guys but i would have even been fine with the original vision of it just being a pokemon snap type game where you do half the game on rails and just take pics if it meant that we would get something that works and is fun to play. At this point i don't see you guys having a clear vision of what you want to do anymore.
Development is things always in a state of chaos. This variation of the game is what the direction will be. It took a while to find our production pipeline and that is generally how game dev goes. I am not afraid to swap the game around until I find what I want it to be. Consider this patch the first alpha and all before it experiments to find this focus.
I’m having absolutely tremendous issues with camera performance (I mean when camera zoom is toggled). Even on everything ultra low I’m getting like 280 fps in-game but as soon as I engage camera it drops to like 10 fps or less :<
Not sure if I'm gonna sound too dumb with this question, but with this update, how does one take advantage of the doll system, and further question, how are we able to have sex with the monster girls?
There are in game tutorials that explain this along with the release post itself. But just throw a lust bomb at a girl.
Right now the player cannot join in. Soon though.
when is the first-person camera gonna come back? I don't mean to be a pain in the ass but I just found it more immersive, I understand if it can't come back for technical reasons tho. If that's not the case I would like to see pov camera angle for the player sex scene where you can move the camera around in a future update
I don't think we will return to a first person camera. Perhaps as we get closer to the full release and we have nothing more important to build.
damn that sucks but maybe we can get some character customization where you can earn money to buy new outfits and hairstyles to change up the look of the character
Yeah clothing and hair is ccoming.
I'm hyped for this update
Good! Be sure to drop us some tasty feedback!