Small prototypes

Written by ♫Dex, published 2024-01-20

Note: This article was written on 2025-01-03, as a summary of the events happening on Discord back during this development log

With Pre-Alpha 1 now released, it's time to start working on some random ideas! This was the opportunity to prototype a lot of concept, and explore where to go from there with the project as a whole.

First, the name "Project Mirabelle" was officially decided on January 7th, right after the launch of the pre-alpha! This would be the name of the project going forward, and the old "3D prototype" project now redirecting to the new project name.

Then, as a small break, I added a prototype for the Sybian animation sequence on January 5th, without any idea whether it would fit the tone of the game yet:

Following that, I added a "chair struggle" prototype system, a bit janky, on January 8th:

I also played around with a prototype for the "spring physics" (a fancy way to say "bouncing breasts") on January 10th, with... Mixed and disturbing results. This feature has gotten shelved for now, and will be revisited later once the actual system is clearer.

This was also the opportunity to experiment with creating props! Which I did on January 11th, with pretty good results.

Followed, the next day, with a very, very simple leash system where the rope is just a straight line.

Image of a character with a rope in their hand connected to the collar of another character

On January 12th, I added a ballgag and leather blindfold

Image of a boxtied character with a ballgag and padded leather blindfold

Then, on January 13th, I made some progress towards lipsynching, using a small voice sample provided by F4ngy as a CC-By 4.0 asset as template - very basic, and without much personality yet, but it gets the job done for now!

This required a lot of shape keys to implement, following the layout based on the Gary C. Martin's extended Preston Blair phoneme series.

Screenshot of the Blender interface showing the shape keys used for lip movements

I played around with making an "intro map" to present the project on January 14th:

Image of a map with a shop stall, a small and large house, and a character suspended as a sign

Then, I added variants for footwear to match the outfits on January 15th:

Image of a character in a blue dress wearning blue

Image of a character in leather armor wearing poofy leather boots

Image of a character in iron armor wearing iron boots

As well as a new, more fitting "default" haircut on the same day:

Closeup image of a character's face with a new haircut

And a new prop and animation for a shop sign with no character tied to it:

I then added some new UI to control the aforementioned Sybian sequence on January 19th:

Created a new set of "stored in glass tube" idle animations the same day:

And added a new "carry tied character to chair" and "tie character to chair" animation set on January 20th:

And with this done, it was time to stop with the small prototypes and to move on to the main "part" of Pre-Alpha 2, new tie up animations!