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[devlog] Hand in Hand - a cute handholding simulator

A topic by glibglib created Sep 08, 2017 Views: 2,905 Replies: 7
Viewing posts 1 to 8
Submitted (3 edits)

Summary

Hand in Hand is a 3d interactive game where you have to try and hold hands with the girl you're dating. It goes without saying that handholding is sacred and special - you can't go straight in.  You have to build up to it first!

The player controls their hand from their own perspective, and must perform successful interactions with their date to build up affection -- enough so that she would be comfortable enough to hold the player's hand.

The ultimate goal of the game is for the player to hold hands with their date. The player will be unable to hold their date's hand at the beginning, and attempts will fail unless the NPC's affection is high enough.

Concept art
Submitted (2 edits)

Day 6 Progress:

Preliminary hand movement with IK arm:  http://a.pomf.cat/yzdjro.webm (video)
Base sculpt for the NPC character: 

Submitted

Design and colors are wicked cool.

Loving the concept, hand holding is serious stuff!

Submitted (1 edit)

Thanks for the comments everyone!

Week 4 progress

Character modelled, textured, and rigged:

Camera movement, adaptive hand orientation and hitzone detection for the NPC and testing how unlit lighting looks (not great...):
http://a.pomf.cat/yqeycj.webm (video)

Lots and lots to do still but the framework is there!

Submitted

Week 6??? Progress (the days are blending into one...)  

Mostly just an art update.  Room blockout and placeholder colours are in.  Got some primary animations going, rest are underway. No interact animations yet, but soon...


Submitted

I really like the art style and animations for the NPC. If I ever did a 3D game, I'd have to look into that style myself. (Incidentally, how long does it take to make a 3D model of this complexity? I never had the patience to model in detail, so it's not something I'm familiar with the timeframe of.)

The one thing that looks a bit odd to me is the band around the elbows for both characters. It looks like they're meant to be shadows built-in to the texture, but since there are unshaded parts between the bands and the clothing for some animations it looks like a glitch. I don't know how easy that would be to fix, especially if the characters are pieced together from multiple sub-models during runtime (like one game I modded once), but I figured I'd point it out. Then again, you probably already noticed it yourself...

A question I have about the gameplay: Based on the introduction information, it sounds like you have to raise "affection" before you can actually hold the NPC's hand. How do you raise affection? Are there interactions besides simply moving the hand?

Submitted (3 edits)

Hi, thanks for the reply! Yeah, the textures definitely need touching up - that was a case of texturing before animating, and once the arms were moved it became apparent that the textures had a gap. Still touching up to do for things like that, thanks for mentioning it.  It took about a week to do the model, but work was on-and-off so it's hard to time.

For raising affection, there will be other interactions such as patting her head, or rubbing her shoulders.  The higher her affection is, her body language will change to indicate how close you are to handholding.  


We planned on having interactable items on the table so you could do things like feed her cake or give her a drink but we weren't able to do that with the time constraints we have, so for now it's cut  down to just various touch interactions.  If we keep developing after the jam then expanding the interactions is going to be the first thing we look at so you can do all manner of cute/fun stuff.

Cool art and animations, good luck on your game!