Sapphire Safari News

​Hello explorers! Welcome to our new development blog for Sapphire Safari called “Sapphire Documents”. Why the dumb name? Well the last post had a lot of confusion around it, fans were thinking there was a release tucked away in the development blog, naturally, this is something I want to avoid going forward, so whenever you see a news post called “Sapphire Documents XXX” you know its just news about our ongoing development timeline.

Ezpz.

[h2]Doll System Updates[/h2]
The system will be ready for the September 1st release of v005 so let's do a little more elaboration on this for you. We have a big post planned sometime in September to go into way more details, this is more of a sneak peek! I have whipped our primary developer into making something to show off, here is what he wrote.

Blastertoad -
Hey, this is Blastertoad the primary dev on Sapphire Safari. Henley asked me to put together a dev post for you all so here it is.

The highlight feature coming in the September update is the doll system. We researched this system a couple of months ago and want it to be a mainstay of our games moving forward. The switch to UE5 has made some of the animation set we are doing easier but also means we had to re-write the system from scratch to get it in Sapphire.

I could tell you how cool it is, and why we are using it, but I don't have the time as I need to get this patch out to you all. So instead here is the basic sales pitch to you customers.

The doll system lets you have interactive sex scenes. Not just set position, control thrust speed, repeat. No, what we have is far better. While you are pounding or standing in the bushes as a futa pounds in your place, you can move the characters, directing their arm to their groin to start masturbating, lift or spread their legs, and grab their head so they can stare at you in the bushes.

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Yeah, sure you have seen this with IK. But it is usually jank, like turbo jank. The doll system’s movements are made up of artist-authored poses. So when you drag a character's arm, from their groin to their breast, then up to their mouth, you are not just IK positioning their wrist but directing them as they move their hand in a much more natural way. Think of it as the difference of posing an action figure verse guiding a person. Other than looking great this also drastically simplifies input allowing full controller support.

Now some of you are already sold. Great, I like those easy-to-please people. Makes my job a hell of a lot easier. But for those of you who are thinking “well that just sounds like it adds limits”, well you’re not wrong. However to make sure we have as few limits as possible we are making huge pose libraries to cover as much range of motion as we can. For example, the first pose we will have in-game, missionary, is made up of over 40 individual poses that are blended so you can position head, hips, arms, and legs in a wide range of motion smoothly. This is just for the female character in the scene. And I still need to request 2 more poses to complete that set, CumminHam I will @ you later.

So in this first release, you will be able to get all 3 of the current in-game monster girls and put them into a missionary pose and push and prod them around. Right now it is just the posing, but in future updates, we will have snapping hotspots like masturbating, groping, finger sucking, etc. Make sure to @Henely on the discord with all your special requests. Ha, that's what you get for making me write a dev log. Anyway, I have to get back to work to finish this patch.

Thanks, Blaster, sassy as always.

Anyways on top of the Doll System will be some facial animations and three speeds of penetration which push and affects all the bones on the model set to receive. Also hey Richard, guess he got tired of Demon pussy and wanted something more fluffy.

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[h2]The Jungle of the Sapphire Islands[/h2]
A lot has happened with the first map in Sapphire Safari. The version available in va004 did a great job, but we saw some very interesting side effects. The map was flat, and it was also difficult to navigate without landmarks. The second version of the map which will be available in v005 has fixed a few of the issues we were having, namely with sight lines.

But let's talk about the third version of the jungle map.

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This is the “blocked out” version of the map, within it, you’ll start to see our exploration mechanics which we are calling “tool gates” along with the first attempt at making better landmarks for identifying regions of the map. We have built this map with what's called course “loops” if anyone has played Monster Hunter before you have a good idea of how this works, but you can move around without being pressured and pushed into locations.

First the landmarks

01: The Waterfall

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Here we have a waterfall that will follow the logic that video game waterfalls should have. You can walk inside. Not sure what we will do with the cave inside just yet, something special for sure.

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02: The Forest Floor

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This will eventually be a super dense forest floor, filled with vines and ancient trees.

03: The Grasslands

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Eventually, this space will be the major drinking and refreshment area for Monsters living on Jungle Island.

04: The Caves Below

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Hidden below Jungle Island is a vast network of caves and sprawling crystal caverns. How deep will you venture below?

05: Hidden Beachfront


What’s better than a private beach just for you and a few selected Monster Girls?

Now a little more on the “Tool Gates”. Think of these as locked doors that require exploration of other maps and locations before you can pass. Let’s break down what we have so far.

Interaction 01: Ziplines

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Just an example of it right now, a zipline will allow players access to areas directly across chasms and difficult terrain. The tool needed to access these points is a “zipline bar”.

Interaction 02: Dense Walls

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These areas are gated with things like thick vines, thorns, rubble, etc. The tool we are looking to use here is a machete or some sort of burning tool like a flare/dynamite. We are not 100% sure about this just yet.

Interaction 03: Squish Points


Accessing these areas is toolless but will require the player to squeeze through a tight area, however finding these will be on the player to spot and use.

Interaction 04: Dark Areas

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Entrances to caves and dark areas will require first crawling and then a headlamp to illuminate the path forward.

[h2]Monster Variations[/h2]
Not sure if this will make it into v005 but we have started working on Monster Girl variations as another way to give more photo targets without increasing our overall art budget for the game. Check out the Bunbuns with a few different flavors.

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Hopefully, all Monster Girls will get the same treatment, and if a Monster Girl appears on a different biome map (Bunbuns in the Snow Map for example) they will get a few model changes like a more dense fur.

[h2]Main Menu Modifications[/h2]
Lastly, for this week's Document Post, we have the additional updates for the Main Menu. Obviously, it is still a work in progress, but we will likely have gender selection active in v005. More updates to come with this soon!

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Anyways that’s all for this week, come Friday we will be entering into the internal testing phase for the build, which includes the Doll System and the new Main Menu. If we do not have any major issues expect it to drop on September 1st.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1526900/Sapphire_Safari/

Cheers!
Kinky

Hello explorers! Man a whole lot has happened since we released va004 of Sapphire Safari on Itch for our early adopters. The feedback and support have been absolutely amazing and we have been on the top sellers for a while now! The energy surrounding the project has renewed our vigor considerably and we have been hard at work making the next patch.

Before we get started though, thank you very much for your patience in waiting to hear any sort of news from us, it took much longer than I anticipated to get my new house setup, then we had a funeral and lastly, my family and I were hit with COVID, 3 years of avoiding it only for us to get nabbed now. Feels bad man. The rest of the staff has been working diligently though.

So production update time! We have expanded our team with a second programmer! His role right now mostly consists of adding extra features into the game, stuff that we were considering adding in much later once the core gameplay loops have been added. Things like our UX for the main menu and other things.

[h2]Main Menu[/h2]
The biggest feedback we received for the first build was the lack of the main menu, so we got you! Originally it was going to be something really simple but the new programmer has jumped into it with both feet giving us a 3d environment to float around.



This is just the first pass at least, from this menu you’ll be able to look at your photos, your upcoming quests, the new Monpedia function, choose your playable character (male or female), and choose the island destination along with the time of day you want to explore in!



Game settings wise we have all the standard stuff, which should allow for older hardware to tweak settings as they need for better performance. We also will have values in there for choosing how the Futa content works in the game.

• Off.
  
• Low spawn chance.
  
• Medium spawn chance.
  
• High spawn chance.
  

We are not 100% sure how we will handle the content offerings if Futa is turned off completely (stuff like quests taking a photo about Futa etc), but that is a problem for future us.

Other notable settings are the photo output changes, basically, you can set up how big the photos the game takes will be, options right now allow for matching the current resolution of the game, along with scaling down and up from that point. Naturally taking massive photos will impact the game performance.

• Scaled Resolution
  

Photo exported at a percentage of game resolution. Exporting at 0.5 is 50% creates an image half the resolution experienced in-game. Warning high values may cause hitching when taking photos.

• Fixed Resolution
  

Export images at the specified resolution. This may provide images framed differently from what is seen in-game depending on the monitor aspect ratio. Warning higher resolutions may cause hitching when taking photos.

[h2]Monpedia[/h2]
This feature is very exciting to talk about, basically, as of the next patch (hopefully), we will have the first iteration of the Monpedia, an auto catalog system for documenting the wildlife on the Sapphire Islands.



Filling out the entries for a species increases the familiarity which will allow the player to get closer to the Monster Girl and eventually open up interactions with them.

[h2]Doll System[/h2]
Alright here is the big cheese, the whole reason for our move to UE5 and the main reason we had massive downtimes from the original release of Sapphire. The Doll system is our overly complicated interaction system with ultimate customization for interactions with an unlimited number of participants. Let me elaborate…

Each position in our game requires a tone of prep and planning. Since every pose will need to have a tone of locking points created and those points documented correctly.



This next build will include the Missionary position and configuration options for that pose as well, and maybe the Jacko pose as well. Depends on how long it takes. However, each model in the game is capable of matching these poses and the system will intelligently blend these poses together. So if you grab buns leg and pull it to an unrealistic position once you let go of the leg she will move it back to a more comfortable position.



These customizations sit between animation loops and facial expressions. Here are some better examples of this in action.





Also in terms of insertions, we are working on a “rubber” type system to not leave weird-looking gapes. Manually fitting everyone to all Monster Girls would end up being a lot of work so building something more automatic is ideal.



[h2]Narrative[/h2]
This is a really interesting portion of development that should help deliver better experiences to players using our systems and such. The basic idea of the game is as follows:

The Sapphire Islands are discovered, they are teeming with brand new species of animals called Monster Girls who have shown alarming curiosity for Humans. The first team of scientists/explorers head into the islands and eventually stop communicating with the outside world. Your job is to follow in the footsteps of the first team and discover their whereabouts. The secondary objective is to document the wildlife.

In terms of NPC’s here is what we were considering to help deliver the story. Keep in mind the names will likely change in the future.

First Team:

• Bucky: The team's Anthrozoologist. Bucky has a reserved type of personality but is constantly compared to his father's achievements. Wishes
  
• Claire: The team’s Ethnologist. Very eager to make a name for herself Claire is the type to dive into any opportunity and get her hands dirty in the process.
  
• Chad: The team’s Ecologist. By the books and professional in every regard. Chad is also the most senior on the team.
  

Second Team:

• Player Character Oscar (male): A wildlife photographer known for his extreme patience and award-winning photography.
  
• Player Character Jamie (female): Fresh out of college and ready to make a name for herself.
  
• Professor Frida: Advisor and handler for the Second Team visiting the Sapphire Islands, she will be running the ship and helping plot the course for the duo of Oscar and Jamie.
  

Whatever character you choose the other will become an NPC who has their own tasks and roles in the game.

[h2]Timeline[/h2]
The last point I want to bring up in this post is our early adopter release timeline. We want to give ourselves at least a month per patch to do three “sprints” of development with one sprint for testing and bug fixing. This means that each patch should drop at the beginning of each month if nothing explodes. This next patch we are looking to drop around September 1st.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1526900/Sapphire_Safari/

All done, looking forward to your feedback!
Kinky

Another week and we are back doing another Dev Blog!

First, the final polish on our second girl the Monkey has been completed. Some of you might recognize her inspiration, and if you do it might result in you needing a cold shower…

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The next Monster Girl on the list for creation is the Apex of the region, a Tiger Girl.

In other news, we are hard at work refining the first jungle map. Space-wise it is quite large, allowing the player to explore and roam about the area.



​We have separated the space into four areas.

• Jungle Floor: This is the first area the player will have access to, it includes the rainforest floor along with a river, beach access, and a lake.
  
• Swamp Outskirts: Nothing is needed to access this area, it will be home to more aggressive Monster Girls and a more muddy environment.
  
• Canopy: The tree tops are the home to Monster Girls who can climb and fly!
  
• Plateau: Not exactly a mountain top, but high off the jungle floor is a more rocky environment.
  

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Some areas the player will need to return to with new equipment to access, so expect new areas and quests to open up the more you explore areas.

Lastly, we are almost done with the new spawn system, once we have that in place we can start internal testing to see how the girls feel in the new environment. If there are issues with how alive it all feels, we have a secondary plan to make it all work. Testing comes first though!

Thanks for reading!
Kinky

Hello esteemed explorers! Welcome to another developer diary for Sapphire Safari, today we will go over our mechanics porting to UE5 along with some very exciting jiggle physics!

Early on in this pivot, we made the decision to build the game around first-person mechanics, this would allow us to focus on content and scenes above the player, build scale both of our monster girls and the environment better, along with making stealth and peeping way more engaging. As such we also needed to scale back the traversal mechanics as well.

Players will still be able to climb, mantle, jump, etc, these will all just be context-sensitive. So do not expect a dedicated jump button and to be bunny hopping around the environment!



​We also have built the first-person camera with the ability to see your own body! Female perspective anyone?



​Here is the first look at the Depth of Field working with our new UE5 camera system.



Previously we had a focus on keeping all the photography done in Sapphire Safari "within" the game, mostly we wanted to make sure we could work within closed systems like consoles and such. However, with this UE5 build, we figured focusing on quality was vastly more important to the user experience as the quality of the image stays very consistent if we are actually writing to the hard drive (kinda like taking a screenshot but vastly more detailed). Below is an example of what the full image is written to a PC will look like. Keep in mind I had to compress this to make sure it fits as our quality options for the photos taken can be set however you like.



Here is an example of what the system does after taking a photo.

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​The problem we are combating with this solution is that there can be a noticeable lag due to content being written on the PC but lowering quality options can make for some jaggy-looking photos. Our best solution here is to match the user's screen resolution for the game and scale up and down the quality from there, but ultimately those choices can be modified by the needs of the end-user.

Here are two examples of this, the first image is set to the user's screen resolution (3446x1361), and the second is half that output (1725x680). The second image is way way faster to process than the first but at a cost of overall quality. However we expect that this won't affect most users, and those thirsty for greater detail will have to take the hit to performance for what they desire.



​Here is an example of the zoom and focus tools working in-game, and how they can affect the photos you take. The focus was adjusted to make buns look detailed with the rest being out of focus.

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And now, onto the jiggles! We spent a bit of time working with UE5 and the physics systems they have to make sure that breasts, butts, tails, ears, thighs, and all those good things wiggle in a realistic manner that does not break immersion.

Here are some earlier attempts.



Without too many constraints things tend to go wild. Here is what after some tweaking it looks like.


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​This is looking really nice, and it is all thanks to our new rig along with the physics engine that comes with Unreal 5. Lastly, for this post I wanted to show off a WIP shot of our second Monster Girl, the Monkey!

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​She has a lot more work to go, but so far her face is in a nice spot. There seems to be a reason you do not see a lot of Monkey Girl waifus, as that monkey-like face is really hard to get right!

Hope you enjoyed the post, we will have more information soon!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Aside from the sneaky little teaser trailer above, our biggest news is that the move to Unreal Engine 5 has officially begun! There are a few growing pains that we are dealing with at the moment related to how the new rig works, more bones in a body tend to do that to ya… However, with that still being the case we have managed to push ahead with the rigs and get our new systems-ready models into the game.

It does mean that a lot of the older content cannot be used, so a complete system overhaul is going to be needed. This means the jungle island we made ready for the new build, will need to be rebuilt. Some casualties are to be expected I guess.

Anyways here are some interesting glamor shots we have of the process!



The next part is getting lighting models right for the game, night time is a very difficult prospect to overcome as we always want visibility even in the darkness. Lucky for us UE5 has great defaults we can use as a starting point.



The style we will likely end up with is what's called VibranceA and honestly, it's a very good starting point, shadows are not too dark, and visibility is good.



Next is getting the cel-shading in for the monster girl models



The goal here is that we want our models to always be easy to spot, this should happen night and day.



Buns is a little too short though, nothing a few points of scaling can't fix!

Hope you all enjoy the latest information about the game, we hope to post more soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1526900/Sapphire_Safari/
Cheers,
Kinky