Fixing ARIA Genesis

So ARIA Genesis has been released on Steam for a while now, and it’s sitting at mixed reviews. I’m not over the moon about it, but I accept that it’s probably where it should be, considering a lot of different factors.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1687250/ARIA_Genesis/

It was my first attempt at a feature complete large 3D game, which is really ambitious for one person.

I also want to make it clear that it is indeed just me, the names credited at the end of the Main Story is simply me crediting the creators of all the various assets I used to help make this game. None of the names listed actually helped me make this specific game in particular. I just felt it was right to credit the asset makers. At best, I had a few people I’ve known for a while online me test for bugs or give me some ideas here and there.

And the assets are what I wanted to talk about. In this post.

Everytime I take a glance at the Steam reviews for ARIA Genesis, aside from very exaggerated comments, or comments that are just factually wrong, the main pain points seem to be, navigating geometry, AI enemies are not interesting enough, the environments are bland, repetitive sex scenes, and lag issues.

So if you like good gameplay mechanics it’s really there, and if you like good sex stuff, it’s not the best in the world either. Fair enough.

I mainly make 2D VN games. So that might be why the game plays similar to a VN outside of combat, with looping sex animations, etc.

Some of the other issues are fundamentally tied to the assets I used to make the game.

I used a 3rd person shooter kit as its foundation. I won’t mention the kit because I don’t want to affect their sales in any way, even if it’s a small, or barely existent one.

But I used it because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. The kit is very modular and can do a lot. But I see the problem now is that I can’t have a lot, and keep the game running smoothly. I just need something simple. 

I don’t need my, for example sniper enemy, to be able to use 3 different kinds of melee weapons, hear footsteps, hear gunshots, detect when allies are in combat, be able to search the area script, be alerted by dead ally bodies (they disappear within 3 seconds in aria genesis), have various feet IK options (all surfaces you can fight enemies on are flat), be able to used pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, dual wield guns, used a shield, do unarmed combat, be able to be in a AI formation or not, have options for how high it can jump, how many grenades it can have, how often it circles around the player, have animation loaded for each weapon type, keep track of ammo and ammo counts, be able to jump and couch, etc. 

I just need the enemy to start shooting the player when it comes into a sight range, or after it gets shot.maybe a basic patrol at best. Maybe try to keep distance since it’s a sniper. I just don’t need all that other stuff running also.

I think because each AI in the kit has all that stuff loaded on it that I don’t ever use (but is required), it makes the game lag when there’s more than just a few enemies on the screen at a time. And I wanted ARIA to have some levels that have a lot of enemies. 

To test that theory. I made a smaller game project I’ll be calling for the time being ARIA SAC, Special Agent Certification. It’s a small game where I’ve coded the movement, and combat stuff myself. Everything coded (and loaded) on the enemies and the player is something I actually use.

And just with a single boss and 3 enemies in an arena (all non-humanoid), it feels way better and smoother than ARIA Genesis.If it has 4 enemies there, the game would already be lagging.

If possible I want to take the custom combat system I’ve made and swap it out with what’s in ARIA Genesis. I think that would fix a few of the problems.

As far as sex scenes go,they will probably remain like that. And the environment will probably remain that way as well in the interest of not having lag from too much stuff in the background.

I want to develop the ARIA SAC game into something complete also, where it just has a detailed non-combat warehouse area. And the combat arena which doesn’t need to be super detailed since it will have way more complex combat mechanics to focus on.

I’ll have more info on ARIA SAC later. For the time being I have been working on updates to ARIA Genesis to improve what I can. Below is my current list of changes/fixes/additions to the game that will be in the next patch. Along with some screenshots  below.

• Changed most areas from a skybox to a volumetric sky and clouds.
• Added an additional butt jiggle setting
• There is now an erect nipple toggle in the esc->settings->options menu (works for Arielle, Maiko and Phia) (does not work on alien missions where Arielle’s appearance is pre-set.)
• Certain places you can fall through the floor/wall have been fixed
• The screen now has a red vignette when your health starts getting too low.
• The parked spaceships in the city now despawn when the player is far enough away from them to help with fps
• enabled GPU instancing for various materials in the game to help with fps
• converted some models from A pose to T pose to work better with some of the animations.
• Arielle’s title screen idle animation updated
• Fixed enemy alien animations
• updated the alien starting area of the game, made traversing the landscape easier, and added a story component at the end. 
• added an additional segment after the starting alien area that expands on the lore of the game.
• added an additional segment after Mission 3 (where you go back to the GamCo facility with Bri) that very briefly expands on the lore of the game.
• getting Bri to open up now allows her to visit and have interactions in the restroom area.

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Vortex00

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