I have a loooot of screenshots of Unity/Blender/etc to show you, from the very first moving cube to the early build.
And more but... let's keep that for later.

The minigame

I really enjoyed the minigame in the first Daggan and I wanted something more challenging, something with a deeper gameplay. I made and posted this prototype around the end of February and was totally happy with it. You can give it a try here: https://malerouille.itch.io/minigame-prototype

Moving and harvesting

For the very first steps I focused on a top-down game approach: move unit, gather resources, repeat. It was even possible to load other maps. This feature is on hold, but wait for it, traveling will probably come at some point!

Then many different buildings were added, with different purposes. The warehouse, the manor and the masonry guild. Basically you could upgrade every unit and building thanks to this one. In the picture above you can see both wood and stone versions of the warehouse!  Also back then, the player was only able to build dolls: the creepy figures on the right.

On the other side the upgrade system was way too complicated. I had to develop a robust save system and it was messy keeping track of every ugprades. 

Then I added sex. Obviously!!!

And I linked it to the fresh and new minigame! Here I was: I was able to reproduce furries, build and upgrade buildings and produce dolls, as long they kept gathering resources. It was rough but it worked fine!

At this point I upgraded the 3d of the resources and made a bigger test map UwU A basic FX system was there to spam sounds and particules when clicking stuff and I had that glowing inline effect when selecting units and buildings! It's still there and I'm still looking for a better idea!

The game was slowly evolving from its top-down dev view to a more engaging point-of-view, adding gizmo to build stuff in third-person and a whole system to show fancy icons to help the player with the inputs! 

From there it's gonna change even faster so bear with me 🐻 I added mechs, and it was the 24th of May already! I've been working on this game 3 months straight! In the game, every save-able objects are Entities. Then you have the Units, Buildings and Resources. Mechs are a sub category of Units, with the Dolls and the Furries. They can't work without furry pilots to fuel them with sex magic! And you can have multiple pilots per mech UwU Got it? Okay let's talk art style now!!

Art, my favourite part

At this point it was too ugly for me to look at it so BOOM it's level design time. I couldn't do procedural map: too complicated for me to mix with the save system this early in the process. It will come too hopefully but at this time that would have mean 1 or 2 more months of dev. So I went the hand-made road and found my crappy map of Daggan to make this terrain!

I mean that map, a very old one I used in the first game to build the lore. Spoiler alert, Daggan is just a continent! I won't zoom out more cause it could become too weird for you. For the early version I used the bottom-right corner to sculpt the level.

Back to Daggan Pink please? I made stones with procedural materials: triplanar stone texture with procedural lichens. It also used a noise to move the vertices of the 3d models randomly, making all stones look slightly different. The seed is simple, it's based on the object's position! At this point I will probably spam a lot about shaders and stuff, please note that I only used Unity's shadergraph to make the shaders. It's a node-based shader editor, so you don't have to learn to write shaders.

You see the cliffs? Here's their texture. For this game I went with a very economic and stylized process. Why? Cause I'm alone and I'm not into hand-painted textures. I want to keep them super minimalistic. And frankly I love the result in the game!! I also added a vertical noise to add horizontal dark bands on the cliffs. Basically to simulate layered cliffs, or you may call this effect stratification.

It's the 6th of June now, I have all my resources: trees, stones and gold mines. I'm suuuuuper proud of these gold veins btw. Isn't that an amazing idea? Dog I love them UwU

Something was bothering me, since I started working in Unity actually, the way light works in the game. The closer you get from a light source, the more it looks like a white hole. Suuuure maybe it's physically accurate. Is it though? I found a way to tweak the way light works in the game, so light is clamped now and no more anomaly of pure white.

See? With candle it's easier to understand! Ah and a secret, the candle itself is not really transparent or else, it's just another tricky shader with a flickering effect UwU I loved the candles in Morrowind so I always wanted to use the same trick, by faking the sub-surface scattering!

Anyway back in June where I started to work on Meccassidy! You remember the sexy magic? I opened Blender and made a tentacle animation with a fancy shader in Unity, et voilà!

 I was very happy with that weird design, inspired by round medieval incense burners. So I made it in Blender!

The textures for the units (mechs, dolls and furries) are suuuuper simple and totally inspired by my way of shading my furry art, you can see it there for info! I'm using a toon shading methods thanks to the technology by Cyanilux, which give me access to the light informations directly in the shadergraph of Unity. Basically I can make my own toon shading now!!

So here we are! I reused the sky shadergraph I made for Mini Meander and we have perfectly fine first cool screenshot UwU

The first four months

It's a very long process, and I try to be as accurate as I can! Let's stop there for this first episode, and I hope you enjoyed diving with me in the creative process of Daggan Pink XD I absolutely loooove working on this game. It's a full-time job. I wake up so early, I go to bed so late, I have to make efforts to stick to a human schedule and not work during the weekends (yeah I'm cheating this Sunday, let's say it doesn't count)! That and cause I need to take care of my gf and her growing belly. Cause many things are happening to me and while Daggan Pink is from faaar my favourite professional lifetime project, I do have a personal one ongoing too UwU That's a ton of work!

I'm already proud of this project. And whatever players will think, for me it's gonna be my favourite game <3

Edit: You can Wishlist the game on Steam  https://store.steampowered.com/app/3156510/Daggan_Pink/