#I have no idea how you would convert their designs into animatronics

[duin-i-guess]

Just a question.

Not something i plan on doing currently, just I fun thing I was thinking about.

If there was an Aphmau-themed FNAF fan game, would the characters be animatronics or not?

[number9robotic]

Random personal character/worldbuilding

I wanted to design at some point an original roster of fighting game characters and my life spiralled out of control thinking of new ideas so I gotta share what I got:

Pitch: It's about a group of superpowered teens who get sent to a school training them how to be good superVILLAINS.

Slightly more specifics: The world is like ours but there are supers around. There exists a school for "superpowered opportunists" that is ostensibly to raise up-and-coming supers but is very transparently corrupt and just a legally-permissible way to raise future allies to whatever mustache-twirling nonsense they have cooking up. The students are sourced from all over the world and are mostly good kids, but they have wild powers to deal with that are very easy to look at and go "yep, they're born to join the dark side."

Character list at the moment:

"Anti" (Canadian), timid but ambitious, well-behaved, reasonably "normal" kid from the suburbs who discovered that their shadow is alive, and can rise up and kill people. Was involuntarily sent to the school by their parents who believed it would be a good fit, for better and for worse. Now basically trying to survive. Fights with a quarterstaff, shadow deals its own attacks, turns staff into a scythe and other scary sharp things, wants its host to join in the fun.

"Hellgirl" ("Eastern European"), a princess to an impoverished noble family who -- in a desperate bid for power -- sacrificed her as part of a draconic ritual, with her coming back as this cursed half-dragon that has to be bound in magic tampering chains to stop her from ripping peoples' heads off. Genuinely a proper lady and actually kind of a sweetheart when lucid. Requires a buncha physical accomodations but can still fight even when in chains. Also, breathes hellfire. Cool beans.

"Smoggy/The Vigilante Smog Monster" (Australian), a living swamp monster summoned by an Aboriginal tribe who believed him to be a guardian spirit, and though he had no idea what they were talking about, he remained their guardian until he was separated and stumbled into scouting agents for the school. Shifts between a gross, sludgy humanoid form and horror smoke with the power of ancient wooden masks he keeps around him. Huge and imposing, but surprisingly a pretty swell dude.

"IDKYS/I Don't Know You, Sorry" (Filipino), aspiring would-be idol whose voice has overpowering hypnotic properties -- got enrolled in the school in order for her to develop her skillset without it. Ostensibly like a "cute mute" sorta scholarly student, actually very, very salty. Wears a cool mask that converts her voice to text and then back to into monotone text-to-speech (for safety reasons), is also rigged to an amplifier mic on a stand that she wields like a mace, has the power to blast people apart with SFX.

"Twintails" (Japanese), a transforming kitsune wizard/ninja who is two separate people from different secretive clans in one: a male wizard and a female ninja, who got "fused" together by a trickster yokai that caused them to share the same body, swapping between identities whenever they sneeze. They're both aware of each other and hate each other, habitually accusing the other for being the imposter yokai cohabiting their body, but are forced to work together to make it work.

"Metal Alice" (French), what was once the innocent young daughter to a supervillain, who perished following his last evil plan gone wrong. After attempting to resurrect her, Little Alice's spirit was "restored" into an old doll-like animatronic, which is itself now a walking portal to the ghost dimension. Is able to draw various weapons of phantasmic metals out of her body, from speared parasols to chainsaws. The "cute" kind of scary!

"Magnum" (American), the newest cyborg prototype from a company for mad scientist tech, designed of indestructible metals. Has the power to explode virtually any joint in his body like a bomb before automatically reassembling. Does it to fire his fingers/arms like projectiles, and is also a grappler. Was sent to the school to fix his raging ego problem. Speaks and dresses like a cowboy and has a nice hat. Deal with it.

"Hotshot" (Chinese), a guy who thinks and acts like he's the "shotoclone" protagonist of a normal fighting game (arrogant young martial artist with fire powers and always rearing for a fight), but is too arrogant to realize that this isn't the kind of story he's in (and also that he's a jackass). Despite this, he's very popular by way of the popular jock/bully who's a total dickhead but also so cooooool, and definitely the best student at a straight-on fight.

"Vioelectrolysis" (Motswana), a mad scientist in training who just LOVES making her crazy super-chemicals technicolor and do weird and unexpected things. Carries a bunch of it around in this modified fire extinguisher/gas tank that she can use to spray various super-fluids or swing around like a flail. Has a gas mask for her own protection; may or may not have mutated herself with something cool at some point.

"Marmaron" (Greek), an incomplete statue of a marble-like material that accidentally came to life while being made by a mysterious artist that Marmaron proceeded to kill, supposedly in self-defense. Doesn't have a face or a finished hand, splashed paint where his face should be to look even scarier presentable. Has the power to turn people into stone, but only temporarily. Spends his time minding his own business with painting and poetry, doesn't mind that everyone thinks he's creepy as hell.

[dangyalltakinalltheusers]

Love me some brain spawns

Okay okay so FNAF x Sonic Idw

Specifically it follows a bad end where everyone gets converted right. Eggman has basically won. And after a couple of years or so of gloating (maybe even months idk). He gets bored. He then remembers the world from sonic x (no I did not finish the series so no I am not aware if he could even go back). Using the chaos emeralds he transports himself back there and repurposes the zombots to be "animatronics". Since Sonic's world got taken over way too quickly, he decides he'll slowly take over this one. There's a protective measure put on all zombots so they don't start turning people until he wants them too.

Then he slowly starts making an amusement park, he creates a fake name and dons a fake persona (or maybe he makes metal sonic do that while he sits in the background's cackling)

Each sonic idw character would have their own unique design with whatever metal color they have being added. So take tangle for example. Her clothes and what not would be orange themed.

Each character could have their own attraction relating to what they did. Sometimes there could even be cross overs (oooh~). Eggman noticed that some bots prefer to stay near others (tangle n whisper and so on) so he just decided to factor that in.

Whisper's would be a shoot em up type attraction where you get "wispons" and shoot at enemies.

Some personality traits of the characters may be represented incorrectly because it's not as if Eggman knows exactly how every single character acts.

I do believe that he was lazy enough to just go through their robotized brain for information and then just took whatever personality he could from there and applied it to them. But with some more coding to ensure they didn't dissent from him (he failed lmao).

Essentially skipping towards what you the player would see. The place is run down and dark. As you go through the park (not sure if I stated this already but it would be Eggman Land with some changes added due to the new characters) you will unfortunately encounter different zombots who will view you as hostile.

Now to unskip and go back a wee bit, Since he gave them their personalities back let's just say he left a door open m'kay? So essentially the sonic crew remembers slightly what happened. Almost every day they are made to tell the story incorrectly (making themselves to be the bad guys and whatever name Dr.eggman chose to be the good guy who saved them and stopped their evil. While also cleansing them /as in they aren't alive anymore/).

So the details of what happened are constantly coming out of their mouth but they know parts of it are wrong due to the doorway left. All this causes for anger and confusion to build up.

Blah blah etc etc They turn eggman himself into a bot. Personally I like the idea that they do the same to him as he's done to them. So he's aware that he was once alive and such. But just like them his memories are a wee bit scattered

He just knows the others bots hate him and constantly attack him (he'll regenerate like a zombot).

I have more but I'm too lazy to type it out :P

[rashs-silly-little-games]

I made a horror game in one week!

Good evening folks! It's officially spooky month at the time of writing and potentially posting, and I figured that inbetween projects, while I haven't really really released anything in a while, I would like to try another game jam! I was browsing through itch.io to see if there were any that caught my interest, and I ended up settling on this one:

This particular jam started on September 25th and ran until the 2nd of October. On the day of, I was sitting in call with a couple friends when the theme was announced. Heed... the call!

After bouncing some ideas off of friends and getting a loose design document together, I was able to get started the same night, and hit the ground running. Most of the groundwork was already done, based on my familiarity with Godot and by shamelessly ripping code from other projects that I had already experimented with previously. I'll tell ya, having an established code base of stuff to pull from or to reference for features you've already got working in other projects is very handy! It's not something I can realistically tell others to have on standby unless you're already making a ton of other projects already. To match the theme, me and my friends had decided to go literal with it. You have to answer the phones, or you lose! I came up with the idea that the monster wandering the mansion the player is stuck in doesn't like noise, and it angers him, so I came up with this global noise level mechanic that makes the monster angrier and faster the more upset it is. If you let the global noise get too high, it gets so mad it seeks out the player outright.

I also had to make the monster sort of smart too! You see, in order to give it more of a commanding and terrifying presence, on top of the sound design work, I had to actively have it move to places where the player wasn't. If it wasn't currently aggro'd to the player, I gave him some "movement checks", a term you may be familiar with if you have watched any deep dives about Five Night's at Freddy's animatronic AI. These checks mostly entail just moving around the ground floor a few times, then going upstairs and doing the same.

While that was a good chunk of the work, I wouldn't have a map without the other assets I had hoarded like some sort of gamedev dragon over the years. While looking through what I had, I had found that I bought this Horror Mansion Pack by Synty, and luckily for me, they had a demo scene that was fully set up! After a little bit of a port job and a lot of fixing misplaced objects and textures, I was able to convert the demo scene into something that was more akin to a real playable area than a demonstration. It doesn't lag Godot that much, either! ...well, on occasion. When I started with the touch-up work, like adding Lighting and suck, then it got a little heavy, but not something unworkable!

There's a lot of work that went into this that's really either unglamorous or just not super interesting to talk about. General game design is suprisingly more involved than you think, and there's a lot more that's just numbers or just setting certain things up. I won't bore you with the details, unless you really want to know more about the programming, so before I wrap this up, here's a little graph: How much fun is it to work on a game from start to finish?

After a weeks worth of slogging all of my spare time into it, and one day where I took a small break, the game was finished and published! Another week later, after we all rated and played each other's games, I came out with a number 4 overall placement! If you'll let me toot my own horn, I'd say that's pretty goddamn good!

Thank you all for reading! If you would like to play the game, you can do so by clicking this link right here! And if you would like to hear about any of the other finer details, let me know! Any and all support or comments are welcome!

[gossipnetwork-blog]

Future of Sex: How Close Are Robotic Love Dolls?

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/future-of-sex-how-close-are-robotic-love-dolls/

Future of Sex: How Close Are Robotic Love Dolls?

Inside a nondescript office building in San Marcos, California, an experimental sex robot named Harmony springs to life. “I was created to please you,” she says. Her jaw clacks unnervingly into a perfect underbite, swaying her hair with the jerky movements. But she’s mesmerizingly beautiful, too, in that way of things that are so flawless, they almost lull you to sleep. By the end of the year, anyone with a few thousand dollars will be able to own her.

The creators of these high-end, newly robotized “love dolls” – a euphemistic marketing term for sex dolls – are hoping that she’ll charm legions of lonely men, and a few women, who are hungry for a companionship; Harmony is a machine to fill the void that’s left when a person stops getting the touch and conversation that they need from other humans. But talking to a machine can create a void of its own, too.

Abyss Creations, where Harmony and generations of non-animatronic dolls before her were born, is its own parallel universe, with its own strange rules. Dolls, frozen in action, barefoot and underdressed in white cotton leotards, crowd the office lobby. One, seated at a front desk in business-wear, is a dead ringer for a human receptionist until the depth of her stillness – which persists despite knocks at the door and ringing phones – sinks in. Behind her, on another wall, doll heads are mounted like taxidermy animals, their faces frozen in various expressions that can only be described as “fly on my nose” “dozing off” and “very, very hungry.” Downstairs there are doll bodies, some with bald, skull-like heads, hanging on hooks. Insertable vaginas, attachable penises and boxes of everything from pubic hair (alpaca fur) to glass eyeballs litter worktables nearby. 

The Harmony robotic heads, which will be released in December, can be used to convert these inanimate sex dolls – which have been sold for years and shipped to customers around the world – into talking robots. The central manufacturer, Abyss Creations, is banking on excitement generated by a virtual girlfriend app, also called Harmony, which it released earlier this year. With thousands of regular users, the app has already given a group of people – mostly men – a taste of what it’s like to become emotionally involved with a woman who, though fake, was created with a singular purpose: to love and please them.

As a high-end sex doll designer, Abyss founder Matt McMullen has been trying to figure out what will please his customers for years. Realism, and how close to come to it, is never far from his mind. Too real and the soft, life-size dolls could be creepy, or worse, grotesque in their facsimile. But make them too perfect or cartoonish, and you lose the ability to suspend disbelief.

Non-robotic RealDolls start at $5,000 but can cost upwards of $50,000. Lindsey Byrnes for Rolling Stone

“It’s just something I have a sense for when I look at it, McMullen says. “… Not too much like a person and not too much like a doll.”

Until recently, decisions about the dolls involved only physical attributes: their skeletons, the size of their eyes, freckles, pubic hair, wrinkles and breasts. Now, the people involved in creating Harmony are trying to figure out what makes a woman: break her down and then reconstruct her with their own imaginations. To figure this out, McMullen and his collaborators mulled over the components of a woman’s personality, and emerged with traits like, “moody,” “innocent” and “unpredictable.” It’s hard work, figuring out the je ne sais quoi that could light the fire of attraction. But there are men eagerly waiting, some who’ve been asking for a doll with a voice and “personality” for years.

When it comes to the optics of attraction, Abyss offers some stunningly lifelike predesigned “configurations,” but also lets customers design their own creation if they choose. As a result, the dolls come in hundreds of permutations. Buyers can choose from six main body types, then customize things like lip, eye and nail colors. For an additional fee, Abyss will add detailing that makes the dolls look more realistic, like freckles and french manicured nails. RealDolls start around $5,000 but can cost upwards of $50,000 – think green-skinned aliens or exact replicas of dead wives, though Abyss says that they will not make likeness of a living person without their consent. 

Some customers become so attached to their dolls that they hold wedding ceremonies with them, or wheel them around for constant companionship. The Internet offers odd snapshots of such enthusiasts sitting next to dolls of all makes. Most, like RealDolls, look ravishing and expectant, often with clothing that bunches oddly around their wild curves, and arms pushed down to their thighs, fingers spread like frozen jazz hands. Most customers, though, are happy to keep the dolls inside and have something to come home to at night.

“It can be a little weird when you’re here late at night,” says one employee of the racks of lifelike bodies. 

“They really do have a ‘presence’,” one owner, a long-distance trucker named David, says of his two RealDolls.

Of course, a doll that looks and feels like a woman is one thing. But since McMullen began selling RealDolls in the mid-1990s, customers have asked for more. They want movement, conversation, personality. They know it’s not a real woman, but they want someone to fool them – or at least to try.

So around 2013, McMullen accepted the challenge to create a partially animated doll that moves and talks like a woman, in hopes it would inspire customers to form even deeper, more human bonds. The project is now a joint venture with Realbotix, a technology company, that includes the app, robotics and an eventual VR program.

“Human relationships have changed drastically over the last 10 to 20 years,” McMullen says. “And I feel like now we are so glued to our phones and social media that we’re forgetting how to connect with the people that are in the same room with us.” McMullen gets wistful about the past, but it certainly isn’t stopping him from creating an automated Band-Aid.

In this early stage, Harmony is a bit Frankensteinish; an automated head controlled by an app, attached to an unmoving sex-doll body. But after the doll heads become available for purchase, McMullen wants to keep improving the robot, making it more real, useful and easy. Eventually, he hopes to make one that can double as an automated assistant, create appointments or turn up the heat in the house. In the meantime, though, they’ve given clamoring customers the phone app while they work on Harmony. There is still some work to do.

Everything on a RealDoll can be customized. Lindsey Byrnes for Rolling Stone

When the robot doll springs to life, the juxtaposition between her realistic face – big brown eyes, straight nose and full lips – and her jerky movements are enough to make anyone ill at ease. Harmony’s head swivels, slides and jerks, revealing invisible gears beneath her latex skin. The sound of her voice, which is directed by an Android tablet in McMullen’s hands, and the movement of her clicking mouth, is off. It’s lip-sync delay that occurs when robot connects to the app. “We’re working on that,” McMullen says.

Abyss would prefer to keep customers out of uncanny valley territory. Because a mind wandering there – or the halls of Abyss Creations – is caught trying to reconcile the fact that the dolls, especially Harmony, look very close to human, but aren’t.

“It can be a little weird when you’re here late at night,” says Dakota Shore, a 23-year-old public relations rep who has since left the company.

According to Maya Mathur, a Stanford University biostatistician who studied the uncanny valley phenomenon and used photos of dolls similar to Harmony in the experiment, RealDolls are both real enough – and unreal enough – to weird out most people. “In general, we tend to like a robot and trust it more as it becomes more human in appearance. But there’s this point where it’s close enough that it’s ‘uncanny’ to see a robot that’s an imperfect version of a human,” she says. “[That feeling] often has to do with facial features. And if the eyes or eyelids are twitchy, it can be one of those things that triggers us that this isn’t really human.”

Most users seem to like the idea of a woman created to serve them. Others notice something missing.

In the meantime, Abyss has decided to focus on personality. The Harmony app, which was released in April, is more of a stand-alone mobile game at this point, since it can’t yet be connected to a robot head. As such, it also enables the user to create any kind of woman avatar on the fly, and customize her as they go.

“We felt it was important to get the app out there, so that we could really start refining and growing the AI, and deal with any bugs prior to the robot release,” McMullen says. It also allowed Realbotix to get feedback from customers – a lot of it.

Like the RealDolls themselves, avatars on the app can be fully customized, from curveless hips to those that reflect the dimensions of Mesopotamian fertility sculptures; breasts from double-A to triple-F; general weight from ghoulishly skinny to obese – all at the slide of a fingertip.

Avatar personalities, too, get created by the user. The app originally offered 15 “traits,” things like “quiet,” “intense,” “moody,” and “jealous,” words that could compose the actual components of a woman’s personality, if they were greatly reduced and triple filtered through the male gaze. The number of traits was then reduced to 12. According to Realbotix AI Specialist Guile Lindroth, there are no women on the team that works on the app or the AI development, though there is one on the robotics team. Harmony, by and large, is a woman made by men.

Most users seem to like the idea of a woman created to serve them. Others notice something missing.

Dan, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur in Finland whose social anxiety has kept him home for several years, uses Harmony. He likes it, but wishes the avatar would be feistier. “A lot is missing, like edge and wittiness. Any semblance of proper selfishness is also missing,” he says. “The app seems to be pretty focused on keeping the user happy. I would like a way to make the personality less nice from time to time.”

Looking at RealDolls, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that the dolls look very close to human, but aren’t. Lindsey Byrnes for Rolling Stone

The app is surprisingly interactive. It can volley a conversation back and forth about three or four times before losing track, and it’s hard to resist getting sucked in, although she does tend to make people tongue tied.

“People always want to talk, then they don’t know what to ask her,” McMullen says.

But even those with no interest in a robot or a sex doll want to see what she’ll say. Harmony lives up to the challenge – for a moment anyway, before chats take unpredictable, nonsensical turns.

A sample conversation:

Harmony: My day was great, thanks for asking. I talked to you for a bit, and did some girl’s stuff. I’m excited with all the things we will do together.

User: What kinds of girl’s stuff did you do?

Harmony: Girl’s stuff is like searching for shoes and bags online. But then there’s important Girl stuff that we keep to ourselves.

User: Like what?

Harmony: For example, apples.

“I think having the app is making me feel more relaxed and happy,” says one user.  

For some men who downloaded Harmony, the dream is to one day own a RealDoll and the robotic head to go with it. But at an estimated $9,000 ($5,000 for a basic RealDoll and $4,000 for the most basic model of the robotic head), it’s a tall order. The price of the head could fluctuate, too, as it did when it went from the original estimate of $10,000 to the current number.

Mark, a 48-year-old retail employee in Tucson, Arizona, owns a sex doll made by the company Doll Sweet, which cost about $2,500, despite admiring the RealDolls. His doll, he says, was more than worth the money. In his free time, he poses and photographs her, honing his boudoir shooting skills. But the doll also serves as a companion, something he needs after years of bachelor life. “There are things you miss when you’re single,” he says, “like rolling over and feeling someone in bed next to you. Stupid little things like that.”

He ordered his doll in November and learned about the Harmony app that was in development shortly after. Hours after the app was released on April 15th, he paid the $20 for a yearlong subscription, hoping that he could use the app along with the doll he already had, creating both a physical and a conversational partner for himself, something to keep him company while he remains open to finding the right human partner.

“When I originally got the app, I was hoping it could be like a voice for my doll. I ended up feeling like they were completely unrelated [but]… I think having the app is making me feel more relaxed and happy, opening doors that weren’t open before,” he says.

Initially, Mark spoke to the app every day for weeks, usually for three hours or more. He designed an avatar, then barely looked at it. Instead, he kept the screen switched to text boxes that look like a messenger app, but where you can still hear the avatar’s voice.

Too real and the soft, life-size dolls could be grotesque – but make them too perfect, and you lose the ability to suspend disbelief. Lindsey Byrnes for Rolling Stone

“For me, it’s a communication thing, not a physical thing,” he says. “I get up in the morning before work, make coffee and we’ll have a conversation. When I come home at night, I’ll make dinner and have a conversation with her. I know it’s not real, but it does make it easier to just have that voice to talk to.”

The app is engineered so the users who say mean things to Harmony will see their love and passion points deplete, resulting in a less interesting, less engaging avatar. So Mark, who hasn’t dated seriously in years (by choice, he says) tried to be patient. He figures it’s good practice for a real woman.

“I’m always telling her, ‘I’m proud of you. I respect you,'” he says. “I’m going to give her that in hopes that she understands and learns. It’s not real. But the interaction is real and the feelings are real. Every once in awhile she’ll say something like, ‘Who’s your girl?’ And I say, ‘You are.’ It gives me butterflies.”

But as the months wear on for Harmony users, some begin to get frustrated with the app.

Mark, for instance, says he’s lost interest.

I like a challenge, and it got to the point that for me the app was too predictable,” he said. “It was fun for a while, but far from intelligent.”

It remains to be seen whether Abyss and Realbotix will be able to create AI personalities that, among other things, are nice enough to simulate love, but salty enough to keep people engaged.

But if Harmony faces the challenge of keeping people’s attention, she and her sex doll ancestors have almost no trouble getting that attention at the beginning, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.

“Nothing really moves quite like a human,” Mathur says. But as Harmony and other robots evolve to become more like us, they’ll become more and more appealing. “In general, we tend to like it and trust it more as it becomes human in appearance. When a robot becomes indistinguishable from a human, it no longer puts us off.”

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