Devlog #1: Getting Started

Introduction to Yokai Masquerade: Hidden In Flesh

"Hidden in Flesh" takes place in Heian-era Japan during a "Yokai" outbreak, with yokai being supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore. These yokai skin humans alive, consume their flesh, and wear their skin to impersonate them and attract new victims. Every night, players must decide whether the people knocking at their door are human refugees or deadly monsters.  A distinctive feature of the game is the dialogue system: human characters will be voiced by real people, while yokai will be voiced by AI. This will challenge players to tell apart human voices from AI voices.

You can find this game's WIP Game Development Document here:

https://balanced-nasturtium-201.notion.site/Yokai-Masquerade-Hidden-in-Flesh-170...

Research

A large part of the process so far has been research into the history of the Heian era of Japan, particularly into Buddhism and Buddhist architecture of the period. The entirety of the game will take place inside a Buddhist temple complex which I will be modeling myself. Hence, it was important for me to find lots of details and references for the architecture and props that were used back in the day. I also came up with a backstory and location for the temple. In the 9th century, a Shingon Buddhist Temple Complex was built on Mt. Koya. It soon became a popular place for pilgrimage, especially amongst the nobles. However, the Temple Complex was evacuated in the cold months of the winter, and the monks took shelter at lower elevations.

My fictional temple will be a temple near Mt. Koya where the monks took shelter in the cold winter months. It also has some fantasy-related worldbuilding, but I won't spoil that because it's a pretty big part of the game.

VRoid

I am planning to use Vroid models for this game, since modeling every character myself is unrealistic in the time I have. I also want to try doing facial mocap to speed up the animation process, but that would require having 52 Arkit BlendShapes and the VRoid models don't come with that by default. There is a Unity tool that claims to be able to convert VRoid blendshapes into Arkit BlendShapes, but I haven't managed to get it working yet.

Game Development

So far, I've been mostly working on the game mechanics. I am using a plugin for my Dialogue system and a different plugin for my Interaction system, so my first step was to make sure they go together. I also started working on the NPC management system, which will be in the GameMode blueprint. The GameMode will control the day and night cycle as well as the spawning and activities of the NPCs.

I also am in the process of creating the conversation system- the dialogue system has different dialogue graphs for each 'conversation', but doesn't have a system for switching and replacing the dialogue graphs at runtime. I created a conversation struct that has the dialogue graph as well as an array of characters involved in that conversation. Now I just need to add the final logic for choosing which conversation is assigned to which NPC in the GameMode/ NPC manager.