Love and Deepspace, the incredibly sexy and sweetly romantic gacha game, is also a third, secret thing: a beginner’s guide to video game development.
Colloquially known as LADS, the game is a bunch of different games stuffed into one very sexy trenchcoat. Beyond the combat challenges and interactive narrative, there’s the photo and home decoration modes in which you can pose and take pictures with your characters and design your dream house. It’s these last two that have helped me understand my true inner talent: 3D rigging and environmental design. And right now, they’re my favorite element of the game. Not the hot boys, not the spicy audio messages they leave for me, but posing and picture taking. Because Love and Deepspace is a gacha game designed for maximum wealth extraction, there’s a lot of neat stuff that’s locked behind an in-game currency wall. A pretty outfit will often cost gems that you can buy with hard currency or some other currency that requires spending gems to get. Same with the poses in photo mode. If I want a really romantic pose where my two characters are holding each other or looking into each other’s eyes, I have to pay for that.
I don’t want to pay for that, though, and over time I’ve learned how to cheat the system. As I’ve slowly grown comfortable with the game’s robust photo mode, I’ve learned that I can take basic poses and use them to create the kinds of scenes I once thought were beyond my wallet’s reach. LADS‘ photo mode features dynamic posing, with which a character will move in a predetermined loop of gestures—summoning a weapon, crossing their arms, yawning and such, and you can freeze them at any time in the loop. When I catch Xavier, the sleepy silver-haired soft boy, as he nods off, eyes closed, head listing like a foundering boat, and position him next to my main character who I’ve also caught in a blink, it kinda makes it look like they’re leaning in for a kiss, doesn’t it?
I’ve taken all kinds of pictures like this, mashing together disparate positions, zooming the camera in to cut out awkward limbs or clipping bodies to make images I would otherwise have to pay to get. You can do this with your house too. Playing around with the home decoration mode, you’ll find a suite of tools in there that feel functionally indistinct from drafting software. You can transform, flip, invert, and lock items to walls or other items to create complex decorations and furnishings. Some items, like the bathtub, are intractable but limited to a single character at a time. But if you stack two tubs on top of each other just so, you can make it look like your digital dolls are sharing an intimate bath together.
Cheating the system feels good, and honestly a bit like game development. How many stories have developers told us about how much doors suck, or the tricks they have to use for something as simple as pausing a game? My messing around in LADS‘ photo mode to get the kind of results I want may not be quite 1-to-1 with what a professional rigger does in Unreal Engine, but it certainly feels akin to it. And even if it’s not, what the advanced players are doing in home decoration mode to make unapproved things like gun racks out of wall shelves has to be. Which means that, if I ever get tired of video game journalism, LADS will have helped me developed the skills to follow my true calling, which apparently is 3D rigging.
