Posted July 21, 2022 by timoteoxo
#Blog
I'm blown away by all of your messages regarding the VN. I'm so thankful and inspired. I'm still in the middle of the next update which is surprisingly going a bit faster than the initial one. Read along for some random unstructured ramblings about the game.
After release, I wanted to get a refresher on everything. I've been working on that last scene for a while, I forgot how everything else looked and I wanted to be reminded in case anyone wants to talk about anything. So I did a quick playthrough, fast forward, to see everything again. And boy, there were several mishaps that I felt should have been fixed but I forgot, or I just didn't have the time.
Just look at it:
Devin's hair magically changes between these consecutive shots.
And then there are these shots.
These aren't consecutive shots but its the same scene. Look at the hair on Devin's ear. It should behave like the first image.
I've actually noticed this before release. The issue was that some of the hair mesh wasn't completely rigged to the head. I don't recall how that happened but I did fix it some time while making Ed's scene. I thought about going back to these shots to redo them but I felt that would have taken a bit of time so it will stay like that for the time being.
Maybe the buttons on the new one are too shiny and clean and I forgot to add the neck tie. Underneath the old one though, is a very ugly seam where the buttons should be. There's so much wrong with the first uniform that you can point out. The exaggerated stitches make it look silly and it simply didn't have a good looking structure. Fun fact: I did a lot of these in Blender but this new uniform is actually a Daz clothing I imported over. Again, I'm not very good with cloth. I still need practice on it so I'm trying to get all the help I can. It's the same situation with everyone's clothing. I'm slowly replacing all of them with better ones.
I was a bit torn on this, 50/50 on either A or B. (A was the original, B started during Ed's scene.) I planned on using B moving forward but felt he lacked a little bit of that daddy quality. I realized that the lessened beard had a big impact on that so I went back to the original beard and got C. I'll still use B in the upcoming update because I've already made some renders for it, but C will eventually take his place. (Still, I have a sinking feeling that he's becoming noticeably handsome instead of the kind of handsome only few people see which was my intention. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing, though.)
(Is it actually possible to go from bald to the hair in B in 2 months? Because that was what I said the game:))
Other notes:
Someone asked about Asian characters - I'm Asian myself so its quite a blunder for me to not have an Asian character in this release. I do have 2 of them, actually, 1 will be coming in the next update.
There was a discussion about body types of the characters and I'd just like to say that I love the bara/bear type characters. It is what I originally set out to make . And I'm referring to the ones that are not completely lean. The ones with some belly, some pecs, etc. This means I have characters that fit this body type. It does not mean I won't add the leaner/fit type characters or some muscle dudes. What I'm avoiding are the extremes on both sides - the super thin characters with pre-adolescent faces and the extremely large caricature muscle dudes.
In all honesty, I prefer complete CG scenes. They just feel better to read and are more impactful because you see the characters in different positions other than just standing there. However, the biggest downside is that you end up using more space. A set of sprites for a character can be used over and over again, whereas a CG of a specific scene cannot. Not to mention, the sprites are very small in size compared to a full screen CG.
So expect a combination of both. Important scenes such as the R18 ones will always be full CGs, so are establishing shots and character introductions. Any other scene that will not lose as much impact if turned into the Sprite format will be in sprite format. This helps me build the scenes so much quicker and easier, and be able to work on the full CGs with more time.
Anyway, once again, I really appreciate all your feedback. Thank you so much.