Kill your Darlings (Plus some WIP practice art)

One of the things you hear all the time in creative domain is that you need to be willing to "kill your darlings". That means being willing to cut out your favourite bits when they don't fit into the larger piece of work you're making. Another phrase I've heard is "Don't hold onto a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.".

I've been thinking about how A Very Full House is shaping up, and the more I think about it the more I think that Unity was the wrong engine to go with. I picked it because I had experience with it and I liked the idea of having low level control over everything. I hadn't considered just how much work would be needed to create the simple tools other choices (like Ren'py, more on this below). In the end I feel like all of the 2D top down movement is just getting in the way of the content that people actually want by putting dozens of seconds between interactions, instead of it just being a couple of clicks.

So what's the plan? Ironically, going aaaaall the way back to how I started this project: working in Ren'py! Ren'py is a 2D focused visual novel engine with native Live2D model support. Very importantly, it also has very intuitive support for writing dialogue, displaying menus, and a fairly simple UI design system. The very first teaser/FAQ for A Very Full House was written up 100% in Ren'py before I made the decision to change over to Unity.

What does that mean for development? For the art side, not much. All of the character models are still 100% useable as-is (except maybe for body physics; I'm not sure if Ren'py has that formally set up? I might be able to implement it myself).  For all of the story stuff I will also be able to port over the dialogue and descriptions already written. A lot of my effort was in recreating the script format of Ren'py, so transitioning everything over should be relatively easy.

The biggest change will be on how the player interacts with the game world. I'm scrapping the idea of a 2D overworld that you move around in. Instead the focus will be on having selectable "nodes" (think of a map of the house broken down into different rooms, plus a button that brings you to a map of the school). Nodes will contain objects you can interact with, plus characters who are there at the time. If you've ever played something like Summertime Saga you're probably familiar with the general plan for the interface.

That's going to take a little time to get set up, but once it is I expect I will be able to spend WAY more time writing, drawing, and animating, and way less time coding door interaction scripts. I'll keep you updated on the progress, and in the meantime I'm going to keep posting my practice art as I try and get my art skills up to acceptable levels!

(Speaking of art: today's piece is a WIP of some experimenting I'm doing with a different style of shading. Instead of laying down my shading colour with a large soft airbrush I've tried laying it down in a solid layer, blending the border where appropriate. It really forces me to be aware of the volumes I'm trying to define and the lighting I'm trying to imply in the scene! Fully detailed/shaded version should be up in two days.)