Meet Shizuka - The Professor - v0.2

This week's new character is Shizuka! A professor at the university.

Seeing "professor" and then this outfit probably doesn't make any sense. I'll explain.

Shizuka is part of the storyline meant to introduce people to the pregnancy mechanic. She's a professor in the medical department doing research into fertility. More specifically, she's trying to create a drug that will let infertile women get pregnant. She needs a volunteer to help her with her research, but has been having a lot of trouble finding anyone willing to participate. She's known for going a bit too far with her experiments, and there's a lot of rumors about horrible things that have happened to past volunteers. So she's gotten a bit desperate to get a volunteer. She's gone so far as to try and lure men in with her body. All her attempts to get volunteers have failed, so she asked one of the working girls how to dress sexier and attract men. That's why she's got a pretty similar outfit on.

As for Shizuka's personality, the rumors are all true. Shizuka has a one-track mind. She only cares about her research and will do anything to push it further. She's especially invested in her current research project, because she's never been able to have children herself.

The full pregnancy storyline wont be added in right away. It's pretty short, but there's 3 separate characters that are going to be a part of it. Shizuka, another in the neighborhood, and then another one at the school. The one in the neighborhood is planned to be added in the August update, v0.1.4, but the other character wont be added until after v0.2 is out. That's when the storyline will get wrapped up. Once Shizuka gets added, you'll be able to get her scene though.

Inspiration - 

Shizuka actually has two big inspirations. I thought they gave of similar vibes, so I kind of combined the two. The first, is Shizuka Ichijou from an eroge called Jutaijima - https://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/characters.php?id=72054

Shizuka is the primary inspiration, and where the name the idea for her to be a researcher came from. I kept a similar overall color scheme with blonde hair, red clothes, and the black thigh highs and gloves. I also gave her the same bit of blue eyeliner. I just wanted to see how that would look in this style, since up until now, I've only done the soft eye shadow. It ended up working pretty well and gives Shizuka a bit of uniqueness among the other characters so far.

The other inspiration is Reika Kitami from Bible Black. https://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/characters.php?id=96060

I ended up going with a similar hair style as Reika to start off. There haven't been many characters with a middle part like this, even though it's an extremely common hair style, so I've been trying to add more in. Then I also used a similar lip color. I also liked the more sort of dirty blonde, as opposed to Shizuka's bright yellow. She ended up looking a lot like Reika because of it though. A little too much. Which is when I decided to add in the blue eyeliner, and also why I gave her green eyes instead of blue. I tried changing her lip color to red, but decided to change it back to purple. I liked that the clothes didn't really match her makeup. It's a little way to show in her design that she's not normally like this. I also gave her a couple of lines around the mouth to make her look a little older. It helps to further separate the character from the inspiration, and also just makes sense. Shizuka in the game is a long standing professor. It makes no sense for her to be 20-something. So adding in those little lines made her look slightly older. I ended up doing just the mouth ones, instead of mouth and eye like I did with the cougar random skank and Shiori. Since Shizuka isn't meant to be that old. More like late 30s, rather than 40s or 50s.

Then of course her clothes were meant to be super skimpy because she's trying to lure someone in to be her volunteer. She was already going to have the thigh highs since both Reika Kitami and Shizuka Ichijou both have thigh highs, and I wanted her to have a short skirt and lots of skin showing. I tried a few different tops and dresses, mostly different backless dresses and halter tops, but ultimately landed on the tube top and miniskirt. Then I noticed that Shizuka Ichijou had gloves on, and thought that fit for a scientist type character, and included those as well. It ended up looking a lot like the working girl design, so I decided to lean into it and make everything like a latex type of material and added in the lore in my head that Shizuka got the outfit idea from the working girls. That probably wont ever be mentioned in game though.

And then I decided to go with a back pose, because there aren't any in the game yet, and I've wanted to include them. I just haven't had a character idea that worked with it yet. Until now. The idea for Shizuka is that she's standing in the hall literally shaking her mostly exposed ass to try and lure someone in, so it made sense for her to be turned like this.

For this artwork, I also tried adding in a rimlight as part of my quest to make the art less AI-like.

RIP Working Girls and Madison

I also wanted to quickly mention that, if you've played v0.1.3 and are wondering about the new Working Girls and Madison scenes, I ended up pushing them to v0.1.4. I had wanted to include them in v0.1.3, but the addition of the Random Skank and the change in process ended up taking too much time. I couldn't do any extra work on top of the normal schedule. Also, the Working Girls were primarily added just to give people easy exp, and with the random skank doing that, I wanted to give the Working Girls their own update too. I'll be reworking how much exp they give to make it a little more worth it. Right now the base value is 1 exp every $2 spent, but with a bunch of random skanks running around, it wouldn't really be worth it to pay for exp when it's that low. Especially right now when money earning potential is still low. So I'm going to play around and see what works best.

Out like trout

That's all for now. Don't forget to go vote in the poll if you haven't already! And I hope you look forward to seeing Shizuka in v0.2!