WIP - Updating Ayako and Ayako's new scene

This week I'm working on Ayako's new scene for when you unlock the apartment.

For a while, her character CG has been bothering me too, so I also wanted to update that.

This is potentially a problem though.

Updating Ayako's Character CG -

Ayako appears to be the most popular character in the game. And if not the most popular, certainly among the top 3. So modifying her artwork is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. Too much modification and it wont look like her anymore, and people are bound to be pretty upset. But her eyes aren't the same size and don't line up. This is extremely noticeable when you flip the image.

Here's a comparison.

 The rest of the artwork looks mostly fine, but the eyes are clearly wrong. The lips are also slightly off and the back of the hair is also not quite right. Those parts aren't as noticeable and for the most part work stylistically, but I still want to adjust them. The eyes are a big problem though, and I've wanted to fix it for a while. This is another instance of me being a little over confident when I started working on the project, and not taking the time to do all of the proper steps. In this case, I never flipped the canvas to check for inconsistencies and wasn't measuring the distance between eyes. The fact that she turned out as good as she did and is as popular as she is is pretty surprising. But since she's so popular, I've been afraid to touch her. But these weird inconsistencies are what make people think AI, and I really want to get away from that. It's also just been bothering me a lot. So it's finally time to fix it. After messing around with it for a bit, this is how it turned out.

It was absolutely bizarre going back to this. My process has changed so much since this first character. Anyway, I modified the eyes, lips, and hair like I mentioned above, and then added in the lines for the fingernails to better match newer artwork. I also made her lips slightly glossier to better match more recent characters. Then I smoothed out her front leg. I have no idea what I was going for before with that weird indent. I'm guessing it was just an error I never fixed. Overall, it's not where I want it to be, but it's better than it was. To really get it to where I would want it, I would need to do a lot heavier editing. Which would lead to her looking very different. Since she's such a popular character, I didn't want to change her too much. I wanted to be sure she was largely the same still.

Updating Ayako's BJ Scene - 

This first change is an extremely small adjustment, so it may not really be all that noticeable. But I added more gloss to her lips. Normally on artwork I add just a touch of white to give lips a little more gloss, but I didn't start doing that until later scenes. So I added that in real quick for consistency with the rest of the game. A lot of artists say that small details like this don't matter because no one will see them, but I completely disagree with that. A small detail that no one will notice can have an effect on the overall quality and how a piece feels overall. Even if no one "notices" the small details, they do make an impact. Anyway, then I also added in lines for fingernails for some stylistic consistency with later artwork. And then I updated the cum variation so that her lips move a bit, like she's sucking harder. I considered removing the blush, since I decided not to do that anymore, but it looks a little weird without out, so I just left it in. Here's the updated version.

For fun, I also tried doing a goth version, to tie into a joke version of the game I've been thinking about doing for Halloween where everyone is a goth girl. I didn't really like it though. Since she's already got a dark color scheme, It wasn't really enough of a difference to make much of an impact. I only did her base CG. Here it is though.

I also played around with the idea of a Gyaru version, maybe as a costume idea for later on. Like she dresses like Seika for some reason. but really hated it after just doing the simple color adjustments. I could have kept messing with it and dove into gradient maps to get it to look better, but just decided to stop messing with it and actually be productive.

Ayako's New Scene WIP -

And now for what you're probably here for, WIP of Ayako's new scene.

Since Ayako already has a BJ scene and a sex scene, I had a bit of freedom about how to go about this next scene. You unlock this scene by unlocking the apartment, and Ayako is very happy about that. I had considered making this scene a TJ, as her giving you a reward for succeeding and moving out, but I thought that was a bit out of character for her. She's an extremely selfish person, meant to be the opposite of the stereotypical caring MILF trope. She isn't really going to care about your accomplishments or be proud of you. She only does what she does to further herself. So instead, we've got a cowgirl scene. Her "reward" for you is getting to see her face while you bang her, but really, she just likes cowgirl. I do want to do a TJ scene still, but Ayako will only do something like that if she thinks it will benefit her. So that scene would unlock a bit later.

Anyway, here's the sketch as it is right now.

Pretty happy with it right now. I'm going to let it sit overnight and come back to it and see if I'm still happy with it or if there's anything that needs adjusting before I start rendering.

This scene will be getting added into v0.2 alongside new scenes for both Kaori and Shiori. This update will also add the ability to unlock Kaori if you didn't choose her at the start. Shiori will updated to be unlockable by the end of the first part of the MMC story. Since she's going to tie into that. Ayako is still a bit up in the air how she'll be unlocked if you didn't choose her. It depends on how much support the game gets and how much I'm able to add to the game. Like I mentioned above, Ayako is a very selfish person. She's really only going to be willing to sleep with you either if she has to (by unlocking her at the start of the game) or if she has something to gain. Which is something that will end up coming a lot later. Right now, she owns a house and has enough money so that she can maintain her lifestyle without having to work. Getting something she doesn't have and wants from you will take a while. I originally was going to make it so you have to unlock the mansion. The basic idea being that she'll let you bang her for letting her live there. But since the mansion may not end up being added, and is planned to be extremely hard to unlock, I'm currently reworking it. It would be a little sadistic to make people unlock the final tier just to unlock one of the starters. I'm just trying to figure out a way to unlock her earlier so that it makes sense. How much earlier will depend on how far into plans I'm able to get.

All done -

That's it for this WIP post. I hope you enjoyed seeing Ayako's new artwork and scene, and have a bit of an understanding of why I updated the older artwork. I hope you'll look forward to seeing Ayako's updated artwork and new scene in v0.2! Also, don't forget to vote in the poll if you haven't already! The poll just shows raw votes, not weighted votes, so even though it looks like one option is winning, it may still be losing with weights.