WIP - Old artwork and original WW style concepts

I was looking through my computer and found some old artwork from before I got my degree, as well as some of the original style concepts for WW. For this WIP I thought it would be fun to share some of it and talk about how and why WW changed.

Old Artwork -

First, here's some of my older artwork. This was after I worked on Fan Fantasy, but before I went and got my degree. So while it's a little better, it's still very basic and I was still mostly just tracing reference. These were part of CG sets that I called the "archive" series that I was planning on selling on DLSite, which is why some of them are censored. They were going to be women "cosplaying" as characters, as to not get into trouble.

These first two are a woman cosplaying as Viola from Saints Row 3. This is definitely my favorite of the series. Don't get me wrong, I know it's super rough still, and not very good. Since I had no idea how to do things like blend or use opacity brushes at all yet, so it's super hard cel shading only, but you can kind of see the origins of the WW style in here. I still like to do things like use pretty saturated colors and have the line-less glossy lips.

Then here's someone cosplaying as Elizabeth. This was before BAS came out, otherwise I 100% would have done that version instead. Very rough for sure.

I mainly share these because something I like to do, is try and sort of demystify the art process. A lot of people think of art as some kind of innate talent that doesn't take any work, but that's not the case at all. While I definitely don't think of myself as a great artist or anything now, I know I used to be way worse. Showing this old artwork is just a way to help show people how much work went into getting where I'm at today. And to show that anyone can get better. Since if I did it, I know other people can.

WW Style Concepts - 

Then I also found some style concepts for the WW style. None of these are actually finished. Since they were really just style concept tests. So I stopped once I decided the test was over, for various reasons I'll go into with each one.

I originally was planning on having the characters in Waifu Wonderland be "cosplayers" like in the archive series or "parody" characters. But I ultimately decided against it. I want to be able to put the game up on places like Steam and DLSite when it's done, and I don't think that's possible with cosplayers or parody characters. It might be okay, but might not. So I thought it was best to move away from the idea, and instead create original characters that are inspired by others instead.

Anyway, let's start with the very first art style concept.

 This is much closer to my "normal" style, at least when I was making it. A lot more detailed and closer to realism. I used more textured brushes for a more painterly effect too. I even made my own reference here in Blender, to ensure character accuracy as much as possible. The sketch is still here, but it would have been a line-less style. The sketch is just there to be a rough guideline.

It was coming along pretty nicely, but at the same time, to get this far took me about 15 hours. Since I had to find good reference that would work with the character, this generally can take up to an hour (longer if I get distracted lol). Which is why I now have a huge folder of scene references that I collect during my free time. Anyway, then I had to find the blender model and then pose the models, light the scene, and then render it out. Which took a few hours.
Then I had to do the actual sketch, which took a few hours. Then I put down the base color and started rendering, which was another few hours. And it's nowhere near done. Not even the skin is done yet. I would still need to back in with a darker color into certain part to make the shadows deeper as well as add more highlights. Then better blend both highlights and shadows. And I hadn't even gotten to the base layer for the feet or hands. And of course would still need to do the hair, jewelry, face, and the guy. Then after that, I would've had to do the cumshot. Which at the time, I was planning on doing a lot more movement for the cumshots. For this one, her hips would have slammed all the way down, arched her back more, and tilted her head. With that much movement, I would have had to do a completely new piece of art from scratch. So after realizing how much time I had spent on it already, and how much longer I had to go, I scrapped this style. It would have just taken waaaaay too long. For a single scene I would have been looking at 50-100 hours. Possibly even longer, since I originally planned on including backgrounds. That's a good 2-3 weeks of work for a single scene. And that doesn't even include the character CG. That would likely be another 2 weeks or so. At one scene ever month or so at best, that's just way too slow for what I wanted WW to be.

Which brings me to style concept two.

 So from here, I decided to make things a bit simpler. Instead of doing my normal, more detailed and realistic style, I'd go for more of an anime style. At this point, I was still working with the idea of parody characters/cosplayers. So I thought I could try to just make the characters look more like their source material, but with some added elements to make them all fit together into one style.

This one was coming along pretty well. It looked like what I was trying to parody, and I added some things like the bottom eyelashes and somewhat different face features to be able to create a consistent style. Her proportions are largely the same in the original style.

But again, this was taking way too long, and I was starting to get nervous about doing parody/cosplayer characters. For context, this took me about 8 hours to do. I hadn't even finished the base colors yet, and still had to render both characters and the background. It was likely going to take a good ~20-30 hours to finish, even with just basic cel shading. Combined with my concerns about using parody characters, I decided to drop it and try a different style.

You may also be wondering why the guy is so big and buff here. Since WW originally used existing CG, I had to think of a reason why the MC's body was always different. So I came up with the idea for the lab to sell gadgets. These gadgets could do things like change your body type, your age, or your skin color. I was going to keep that idea for the actual release for a long time. But then ultimately decided against it. I thought it would be a little weird and confusing for some people. Since unless I outright told the player, "This person requires X body type," there wouldn't be any real way of knowing you need the body changing item. And I don't like telling players exactly what to do. I'll sometimes leave little hints, but I really don't like when games tell you exactly what to do. It's even worse when there's a guided walkthrough directly in the game. I get that some people are cool with that, but personally, it takes a lot of the fun out of the game for me. If I'm not figuring things out on my own and basically just waiting for the next scene, I'd rather just look up the scenes. It's way faster. So instead of having to tell the player exactly what you need and what to do, I just cut the idea. I still have some other ideas for ways to have different body types, but in a way that makes more sense and without me having to directly tell people, but that's much later on. I'm also probably going to be leaving it up to a poll if something like that happens.

Anyway, on to the third style concept!

This was the initial sketch I did for this style. I really liked it. I think I even shared it on Twitter. It had everything that I personally like in 2D games. Sharp eyes, lips, big butt and big booba. This is when I decided to cut the backgrounds from scenes, to cut down on how long it would take to make the scenes. I thought it worked well, so I started doing a color test.

 I tried keeping it simpler than the first scene, but still have that soft shading. Having lineart this time helped to speed up the process too. I was liking how it was turning out, and while it was taking kind of a while, it wasn't too bad. This so far had taken me about 10 hours. I was getting relatively close to done though.

I considered test done at this point. It liked how it looked and it was a fairly quick style to do.

So I started to make real character art. I started with the character that Ms. Hartley ended up replacing, one of the teachers at the school. A character inspired by a CG set by Fool's Art Gallery. The character didn't have a name as far as I knew, I don't know Japanese so I had to rely on the description for the CG set translated through google translate. I didn't see a name, so I called them "Kyoushi", since that was part of the CG set name. Anyway, here's the lineart I had made.

As you can see, it's both full body and has a background. I thought that would add a bit of polish to the public presentation renders, for when I announced the character. I figured I could take away the background and cut off the legs as needed to have it better fit in game.

Before I could start coloring though, I had to stop working on the project and focus on schoolwork. So I had to let it sit for a few months while I finished out the semester.

Then winter break hit and I came back to the artwork to start working again. And I kind of hated it. The scene coloring was all way too soft and looked unfinished. It wasn't detailed enough and the style just overall looked... wrong. I don't really know how to describe it. It looked like one of my main inspirations, but worse. More like I was trying to copy them and failed miserably, rather than being an original style.

So it was back to the drawing board.

From here, I spent a lot of time thinking about and writing down what I wanted out of the style. Who my main influences are, why, and what parts I should incorporate into the style so that it's as flexible as possible.

I came up with an idea, but wanted to refine it and wanted to be able to get feedback on it from other artists. So I did a full painting every day for two weeks straight as I figured out the style. Backgrounds and all. It was miserable. I was working 14+ hours every single day to get the paintings done. Each day I would ask for feedback, and also take a look at the previous day's painting and see what parts worked, what didn't, and why. I refined the style over this period by trying out and making different brushes to get different effects, mixing hard and soft shading in different ways, figuring out how many colors I need to work in, how much detail I can do without it getting to be too much work. Doing this also just gave me a decent amount of practice. I'd share the work here, but since it's linked to my normal social media and professional portfolio, I don't want to accidentally lose out on jobs or anything by the wrong person seeing them and realizing we're the same person. Some people/companies wouldn't care that I also make adult content, but some would. And I don't want to take the risk.

Anyway, after spending all of this time to create and refine the style, I decided to finally go back to WW and start making characters. I decided that to cut down on time, I should really only make the artwork I'm going to use in the game though. So I scrapped the backgrounds for character art, and made them thigh up instead of full body.

I had thought about making Kyoushi as the first character again, but decided it would be best to do the first character you meet first. So, I made Ayako. I took everything I learned from these previous failures, as well as the two weeks of experimentation and feedback and mixed them together. And she turned out to be exactly what I wanted for the WW style. Distinctly anime style, but also fairly unique. Detailed enough that it looks like finished artwork, but not so detailed that it takes too long to make. Versatile enough that I can do different bodies and faces, with it still looking like the same style. It just felt right. That's when I decided to start this patreon and start really working hard on the game.

We done son - 

And that's it for this post. I hope that was insightful and you enjoyed seeing the old artwork and how the WW style developed! If you haven't already, be sure to vote in the opinion poll! It would really be helpful!