Progress Update: September 2023

So dry. So dry. Where is the rain?

My dehydration aside, things are going well. I'm deep into Ta'kom's story, I have ordered several new CGs, and the character designs are on the verge of being done. I haven't discussed the art for a while, so maybe a brief dive into what my thinking is around all that.

Using multiple different artists for the CGs has been a real boon. While in a perfect world, part of me would always prefer a universal style for all the art in a project, the reality is that the volume of art I want for the project is infeasible for one person to do unless it used a very simple style. Your sort of classic flat-shaded pieces. That was my thinking originally, but even then, the volume would have kept Tanu drawing for years and years more. And the advantages of not doing it that way have been significant: being able to use people with strengths in specific areas (wait until you see the Kierie CG), being able to parallelise CG work, and being able to get pieces of arbitrary rendering quality appropriate to the eroticism and gravity of the scene, limited only by the funding and the availability of character designs.

The latter is now close to complete. Of the four I ordered from Tanu a couple months ago, only one is left (Eshu) and should arrive this month. After that, she only has to design the painted dog twins and then...it's finished. All characters designed! (She does need to produce refs for Dalarius and Rhangani, but as these are pre-existent characters that will be vastly easier). Boerewors and Inkanyamba are on the way as well, though those are being done by different artists since feral designs aren't Tanu's strong suite. Boerewors is being shaded now and he looks so fucking good, and Inkanyamba is going to blow everyone's socks off because of how disgustingly talented the artist is with that sort of character. To conserve cost and time, the Boerewors and Inkanyamba ones are CGs that will double as character refs, so there probably won't be voting on how those look. However if some change simply has to be made for some unavoidable reason, I'll revisit the artists and get the changes made.

It might not be clear, but the CGs so far have been approximately 1 per character. Flax naturally features in many of them, but my goal is to ensure each character has one CG represented in the story up to 0.5 - partly to make it "worth" playing each character once, but also because it's just nice seeing each character get an illustrated moment. They'll all get more yet, but for now, with 0.5 solidly in the bag, it's a low-risk high-reward venture. The only ones left for me to order are Eshu and the wild dog twins, both of which are just waiting on their character designs. And then?

Well, then it's sprite time! (Shout-out to the various randos in the community who say LOTM isn't a "real VN" because it doesn't have sprites. Lol.)

Tanu and I are going to experiment with sprite designs to see what works, but I have a definitive concept of what I'm aiming for. Here's a visual example from one of my own commissions:

The background can be ignored, of course. The key elements about her style that originally caught my eye for Vn purposes are all present:

• Bold, visible linework. The art stands out clearly from the background. This is key; I don't want painterly-looking sprites. Two characters should be able to overlap without melding.
• Subtle shading. The shading isn't flat, but it's also not fully real. The use of highlights, colour gradiants and contact shadows helps sell the presence of the image in the world without using full shading (which is a lot of work and cost).
• Bright colours. The colours pop so well. Partly that's assisted by the highlights, but in general she is just superb with colours.
• Expressions. Absolutely key for sprites of course, and I love her expressions.
• Detailing. Lots of little touches that make the sprites stand out from the crowd.

So that's what I want from the sprites, too. Perhaps some of you were first attracted to the project by the promise of Tanu sprites, and you won't be disappointed. Perhaps it's worth stating here that even though some characters are being designed by different artists, their sprites will still be done by Tanu. The characters (minus Flax) will be rendered with half-body or maybe three-quarter sprites, with each one having a few variations of outfit (eg. casual, formal, nude), pose and of course expression. Some characters will also have variants of decorative elements like facial hair. The combinations here can quickly become a chore from an art perspective, so I am not planning different casual outfits; characters will just really fucking love how one set of clothes looks and will reuse it for weeks on end. Flax himself will not be a sprite in the "world"; he will appear as a talking head in the corner, showing only his head with no body.

The process of putting the sprites in will be lengthy, but I've got a plan for that too. I do not write the game directly in Ren'Py's format; I have a custom script format which I compile into .rpy files. This has many advantages, and one of the major ones was forward planning for sprites. At some point I'll go on an unpaid hiatus for a few months to write a visual sprite allocation tool (VSAT in the industry) which will basically be an app that I can "play" the game in, seeing each line of dialogue in order, and choosing relevant character sprites for it from a sort of wardrobe on the side that shows all possible options and renders them in realtime for me so I can see how it'll look in-game. It will automatically persist this for the character as I step through the script, generating the optimised code needed to make it show in Ren'Py, and letting me jump to any spot in the game to see what the sprites are at that point. The VSAT does a lot of other stuff like branch testing as well, but sprite allocation will be the major purpose. Even with a tool like this, it'll still take me some time to put them all in for all the text done so far, but once I'm caught up I'll just need to do it for each new tranche of monthly writing as I do it.

Speaking of writing, that's going well. Doing a poll each month to let you guys choose which character I should focus on has been a great idea. Ta'kom is coming along nicely, and I think people will be quite surprised at the twists and turns of his route. At the same time I've done some more work on the Family DLC, and I've also gathered a few more narratively inclined folks to assist with making the story the best it can be. I'll polish up part of Suri's last-month route as well, since that needs finishing, but beyond that it'll just be Ta'kom this month.

And that's all I can think of for now. Hope you find that all interesting, and see you at the end of the month for the next build!

Zaggy