Devblog #31 - A pair of helping hands

What's up guys. Johnny and Nix here with another Devblog.

We've been hard at work here at Silver Studio Games over the past few months—focusing not just on new Tonks content (which we've already shared previews of), but also on upcoming content we haven’t revealed yet (like Luna), as well as enhancing existing scenes with new artwork. Today’s post is all about that last part: bringing fresh visuals to scenes you already know and love.

In a previous post, we introduced our new approach to CGs, which combines fullscreen illustrations with panels for animations, variants, and close-ups. We're excited to share that this style will also be applied to other scenes—especially those that currently rely mainly on chibis and character dolls.

When it comes to adding panels to existing scenes, we're prioritising Nix’s efforts on creating artwork that can be reused across multiple scenes to make the most of our resources. If the budget permits, our long-term goal is to bring Nix on full time—allowing us to dedicate more attention to unique, one-off scenes that deserve some visual stimulation.

One of the scenes we’re expanding with panels in the upcoming update—alongside Tonks’ content—is Hermione’s “grope me” favour. This favour will feature around 20 panels, including a few animation loops, displayed alongside the existing chibis and character doll.

To give you a better idea of how these visuals came together, I’ll let Nix share a bit about the process behind creating the artwork for this scene. Before we dive in, I want to take a moment to thank you all for your continued support. Working with Nix has been a real pleasure so far, and I’m genuinely excited about everything he’ll be bringing to the game moving forward. As I mentioned earlier, we're hoping to bring him on full time.

To help us work toward that goal, we’ve introduced a new supporter rank that lets you vote on new outfits to be added to the game. As of writing this post, we’ve already got ten new outfits drawn up—which you’ll be seeing soon!

Alright, that’s enough from me. Now, on to the meat and potatoes of this post. Take it away, Nix.

Howdy, folks! Nix here. I'm super excited to share some news with you! We have been working on a personal "gripe" of mine with the game's content for years now, going back way before me joining the team: the lack of artwork on the existing chibi scenes.

While I'm sure that they have a big following, both thanks to the chibi art and Johnny's stellar writing, I know a lot of people always wanted to see some bigger resolution art so we can really visualize what's happening in Dumbledore's office.

As such, I proposed the inclusion of an idea I'm using in a project of mine, only to find out this was already the plan all along. Great minds think alike it seems.

The general idea is to make some smaller panels, a la comic book, so that we can add a lot of artwork at a very fast rate without having to put time into rendering full scenes.

In fact, I’ve been adamant about adding scenes like these even as a fan, as you can see in this almost 3-year-old message (I was almost 2 months into learning how to draw at that point!).

While we all love detailed artwork, a lot of people would rather see more and more spicy content in a scene over a single frame with a really detailed background and some simple variations; for us the choice was easy, especially since we're working at a really fast rate to fit the budget and add in as much art as humanly possible, which has been the case so far. I’ve had a blast working with the SSG team, and I’m looking forward to seeing your input on these scenes! Enough ranting, let’s talk business.

How are we implementing these scenes? That was a question we had to ask ourselves to know how we’d handle them, since the idea is for them to fit within the game’s art style, and add a lot more meat to the past and future scenes, but to also allow some scenes to have some more visual stimulation for the players.

The first priority is respecting the game’s existing artwork, even if it’s stellar or not. Going for a comic style vibe that follows the project’s original art style felt like a proper fit due to the medium Akabur had used for the game’s lineart. This allows us to add some pretty cool stuff without necessarily having to set an entire scene visually. It also means we can set the framing around the existing artwork, so usually the setting for the scenes looks like this.

Art-wise, we like to have things “escape” the panels, as it will be showcased below. Once we have decided on the variations, requirements and such, it’s just a matter of drawing the parts we really want to highlight, and then the extras that will put focus on the major parts of the given scene; For example, while we all may like Hermione’s pretty face, it isn’t the priority in certain cases to not distract you in a scene. Such as favours focused on the breasts. So instead, I add in the base and render the lineart and colors. After that, it’s a matter of adding the variations on top.

In this case, I make the torso and Genie’s hands a different color (so that I can clearly see what I’m working on on the top layer) and render her bra and clothes.

Needless to say, we’re trying to do as much animation as possible on these. Loafy has done a masterful job at handling the time allocation into each different part of the game I work on, so that everything gets the necessary amount of love to take the game to another level from what it currently is.

At the moment, we’re doing 2-frame animations, which fit the vibe of the chibi animations, and our goal is to have more fluent animations in CGs and other scenes in the future, which all will remain drawn frame-by-frame.

After everything’s done and implemented, then comes the testing phase! We implement each panel into the game, and make sure everything looks good, doesn’t glitch and works within the existing scene. The idea is to incentivise the player to go through the dialogue and text, offering more visuals for players that don’t focus on the writing as much, but also to reward everyone with some spicy artwork when they’re playing our game.

This is the first of many insights I want to showcase in the art making process, so I’ve kept it relatively simple, but I’d love to make some more in-depth dives into what goes into the making of an asset, should you guys want to hear more about it. Let us know what you think!

Lastly, I’d love to thank you all for your incredible support. I couldn’t be here working next to two dear friends of mine, Johnny and Loafy. If it wasn’t for your continued trust in our vision to bring our ambitious ideas to life. This is only the beginning of what hopefully will be some of this project’s more fruitful years, as we have an amazing team. We’ve already got the technical part of the update out, and we can now fully focus on expanding the storylines, adding heaps of content and bringing ours, but also your ideas to life. All I can say is thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

That marks the end of today's devblog. See you all in the next one!