Developer's Journal 2:2 (Patreon)

Hey everybody.  I had a pretty busy week at work and I didn't have a lot of time to work on the game, but I did complete an additional 31 renders.  The scene I'm working on now is another bar scene, but with Rockford and a different cast of characters.  For the bar interior I decided to use one straight out of the box because it's a new asset and it looks really good as is, but I did have to put together an exterior for some renders so that took awhile.

There's something else I spent several hours working on today.  You've already seen that I have spent a lot of time on customizing the LI's.  The character I have had the hardest time with is the blonde character.  There are a couple of complicated reasons for this and between the release of the demo and Part One I redid her model twice trying to get it perfect.  But then as I was working with her today I really just was not happy with how her renders were turning out.  So I've been working on trying to improve her model.  This is still feasible for her because so far she's only got about three dozen renders from Part One.

The first thing I'm changing is her hair.  That hair asset has been the one constant as I've redone her model over and over since I created her in February.  I've been set on it because I think it conveys a certain sweetness that is integral to the character, but I've never been satisfied with its appearance because I don't think it frames the model's face well, creating a sort of boxy look.  And at the end of the day, this is an adult visual novel, and I want the main LI's to be attractive.  So I've got a better option for her.  The headband hair will probably stick around as a secondary hairstyle, but it won't be her main look.

The second thing I'm changing is her skin.  You can have the exact same shaping morphs in place on a model and get a very different look just by changing the skin.  Her new skin is better quality and will also age her slightly, which is what I want.

And that brings me to the third change.  I've seen a comment repeated that she is too young-looking.  I had meant to create four LI's all with different body types.  She was meant to be the short one at five feet tall.  However, in shaping her, I inadvertently (as I realized after Part One was released) scaled down her entire model, not just her height.  It's most noticeable on the Main Menu screen, where if you look at her size compared to everybody else she doesn't quite look adult-sized.  I played around with this for awhile but never did get exactly the look I wanted for her at five feet, so I finally decided to give her a couple of inches--she's now 5'2" and her body is appropriately scaled for the mid-20's woman that she is.

And that allowed me to make the fourth change.  All four LI's were meant to have different bust sizes: a small bust, a medium bust, a large bust, and a very large bust.  Obviously, Jamie and Aghavni are the large and very large busts.  The Latina was meant to be the small bust and the blonde the medium bust.  However, once I muscled up the Latina, I didn't like the flat chest look on her, so I decided to make Blondie the small bust character.  The problem was that Blondie was already so small, I felt like she needed slightly larger breasts to make it clear she was actually a woman and not a girl.  Now that her model is sized more appropriately for her age, I feel more confident in giving her a smaller bust.

I also gave her new eyebrows and increased her eyes size a smidge.

Here you can see my in-progress changes, although I'm going to keep working on this tomorrow.  If you prefer the older model let me know (although unless there's an unexpected groundswell of support for headband version Blondie I'm going forward with these changes).

Alright, this is probably way more info than anybody wants or is interested in.  If you've made it this far, I'm sorry. :D

For my upper tier patrons, I'll be working on the monthly special render tomorrow.

Thank you all for your support!'

--Monk