Hey everyone!
I'm actually a bit unsure of what to post/show, but didn't want to go too long without anything new either.
So here's some random infos and sketches to see what I'm working on right now and what things you can expect from version 0.2, the NSFW update!
It will be my usual babbling and ranting but I will add a sketch or two for everyone that's more into the pictures.
For censoring and spoiler reasons, I'm going to link every sketch instead of posting it directly.
So don't worry about spoilers, I'm going to tag everything and you can decide if you want to look at it while reading!
And while I'm going to censor images for the blog, please keep in mind that everything will still be NSFW since this post is about the h-scenes.
H-Scenes / Writing
I already talked about it a couple of times, but update 0.2 will add in all the h-scenes that were missing in the latest version.
It will be 9 scenes in total that range from short, mildly teasing scenes that set the mood to longer emotional scenes that are supposed to bring the characters closer together and/or reveal some parts of the story that weren't told yet.
I've also written about 4 more scenes that are not really story related and could be seen as non-canon/optional that I'm planning to add as unlockable bonus scenes for every playthrough.
If they're in v0.2 will completely depend on how fast I can do the sketches though.
Since the scenes are non-canon I was able to go a little crazy, adding/making up whatever I want and ended up having a lot of fun writing them. So I'm actually hoping to be able to ship them with 0.2 to share them with you guys, don't count on it though!
I actually wanted to do sketching first since I would have had more stuff to show in progress updates inbetween, but I ended up doing writing first to make a proper list of what kind of
sketches I need to be able to properly update the progress bar every now and then.
Now I'm done writing for the most part and have a lot of work done that I can't really show off since that would spoil everything and would probably be a bit confusing without the sketches/right formatting, but maybe I can at least get something out of the few sketches I already made...
H-Scene Sketches
While I did start a lot of sketches I only completely finished 11 of them (3 of 9 scenes) so far.
Getting them to be the way I want is taking me a bit longer than I anticipated, but I rather get them right and take a bit longer than rushing things. I'll probably end up rushing some stuff anyway, but since it's just sketches I won't have to worry about every detail anyway.
A lot of sketches are still going to change before coloring and getting some feedback after 0.2 release will help out correcting everything I didn't see/could have looked better.
So don't worry about anything that looks off.
Just mention it somewhere here on the blog or discord and I will add it to the list of things to look into for the next update!
An example for what kind of changes can be seen on some older sketches from the old demo that nobody saw.
Image: Old demo CG / Old demo sketch comparison
As you can see I changed a lot of things like posture, proportions, etc while coloring.
Some of it because I didn't see while drawing, others because I could do it better at that point or simply didn't like what I did before.
Now the new sketches will most likely have less extreme changes, but it can still end up looking completely different if it has to.
That pretty much already brings me to my next point:
CG Variations
CG variations will be a big part of the game.
While a CG-Image is a full screen image that shows a scene in more detail, a variation of it will slightly alter the image to go along with the story.
This can be simple things like changing a facial expression, but it can also have some more extreme changes like a different pose or background.
All in all however, it's still the same base-image that's simply been changed.
That's why you see a lot of CGxxx-1, CGxxx-2 etc in the latest demo.
Variations will help make the game feel more alive and hopefully almost cinematic.
In H-scenes the variations will have an additional use and represent something similear to "key-frames" that will be needed for animations later on.
Every variation pretty much shows me what kind of body parts I need to draw in which angle and at which time of the animation it's used.
Here's a little example of how they're put together to make it easy to replace parts and make it easier to model the animation later on.
Image: Sketch/Variation layer example from office scene (Spoiler!)
For now it's just a few parts layered over each other, swapped out for each variation sketch.
But in later versions I will use them to make animation samples just like the one I made back then for the old demo:
Animation: Old demo sketch-animation test over on Furaffinity (NSFW!!)
If you're interested in some more variations here's a couple of them for the first h-scene in the game, a redrawn version of the old sketch you saw on the first link above:
Image: Variations of redrawn BJ scene from old demo (NSFW!!)
Image: New frames/variations for 2nd scene from old demo (NSFW!!)
While there's going to be a lot of variations, 0.2 won't have any animations yet.
There might be some simple test gifs similear to this:
Image: Old motion test over on Furaffinity (NSFW!)
to test motion and pacing, but nothing too serious since that would only waste time on I could use for the actual animations.
Fun fact:
I'm actually doing these kind of motion tests all the time, mostly to figure out/decide on which kind of animation/picture I'm going for.
I always end up drawing multiple sketches for the same scene and decide which one I'm going to take/animate by doing these little "warp" tests in gimp.
I have a couple of different ones for the Lucario animation, Zoroark, some unreleased ones, etc...
Here's 2 tests for Zoroark that didn't make it if you're interested:
Image: Motion test for Zoroark (NSFW!)
Image: Motion test for Zoroark 2 (NSFW!)
Keep in mind that these were really just to test what kind of pose I want, I was still figuring out which style I was going for and design would have changed a lot after.
I have a lot of these + some random, silly/cute animations I make inbetween to work against stress.
You could call them leftovers from whatever I work on at the time and if you want I can try to share a few more of them in the future.
End word
I think that's pretty much all I can talk about right now and I hope that it was somewhat entertaining and shortens your wait for v0.2.
When I guessed the release dates for the roadmap, I gave myself time until late July.
While I'm hoping to get everything done until end of the month, I probably end up fixing and finalizing things until 15. of July after all... But we can always hope.
If you want I can show of some more sketches on a later post in about 2 weeks when I'm hopefully done sketching.
Alltogether, just let me know what you think about the sketches or whatever is on your mind.
I'm always glad to answer questions and get feedback so I know what to improve in the future.
I didn't want to spoil too much, but since I didn't have much to show here's some more sketches(without variations) from the office h-scene, to at least have something to show if you were only interested in sketches from the start. Sketch 08 and 09 will most likely end up animated btw!
Images: Office H-Scene Sketches with Anthro/Dream Fia (Spoiler!)
H-CG06 (SFW!)
H-CG08 (SFW!)
H-CG08-10 (NSFW!)
H-CG09 (NSFW!)
I know this post didn't have too much in it, but you can always reach out to me if you want to know more about the progress or want more details on what I'm working on right now.
I'll keep you updated on everything, thanks for reading and interest in the project!
-Dark
