FortySixtyFour
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- Joined
- Jun 19, 2019
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- 53
This was just a random thought that popped into my head last year—my guesses were that it'd probably take a ton of time and money and be a big hassle. So, I set aside 40% of my Patreon income last April and decided to give a try, investing $1,000 every month into game development.
For starters, I figured I'd go with Ren'py over VN maker or RPG maker, as it seemed easiest to tinker around with while throwing together a game with low resources. Games like these need a ton of assets, so for starters, I'd need to hire some artists. R/hungryartists was a prime hunting ground last April because the onset of quarantine meant many artists were unable to work their day jobs (but still obviously needed money). I managed to find a guy with a style I like who works for $100 per character sheet (nude base + two outfits & three expressions) and started hiring him. Because I wanted to chase a "late eighties/early nineties cartoon" aesthetic I then needed a background artist who could create painted backdrops for me, which I found after searching Fiverr. From there, I was all set!
Well, not exactly. The harem webfic I wanted to adapt had character descriptions and a handful of cover art I'd hired back in the day, but we still needed to hammer out the exact appearance (body, face, hairstyle, posture, clothing, cosplay) of each character!
Huh, and they all look completely terrible. This was within expectations, though, and after many many late night back-and-forths with the artist we got them to shape up a bit!
These are... well, they're better than they were. These designs were about the hard limit for how many extensive changes and redraws I could ask for what I was paying, since no artist has patience for endless changes in perpetuity. So, naturally since I'm still within my budget, I just recommissioned him to keep working on them until they most closely matched how the characters should look.
Much better! Although it might seem like there's not many differences, each change you see here turned out to be the product of long, in-depth discussion with my patrons, who helped correct and visually define the characters they love as they were meant to be seen. However, in our early Ren'py tests, we realized there was a problem. A BIG problem. All of the characters are facing forward! While that's traditional for many visual novels, in those sort of visual novels the sprites are facing the unseen player. My story being multi-protagonist and featuring many scenes where there's multiple characters interacting, all of the characters in a scene NEEDED to be on screen.
In the above comparison, the forward-facing characters don't look like they're interacting whatsoever, while the bottom comparison they do. Thus, at cost we needed to commission each of the main cast all over again, from side view. It was a setback—but, ultimately worth it in my eyes. The forward-facing sprites are still useable for various situations in game, so now we just had that much more variety to choose from when rigging sprites in Ren'py for scenes.
Like so! Each of the "side-facing" (actually 3/4 view but you get the idea) designs can just be flipped left or right to face another character on screen as necessary. In addition, the contrast between forward and side facing sprites helps set up the dialogue images (bust-up profile of a character to help indicate who in the scene is speaking) better.
Now, the other major assets I need! Background illustrations, because each scene needs set up with an environment to create a context. Just like working with the character artist, not everything will go smoothly here, either. Quite a few scenes seemed fine enough at the time of commissioning them but then didn't work out in the game tests at all. These locations were then adjusted, most of the time expanded upon or had their POV angle corrected or patrons found that the references used were too simple or not to how they imagined the scene.
Also, my story—AnimeCon Harem—is set at a cosplay convention, so in addition to hiring one artist to paint the scenes, I had to hire an another one to populate them with crowds where necessary. The scenes just don't come to life as a big event without the attendees and cosplayers filling a lot of the backgrounds.
Having the backdrops to pair with the characters also helps give you an idea of the "late eighties/early nineties cartoon" aesthetic I was aiming for.
The scene above is one of many "special illustrations" that's currently eating up my budget. While normally the special illustrations would just be sex scenes, I really wanted a lot of the things they do in-story to appear on screen. Rather than describing Emily handing Brian the harem charm in a text box while the character sprites actually just stand across from each other staring like soulless puppets, you see it visually represented on screen. Whenever the poll for a month's illustration goes up I try to balance the options so that they're either all mundane illustrations or all intimate options so as not to skew the results.
To sum up—it's now been exactly one year, and I have 12 character design sheets (multiple outfits, expressions, minor pose variations), 13 illustrations (all either two characters interacting or a two-parter illustration of one character performing an action), six theme music tracks (I don't know how to share these in a SH post just yet, plz help), and 33 backgrounds (many with major day / night lighting variations for maximum utility). I've spent an enormous amount of money and acquired a reasonable number of game assets, but don't have quite enough just yet to put together a game release.
Consider the topic question still being explored, and I'll revisit this thread to update now and then with my experiences.
For starters, I figured I'd go with Ren'py over VN maker or RPG maker, as it seemed easiest to tinker around with while throwing together a game with low resources. Games like these need a ton of assets, so for starters, I'd need to hire some artists. R/hungryartists was a prime hunting ground last April because the onset of quarantine meant many artists were unable to work their day jobs (but still obviously needed money). I managed to find a guy with a style I like who works for $100 per character sheet (nude base + two outfits & three expressions) and started hiring him. Because I wanted to chase a "late eighties/early nineties cartoon" aesthetic I then needed a background artist who could create painted backdrops for me, which I found after searching Fiverr. From there, I was all set!
Well, not exactly. The harem webfic I wanted to adapt had character descriptions and a handful of cover art I'd hired back in the day, but we still needed to hammer out the exact appearance (body, face, hairstyle, posture, clothing, cosplay) of each character!
Huh, and they all look completely terrible. This was within expectations, though, and after many many late night back-and-forths with the artist we got them to shape up a bit!
These are... well, they're better than they were. These designs were about the hard limit for how many extensive changes and redraws I could ask for what I was paying, since no artist has patience for endless changes in perpetuity. So, naturally since I'm still within my budget, I just recommissioned him to keep working on them until they most closely matched how the characters should look.
Much better! Although it might seem like there's not many differences, each change you see here turned out to be the product of long, in-depth discussion with my patrons, who helped correct and visually define the characters they love as they were meant to be seen. However, in our early Ren'py tests, we realized there was a problem. A BIG problem. All of the characters are facing forward! While that's traditional for many visual novels, in those sort of visual novels the sprites are facing the unseen player. My story being multi-protagonist and featuring many scenes where there's multiple characters interacting, all of the characters in a scene NEEDED to be on screen.
In the above comparison, the forward-facing characters don't look like they're interacting whatsoever, while the bottom comparison they do. Thus, at cost we needed to commission each of the main cast all over again, from side view. It was a setback—but, ultimately worth it in my eyes. The forward-facing sprites are still useable for various situations in game, so now we just had that much more variety to choose from when rigging sprites in Ren'py for scenes.
Like so! Each of the "side-facing" (actually 3/4 view but you get the idea) designs can just be flipped left or right to face another character on screen as necessary. In addition, the contrast between forward and side facing sprites helps set up the dialogue images (bust-up profile of a character to help indicate who in the scene is speaking) better.
Now, the other major assets I need! Background illustrations, because each scene needs set up with an environment to create a context. Just like working with the character artist, not everything will go smoothly here, either. Quite a few scenes seemed fine enough at the time of commissioning them but then didn't work out in the game tests at all. These locations were then adjusted, most of the time expanded upon or had their POV angle corrected or patrons found that the references used were too simple or not to how they imagined the scene.
Also, my story—AnimeCon Harem—is set at a cosplay convention, so in addition to hiring one artist to paint the scenes, I had to hire an another one to populate them with crowds where necessary. The scenes just don't come to life as a big event without the attendees and cosplayers filling a lot of the backgrounds.
Having the backdrops to pair with the characters also helps give you an idea of the "late eighties/early nineties cartoon" aesthetic I was aiming for.
The scene above is one of many "special illustrations" that's currently eating up my budget. While normally the special illustrations would just be sex scenes, I really wanted a lot of the things they do in-story to appear on screen. Rather than describing Emily handing Brian the harem charm in a text box while the character sprites actually just stand across from each other staring like soulless puppets, you see it visually represented on screen. Whenever the poll for a month's illustration goes up I try to balance the options so that they're either all mundane illustrations or all intimate options so as not to skew the results.
To sum up—it's now been exactly one year, and I have 12 character design sheets (multiple outfits, expressions, minor pose variations), 13 illustrations (all either two characters interacting or a two-parter illustration of one character performing an action), six theme music tracks (I don't know how to share these in a SH post just yet, plz help), and 33 backgrounds (many with major day / night lighting variations for maximum utility). I've spent an enormous amount of money and acquired a reasonable number of game assets, but don't have quite enough just yet to put together a game release.
Consider the topic question still being explored, and I'll revisit this thread to update now and then with my experiences.
