On Artwork and Sexybits(And Release Patchnotes!)

I’m not a particularly good artist.

That’s probably already been clear from the get-go. If not, then I apologize immensely. It was never my intention to deceive you in any way.

I started my game development career just out of college with my shiny, new Software Engineering degree and a lot of “ideas”. Around July of 2019, I started on a brand-new project, one I thought would be perfect for what I wanted to do.

I quickly ran into a roadblock on it, and as you can probably guess, it was artwork. I couldn’t draw a damn thing, despite having basically gotten a minor in illustration while in college.

I suppose it didn’t help that I had entered college without the ability to draw. As it turns out, starting to draw when you’re 22 and mostly through college isn’t the best thing.

My skill level, at that time, was several figure drawing classes and nothing else. I picked up the fundamentals of perspective and learned how to hold a pencil, and that was about it.

So I took a step back from Unity, and I reevaluated. I realized that I was spending far too much time coding an innovative combat system in unity, with great mechanics…. on reused, boring 3d assets that I couldn’t build myself due to lack of skills.

No 2d busts either, that was out of the window almost immediately despite my figure-drawing experience. I can program fairly well, as 4 years of experience with it shows, but not even the drawing classes I took taught me anything more than the basics.

So I decided to step back, and take a look at how I was doing things, and how best I could improve. I didn’t (and still don’t) want to hire an artist. I haven’t the money or time, and I want to be able to do it myself anyway.

I decided to shift my focus away from a game that’s super-gameplay driven, and instead focus on another genre and area.

I chose RPGmaker, but not because it was easier, as can probably be seen by the gameplay. I chose it because I wanted to make things harder on myself. I could get away from drawing before by focusing on the gameplay and programming, that’s an endless task in a larger game like the one I was working on before this one.

No, I chose RPGmaker because there is little to no programming to be done… And then promptly failed by deciding to take inspiration from Violated Heroine and make it into a top-down action-rpg reboot of the Persona series.

That’s not exactly a bad thing, but I had originally thought that “I can get a full semester of content, the basic systems, combat, and UI done by mid-September at worst, then spend a lot of my time on art!

I then spent 4 months tinkering with combat scripts and writing/editing other scripts, as well as learning how to do script calls in RPGmaker MV, and basically doing minimal artwork.

At the end of December I had finally done it…. The gameplay was set, it was expandable, it wasn’t perfect code, but it worked, it was functional and, in my opinion, fairly well-written! Now all that was left…. was the artwork…

So, I was back to square 1. I had managed to learn a bit of color theory, drew 3 (fairly bad) character busts you now see in the game, learned to use a digital tablet, and a few other things in those last few months… But honestly, it wasn’t close to as much as I could have done if I had just focused more on the artwork, less on the gameplay.

In the interests of not taking too long, I’ll select a few pieces from different time periods and see just how things changed.

October: 2019

In October of 2019, I participated in Inktober, joining a server to do daily drawings the entire month. My skill level increased rather quickly doing this for things like line quality, anatomy, and general art speed and hand control. I gained nothing, however, in the ways of color, and little in shading.

November 2019

In November I sort of fell back into old habits, working more on gameplay than on art skills in particular. I did manage to build most of the imp scenes(which was an interesting exercise in green skin), as well as perform a few color studies (since I knew that was a weakpoint of mine)

December 2019

In December, I particpated in another drawathon, this time only for part of the month. I also built the kissing scene, and then I panicked and threw together the nekomata scene because I fell behind on my self-imposed deadline.

I reasoned it would be fine, the art was, and still is, placeholders to me. It’s fine to let it be a little meh. It was probably a mistake, as i hadn’t even finished drawing the nekomata in, he was scribbles!

And this was the state of my artwork at release, just a few short weeks ago.

January 2019

Is just over at the time of writing, but has been focused so far on Anatamy studies and shading, plus clothing. Two weeks ago I discovered live2d, and got excited making animations with it so I put together the tavern’s first oral scene with it. It still requires a lot of drawing practice to use!

So the gist of this blog post is, I’ll probably be redoing a lot of the artwork in 4 months or so when my skills have improved. I still have a long way to go, but as long as I’m developing games I want to get better and better!

RELEASE 0.2.1

As a final aside, Release V0.2.0 and bugfixes have been released for a bit! Check them out on the downloads page! Here’s the patchnotes for both, for a quick overview of everything that’s changed.

V0.2.0-Purity and Corruption!

• Changelog
• You must start a new game for this update! Due to equipslot changes, savegames are no longer compatible, but this should be the only time a restart is necessary!
• Updates/Changes-
• – Added the Church, village entrance, tavern, and choir room maps.
• -Added Choir Practice- A subset of the religious activities the school offers, choir practice decreases corruption, increases purity, and lets angels give you…. “blessings” if you’re pure.
• -Skills Menu Upgrade – Skills can now be properly reassigned outside of dungeons.
• -Milking!- During pregnancy(and for a little while afterward) your character produces milk! The shop in town has something for that…
• -Tavern + Tavern PTJ- A new part-time job where you work as a cleaning maid!
• -Basic Prostitution! (1x Scene)
• -4 new talky(noH) repeatable scenes for Anya! Some have special activation requirements such as character pregnancy or seeing certain events previously. They start appearing a bit later into her storyline.
• – Imp Birth Scene added
• – Added basic reactions to many, but not all, of standing students! Nude+ Pregnant reactions.

• Bugfixes and Misc Changes
• -Fixed a bug in gardening club in which green mushroom seeds are never unlocked. This broke the questline for magic recall
• -Fixed body freeze on waking up in nurses’ office when dying in any other orientation than facing right… still can’t figure out what was causing it though, but adding a failsafe to combat disable fixed it
• -Fixed waterway dungeon not properly passing time upon exiting
• -Fixed Imps not showing up on stats screen when pregnant
• -Removed the standing student spawn point in the women’s restroom on floor 2. No more men in the women’s restroom!
• Changes
• -Gardening Club-Fixed harvesting not properly working on left side
• -Imps now steal a little gold(1-10) from you each time they grope you. Little thieves!
• -Combat Class-Sword Quest Never resolves properly in the quest log
• -Added 8 new random students to the random students standing and walking around
• -Gardening Club- Added a 1-use mortar! Unlocked after 15 visits, this allows you the choice of crafting 1 potion on leaving the gardening club!
• -The debug tool is no longer added to your inventory on game start. It’s now in a closet in the upper-left of the tavern’s 1st floor

Bugfixes – V0.2.1

• Changelog
• -Fixed Green Mushrooms being unharvestable.
• -Fixed Combat Self-Study applying grade to Combat 1 instead
• -Fixed stuck image in tavern PTJ
• -Made several changes to the layout of the dungeon maze maps
• to avoid dead-end blockages when events spawn in front of you