Update on art account

 It appears that my account has been unsuspended. I'll continue using it for the time being, although I'm still a little worried about trigger-happy mod bots.

Art Xitter Suspended

Because X is a useless piece of shit site and app that was raped to hell and back by El*n M*sk's incompetence, both my dedicated art account and main account have been suspended for "inauthentic behavior", which essentially mean the automated moderation system is convinced I'm a bot for whatever reason (even though actual bots continue to run rampant and have been spamming illegal material on the site for years now). Oh and apparently this has happened to tons of other people too, turns out they're all free users using the app normally and that blue checks have never had to deal with this. Funny how that works.

I don't know if I'll be making any new accounts any time soon (I sent in a few appeals, not too convinced they'll get through considering other people's experience with the appeals system and may have to send in several appeals if they're rejected to even have a slight chance of getting my accounts back), mostly because it'd be a pain in the ass to have to re-follow a bunch of people. This may mean that there will be no way to post mini-updates in the form of art WIPs. I might just post art dump WIPs on the blog once in a while to make up for this. 

 

EDIT: Figured I might as well include a WIP here. Not sure why I didn't think of that in the first place. 

Backgrounds Complete

This post is technically a few hours late since I finished the last BG right before I had to go to work.

There are 77 BGs total, including variations on base images for certain times of day and whatnot. Here are a few samples:

 

 

There are some I'm not entirely satisfied with, such as

 where the metal parts beneath the table don't seem to match up completely (they're going to be covered up by the text box anyway, which is why I didn't fix them), and

which I'm not sure if I really *need* since I could probably write certain scenes in similar areas.

Regardless, this leaves Chapter 1 at about 63% completion. Next on my agenda is CGs and "popup images", but I'd like to get started on finalizing the UI, too. As always, I'll be posting teasers and smaller art-related updates on my dedicated art Twitter, which I don't feel like linking here since I already have it in previous posts.

Backgrounds Over 50% Completed

 I somehow never noticed this until today, but I have about 54% backgrounds required for Chapter 1 done. Progress has been slower than I'd prefer, but BGs can be very time consuming and painful to draw (my hand hurts as I type this). I doubt I'll finish them by the end of the month, but I'll try to pick up the pace as much as I can. 

Once again, teasers for what I'm working on can be found on my dedicated art account on Twitter.

Sprites for Chapter 1 Complete

 

Every sprite set needed for Chapter 1 has been completed. There was a bit of a delay in finishing them because I was working on scripting-related things in Renpy (implementing audio, tweaking UI, and some textual fixes), mostly because I find working on sprites tedious and wanted to keep my enthusiasm up. These aren't all the sprites needed for the full game, I just decided it would be better to focus only on the items required for Chapter 1 right now, so more sprite sets will be completed for subsequent chapters (though there aren't a lot needed; most of the game depends on the sets I have now).

With that being said, the total assets needed for Chapter 1 are over 50% completed. My next focus will be on background art, but I will likely be working on other things as well to prevent boredom. CGs may be a part of this. In any case, I will continue posting occasional updates on my art Twitter, which was linked in the previous post.

Where to find my art WIPs

 Since I've mainly been focusing on producing art assets (which there are a lot of), I've been unable to share significant status updates in terms of progress. My next blog post will probably come out when I'm finished with all the sprite sets needed for Chapter 1, but until then, you can find teasers and WIPs of things I'm working on here. 

A Necessary Sacrifice

 

This odd-looking woman is one of many background characters ("NPCs", if you will) that will appear in BFD. She'll only be on screen for at most a couple lines and then disappear, though she may or may not show up in a CG or two, possibly with a more normal face. 

The role of NPCs like her is to establish that there are more people in the game's world beside the main cast. The concepts and conceits behind BFD's worldbuilding are of epic proportions and affect the entire human race, but BFD's story is focused on a tiny subset of humanity. I figured that including background characters would make the world feel more fleshed out and help players feel that there are a lot more stories going on in this game's world, stories that ultimately go untold but exist nonetheless. Also, some aspects of their designs are symbolic of certain aspects of the world's culture, but I'll leave that for players to discover. 

 These NPCs aren't necessary to include, and I've often wondered whether it's a good idea to include them in the first place. In other VNs, background characters usually aren't given sprites, instead appearing solely in the text, though sometimes you'll see them represented as generic silhouettes or faceless mannequins. They're almost never given full designs because there's no real reason to. There's no need to lengthen the development time by creating assets for them, and they're probably not worth the extra disk space. Even so, I feel that BFD's background characters add enough to the game experience to justify their existence.

Of course, I still recognize that these guys should be treated as minor set pieces in the grand scheme of things, so I haven't been putting a lot of time into drawing them. As a result, many of them look a little wonky, some more so than others. Most are unremarkable (but clearly messy in terms of anatomy and rendering), but a few are notable for being a little funny and uncanny. I think it really sells the idea that the world of BFD is not what it seems at a cursory glance.

At the very least, I hope players will be amused by their strange appearances. Besides not wanting to spend a lot of time on NPC art, one of the main reasons I haven't fixed the above woman's sprite is because her lopsidedness has grown on me. The audience will probably be spending a lot less time with her than I have, but maybe they'll feel something similar.

Some of you might be wondering why I've dedicated a whole post to some nobody that'll only be on screen for like 5 seconds while having nothing for the game's actual main cast. Rest assured, they're all fully-designed, and I'll write more about them someday, though it'll probably be sometime closer to Chapter 1's release (or at least when I have enough decent-looking art of them completed).

Lines & Squiggles 2: A Lesson in Optics

 

This is a mandatory restatement of opening sentences present in most of my other blog posts that BFD is, in fact, still being worked on. However, there's a twist this time: progress isn't slow, it's just that I don't think it's worth sharing all of it on here. I've mostly been focused on art, including background art, an example of which being the above image. I have two other versions of this BG for evening and nighttime (as well as a secret third thing that will be present at the end of Chapter 1):

I'm not going to pretend there are no issues with these pieces or that I didn't use a specialized grass texture brush to paint the grass, but I do think they work well enough as BGs. At this point I'm fully committed to the idea of "settling" for flawed art just to get the game done---hence, progress isn't slow. 

 In terms of the actual "game" aspect of this project, I've also started putting the script together in Renpy, and I currently have all of Chapter 1's text with choices implemented. I have a few custom text boxes (may be subject to minor changes) and logos done as well (one of which is on the right side of this site).

 

 Now with the obligatory status update out of the way, I'd like to expand on some of the points I made in my previous post regarding lines and squiggles. Since I've been focusing on art assets, the technical and perceptual aspects mentioned therein have been haunting me. There was no need for me to use the grass brush in those BGs; I should've been able to draw the blades manually. I (allegedly) know how to draw them. I know how to paint them in theory, but as it turns out, knowing and doing are two different things. It's like how people learn physics in high school but don't apply it to the world beyond. Putting the top of a pickle jar you can't open in hot water for a minute and sprinkling water onto your food before re-heating it in the microwave seem like creative and novel ideas until you remember how thermal energy works. Then the realization makes you want to hit yourself on the head for being so stupid...it was so obvious, but you somehow completely missed it.

 How could this happen? 

 

There is a strange divide between theory and praxis at play here. Theory can provide a framework for praxis to work around: heat increases the movement of atoms--->heating up an object can cause it to expand--->you can make a pickle jar easier to open by heating up the lid. However, most people approach such problems in the opposite direction: I can't open this pickle jar--->I look up ways to make jar lids easier to remove--->I discover the heat technique, which can be explained with basic physics facts. Both of these trains of thought are linear, so their starting points determine how the situation is conceptualized (you either learn some theory and later come up with a practical use for it or you encounter a problem and discover why a particular solution works in theory afterwards). 

A nonlinear version might look something like this: I can't open this pickle jar--->I wonder why pickle jar lids are so tight and hard to remove--->I consider how jars are constructed, which could include going over the properties of the materials used in them--->using my knowledge of materials science and thermodynamics, I realize heating up the lid might make it easier to remove. This thought process might seem more convoluted than the first two, and it's probably less common as a result.

I approached the problem of painting the grass blades in a linear way: I need grass in this BG, how do I paint grass--->I look through my list of brushes and find one for grass textures--->after playing around with the brush and finishing up the BG, I notice how grass blades can be represented by long, thin strokes with lighter and darker-colored blades arranged in a certain pattern that creates the illusion of depth. While mulling over this, I realized something: most of my thought processes in learning art have been linearly-structured (I wanted to draw something but couldn't get it to look right, so I sought out solutions and discovered why these solutions worked as a posteriori knowledge. I suspect a lot of beginner (and even some intermediate) artists fall into this process. A lot of online "art tutorial" content preys on this; for example, if a fledgling artist is struggling to draw hands, they might search up "how to draw hands" on YouTube and watch several videos on how to construct hands from basic shapes like boxes and cylinders, only to be reminded that breaking things down into simpler shapes is a pretty standard technique that most beginner artists learn early on.

Now, this fledgling artist might be a little better at drawing hands after watching those videos and practicing for a bit, but have they gotten better at drawing in general? If they internalized the shape technique and figured they can apply it to pretty much anything they want to draw, then yes. The thing is, many beginners don't internalize basic techniques, and many more probably don't even seek them out, preferring to watch several videos about other body parts and blindly copying them without fully digesting the theory they're built on. The issues with linear thought trains should be apparent here; more often than not, they're constructed around finding immediate solutions to short-term problems, only taking things in at a surface level. Recall how the human brain is built around energy optimization first and foremost, and you should have a decent idea of how deep this problem goes.

What matters more: how things are, or how they appear?

 

I'm not a good artist by any means, but if there's one thing I've gleaned from my experience thus far, it's that looking at something and seeing something are not the same. Shapes and lines are helpful for simplifying the artistic process both intuitively and mechanically, but they aren't real (at least not in a tangible sense). They are illusions, in a sense. In the tangible world, or the world governed by the laws of physics, the only visually-perceived thing that "exists" is light. For all intents and purposes, shadow is an extension of light. To understand and master art, you must internalize the idea that everything you see is an effect of light and shadow. 

There are a lot of ways to put this idea into practice. One way is to completely forgo the sketching and lineart steps, instead creating everything from the ground up with splotches of color (gray is technically a color, so grayscale work is compatible with this). If you really must use lines or shapes, you could start off with the colors and using your knowledge of light and shadow to craft "edges", or you could add lineart at the very end by drawing over your color blocks. Again, I am not a good artist so you may want to take my words with a grain of salt, but I think these observations could be useful for people who feel "stuck" in terms of their art progress. It's certainly helped me, at least.

Chapter 1 Final Draft Complete

 NO MORE EDITING FOR REAL THIS TIME

NO MORE 

It's just lines and squiggles bro it's not that hard lol

 Find a really great piece of art online, save its image to your computer. Then open the image, look at it, and wonder, "How the hell is it even possible to paint colors and textures like this?"

Now zoom in. Those ripples on the water? Those soft strands of hair? Those shifting patches reds and blues on human skin? Those blades of grass? The entirety of the piece's complex and beautiful interpretations of light and shadow? It's all LINES and SQUIGGLES.

Up close, everything looks like BABY MODE MS PAINT BULLSHIT. Every detail that pulled you into the piece and took your breath away is actually RANDOM-LOOKING ASSORTMENTS OF COLOR AS APPLIED BY A FINGER PAINTING CHIMP. How could anyone think to arrange it all like this? How the hell does it all add up to a coherent, aesthetically-pleasing painting?

Is my perception of light fucked? Too complicated? Too unclear? What is optics? Do I even understand physics or have I been PLAYING MYSELF THIS WHOLE DAMN TIME, STRUGGLING TO IMPROVE MY OWN ART WHILE NOT ADOPTING AN ACTUAL ARTISTIC MINDSET? 

Literally the first thing they tell you in middle school art class is that we often aren't truly SEEING the things around us, just LOOKING at them. The amount of times you've looked at something is positively correlated with the amount of details that get filtered during sensory processing—this is the main reason why people struggle drawing human bodies despite inhabiting such a body and being surrounded by other human bodies for most of their lives. When you engage with artistic theory and/or take an art class, you learn how to perceive and draw humans figures through abstraction, by capturing the gist of the form and dynamics of a body with representational lines, curves, shapes, and polyhedrons. Everything in art is founded on abstraction, and it takes surprisingly little to convey whatever you're trying to depict if you're strategic with abstractions. It's similar to how scientific and mathematical models aim to reproduce complex physical phenomena: they take in as few parameters as they can get away with to capture the essential behavior. 

The fundamentals build up skill over time. You get better at seeing, perceiving, and analyzing the world around you, breaking everything up into simple patterns and somehow getting closer to depicting it accurately (both in terms of hardcore realism and aesthetic goals, aka getting better at making something look good and more accurate to your mental vision of it). At its core, improving at art involves unshackling yourself from the filters, assumptions, and heuristics, looking beyond the energy-conserving cognitive shortcuts. Look beyond yourself, and you might just get a little closer to seeing things as they actually are.

 Alright then, seems like a pretty straightforward technique. I'll try it out now...

...

...

...

...Wow this looks like shit

Non-update

 I was originally going to wait until I finished something significant to write another blog post, but I figured I should put this out now since progress has been moving very very slowly again. The project is not dead, I am just worn out by school and have been spending a lot of my free time unwinding from all the cringe ass homework I've been doing (as well as working on my senior project, which is going terribly because I'm trying to write Mathematica code to model various systems to include in the project paper, and I fucking suck at Mathematica, I have to get the first draft done in two weeks and if I don't learn to code quick enough I'm going to have to post screenshots of models from other papers [with citations of course if it comes to this] or draw the models manually, both of which will make me look like a complete dipshit). In terms of progress, I am about 80% done with the draft for the last alternate route in Chapter 1 and about 10% done with editing for said route, but on the bright side I'm done with both the drafts and editing for all the other routes. I will probably make a more detailed post once I finish this route, though I might try to finish up some other stuff before posting it too idk yet.

Writing Style Aesthetics: Artifice vs. Verisimilitude

 For those who only want to see updates, here's a quick rundown of what I've been working on: editing for the Chapter 1 true route, first drafts for the final two alt routes, BGM/sound design edits, art drafts and design finalization. I'll try my best to make a Christmas Miracle happen and have something significant to show off or announce within the next few days. Feel free to ignore the rest of this post.

Something that's been tormenting me since I started writing Chapter 1 one is the quality of said writing---not in terms of my skill (or at least I hope not) but rather in how I'm limiting myself to a certain style. Chapter 1's protagonist is canonically not very good with the language arts and has a stilted, awkward way of communicating, so I'm not sure it would be "in character" to write anything particularly poetic or beautiful from her point of view. Of course, good prosaic styles exist (Hemingway and whatnot), but I'm not talking those forms of prose when I say this character is bad at communicating. If you were to read an essay she produced for a school project or something like that, you'd quickly clock it as a result of the nationwide budget cuts to education. If you've ever come across American teachers complaining about No Child Left Behind in response to their students' papers, then you should have a decent idea of what her work is like.

That's all well and good, and I think it's fine to cast shitty writers as protagonists, but what would this entail for her in-game narration? 

This is the opening chapter of the game. This is going to be everyone's first experience with the game, and it's inevitably going to color their expectations for the rest of it. What does it say about BFD and its writer if the writing blows major dick and is awful to read in the very first chapter?

I've been holding back when working on the Chapter 1 drafts in the name of "verisimilitude", or for maintaining a semblance of realism in the narration. Limiting my normal writing style to this extent has been quite eye-opening in terms of both my own skill and my conception of what "good writing" looks like, but at the same time, it's also been painful. Granted, I haven't written seriously in a long time, which dulls the pain a little. But still, it feels like I'm half-assing a very important part of the very first chapter of my very first game. I'm often left wondering if I should slacken this commitment to realism in favor of literary artifice; this includes things like more poetic descriptions and following standard English grammar rules, stuff that the Chapter 1 protagonist would almost never use if she were actually in charge of writing from her own perspective.

Of course, this isn't a unique phenomenon. The issue of accurately translating thoughts and conceptions into something tangible has plagued artists since the dawn of time. It's like nothing ever comes out as good as you imagine it, and you'll never be satisfied with your work no matter how much time you spend polishing it. In the words of the legendary Leonardohen Skynyrd DiCaprio, "Art is never finished, only abandoned."

These issues in BFD's writing come in a couple different forms. I don't feel like going into all of them, but I'll highlight an example that should make my point clearer.

In writing circles, there are occasional debates about how much character dialogues should take from conversations in real life. Real speech is inundated with meaningless filler, which some argue should be eschewed in literary speech; this refers to things like "uh", "um", "like", or basically anything used to pad out statements when one is trying to put their thoughts into words. If you make a character say something like "Uh I um went to the store and uh I bought some uh milk and uh...", they'll come off as nervous, confused, or zonked. Even if real people talk like that regardless of personality or mood, they'll be interpreted in a specific light by readers because these types of filler words have been encoded as temperament signifiers in the sphere of language arts. They also tend to make sentences really annoying to read. However, if used in the right contexts, filler words can make dialogue sound more natural while also being easy on the eyes. The "right contexts" in question come about through the actual behaviors and feelings of the characters, and in certain mediums, they can come through the technical requirements and/or properties of a given medium. For visual novels with voice acting, filler words are often included liberally since the script being read by the audience is the same script used by the voice actors. Their inclusion can make the game's narration easier to follow since minimizing the differences between the written and spoken words can make the reading experience smoother (this is also likely why moans, screams, and various onomatopoeias are spelled out in H-scene dialogues).

In BFD, you'll see characters spouting filler words a lot. I chose to model the dialogue after the standard in other visual novels, which involves liberal filler word usage as described above. BFD doesn't have voice acting, but most other visual novels without voice acting use this same style. Maybe this is just my personal preference, but I feel that this style works well in the visual novel format; the on-screen depiction of characters' expressions supplements the filler in a way that wouldn't work in a purely textual medium. Plus, it allows me to convey emotions and moods in a more subtle way, expanding the potential circumstances in which many sprite and CG assets are used.

Again, this is not the only issue I've been dealing with in Chapter 1, and it is not representative of the issues with Chapter 1's writing as a whole. If anything, I made this post to organize some of my thoughts on imitating nature and art and which one I should prioritize in certain situations.

Doing some editing of the true route draft

 This shit is so ass bro 😭

Excuse me

 

It's been almost three months since I last posted an update, what the fuck is going on⁉️

Dear readers, I've been wondering that myself. What the fuck IS going on? Why is my time management so ass??

So basically, I'm a fifth year college student (failed a required class only offered once a year because I'm stupid and gay), and I'm also a double major taking my two major-specific senior thesis classes. On top of that, since I'm stupid and gay, I have to spend a lot of time working on assignments/studying to keep up with the non-thesis work. Of course, this is not a strong enough excuse to halt game development entirely, so I haven't been on hiatus or anything like that; I'm just stuck working at a very slow pace right now because of school.

 For the record, I'm still aiming for the chapter 1 release to be on January 16 for Appreciate a Dragon Day (or on January 29 for the Chinese New Year of the Snake if I need a little extra time). However, I want to make it clear that this slowing down of development might make those deadlines a little difficult, and I figured I'd post this now as a warning. I didn't think it was worthwhile to post this at all at first since I wanted to focus on actual progress (plus these kinds of announcements tend to make devs look flaky and unreliable), but I came around to the idea that this would be a good record of acknowledgement---acknowledgement of my personal life getting in the way of timely development before the deadlines close in. 

I hope you all understand, but you are free to call me a dumb lazy bitch anyway since I'm only in this situation due to being bad at school lol

More Art

 

Just wanted to share some more practice art I made since I got the style nailed down. Above is a portion of chapter 1's protagonist.

Clarification on "WHAT I HAVE DONE??????"

 Just wanted to clarify that I know the art I displayed in the last post is flawed in a few respects. I know the eyes are uneven and not round enough, I know the face is a weirdly proportioned, I know the detail in the hair strands looks somewhat odd given the detail of the rest of the head, and I know the pitch black outlines are a little jarring. I want to emphasize my previous words---you can expect the art to look like something "VERY SIMILAR" to this in the demo. I plan to polish this style for the final product. Rest assured, this piece was made for PRACTICE and PRACTICE ONLY. I'll have higher standards in place for the final sprites.

Oh, maybe I should bring this up now, but this style is specifically meant for the sprites; CGs will look similar, obviously (not going to change the whole ass style I set up and have been developing/deciding on for years now...okay there may be some variation in some of the CGs but these will be done on a CASE-BY-CASE, INFREQUENT basis), but more consideration will be given to the background environments and how light/shadows/colors should be affected in said environments. I ought to post some WIP CGs in the future to make this clearer.

Have I FINALLY DONE IT??????

 

 

Above is my most recent practice piece. I feel very satisfied with the end result; a lot of the things I was aiming for were hit, and a lot of the things I disliked were fixed. With this, I can confidently say that you can expect an art style very similar to this in chapter 1's demo release.

Art is getting...better?

 

I think I'm finally starting to narrow down the specific issues I've been having with my art, and I'm finally starting to produce practice pieces that don't make me feel horribly disgusted. I know what I want to try next, and hopefully it'll result in something that looks like it could be in the demo.

On Chapter 1's Route Structure

 

Above is a snippet of a chart I made detailing the choices and endings in BFD. As you can see, chapter 1 has 4 endings total, with the single true end (Sea Lulling) unlocking chapter 2.

I'm currently working on the draft for Kemp Owyne since it's so close to the true end, meaning it will take the shortest amount of time to write out of all the alternate endings.

I will post the full version of this image sometime in the future (probably after chapter 1 is released) to give people an idea of how the rest of the game is structured.

I realize there's some aspects of this picture that would be confusing to anyone reading this post at this time, sparking questions such as "wtf is a Alaire", so sometime before chapter 1's release I'll post a downloadable game manual that will fill you all in.

Chapter 1's True Route Draft Complete

 

Pics are of CG concepts/references. I drew them with a mouse, which is why they look like shit.

Anywho, I'm pleased to announce that the draft of chapter 1's true route has finally been completed, as the more precocious among us have probably figured out from the title. I originally wanted this done by the end of June, but I ended up putting off some of the scenes because I wasn't sure if I was happy with how I envisioned them (aka procrastination, bumfuck laziness).

I use the term "draft" because I want the script to be eternally open for editing. The ways certain things are phrased and even their portrayal will remain up for potential changing as development goes on (even when I deem chapter 1 fully completed). This is so that any shitty writing that I fail to take notice of until I'm a bit older and wiser can be fixed so I don't hate myself for publishing it.

Basically, the draft is representative of the final script of chapter 1's true route at this point in time, but I will still go over it to make edits from time to time. However, right now my next focus is to get the alternate routes' drafts done; editing will be taking a backseat for a bit.