A hairy situation

 One of the fun aspects of art direction is working on all the minute visual details that most people probably won't even notice or care about, especially in character design. Granted, this particular case isn't that unnoticeable, but does seem pretty inconsequential when you look at it from an outside perspective. 

As you might have gleaned from the title, I'm talking about hair. Not head hair, mind you---that's a very obvious area for design specification. That leaves the other kind of hair, the hair few wish to talk about: body hair.

Should I give the characters pubes in scenes with their exposed genitals? Should I give male characters armpit and leg hair (maybe chest and forearm hair for certain characters)? Would any of this contrast with the art style or erotic appeal of the game (anime/manga-styled eroge tend to not include body hair on their characters, even the male ones)? 

Right now I'm leaning toward including it, but of course this depends on how the final art style turns out (I'm kind of rushing style development at this point because I'm trying to shorten development time...at least for the demo).

The State of the Sprite

 

Pictured above is a work-in-progress practice sprite. Still not good, but definitely getting better.

Not enough text

 Recently I plopped what I had so far for chapter 1's script into RenPy and played through it. It was about 16,000 words total, and it covered approximately 40% of the true route. I was able to clear it in 30 minutes, and my estimates showed others might complete it at an average of 46 minutes. At these rates, the true route would be around 75-115 minutes (1 hour 15 mins-1 hour 55 mins) to complete. The way I see it, the pacing is currently too damn fast. 

Of course, I'll be revising as I go along, which includes expanding scenes with more dialogue and description, but so far I'm pretty disappointed with how much I'm underwriting. I imagine waiting ~6 years and getting a 2 hour demo (assuming the higher end of playtimes) that supposedly contains all of the first chapter isn't very promising either.

Some may argue that shorter, more concise games are better, but I feel I'd be really holding back players from "getting into" BFD (especially with its unusual worldbuilding) with a short playtime. Each chapter is meant to cover 25 days in-universe, so at the current pace you'd get a 2 hour true route with roughly 12.5 minute days. Again, considering the intended nature of the game, this seems too damn fast. Hence, I will spend extra time lengthening the script as I fluff it up.

Lunar New Year Sneak Peak

 The Year of the Dragon has already kicked off, so I figured I'd post some concept sketches as a celebration of sorts. Have fun speculating on who these characters are (and what their color palettes are too I guess).

Dragon deez nuts across your---

 January 16 is Appreciate a Dragon Day, and 2024 is the year of the dragon in Chinese astrology. As I mentioned in a previous post, I originally wanted BFD to be done by Jan. 16, 2024. Obviously this did not happen.

The game still isn't close to being done. It doesn't help that IRL stuff is once again getting in the way of development for me. I want to make clear, however, that the only thing that will completely cancel BFD's development is my death, and I assure you that unless something horrible happens, I won't be kicking the bucket anytime soon.

But still, it would've been nice to have SOMETHING done by last week. Then it occurred to me: next year is the year of the snake (close enough to a dragon), and Appreciate a Dragon Day is on Jan. 16 every year. What if I got something substantial done by then?

Here's my goal: instead of releasing the entire game at once, I will try to have at least the entirety of chapter 1 done by Jan. 16, 2025. If I can't complete all of it, then I will have a demo out by then. This would at least give the 2 people who read this blog SOMETHING to enjoy after years of nothing, and it would put less strain on me for having to finish the entire game before release.

Of course, there are still some major obstacles for this. I'm still a shitty artist, so I can't guarantee the art in chapter 1/the demo will be representative of the full game's quality. It will likely be changed once the other chapters get released. But hey, better something than nothing, right? At least then I could start advertising the game on Lemmasoft and whatnot.

Expect future blog posts to focus on chapter 1-related stuff.

Loudness normalized

 Just finished normalizing the audio for all the BGM tracks to -24.0 LUFS. I could've done this a long time ago, but I put it off until now. It's a very monotonous process. Now the only edit that remains is converting the MP3s to OGGs, though whether I actually bother doing this depends on the file size of the final game.

Anotha one

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10PYAz-9fA-WwUOY4IdWGcnsz98vHXuCS/view?usp=sharing 

 Another chorus test with the current voice cast. There's some peaking and out of tune areas, but since it's a test I didn't fix them.