Hey again everyone!
I was actually hoping to be done by now but it's seems like I need July to finish
version 0.2 (or the NSFW update) after all..
It's nothing too severe since I'm still in synch with the roadmap, but it would have been nice
to have some more time for the coming animations as well...
For now I'm hoping to release it on 15th of July, but depending on how well everything works/looks
I might take a bit longer.
This blogpost will focus on the things that I was working on the last couple weeks and some more of the stuff you can expect in the next update for the game.
For everyone that doesn't quite know what's coming up here's a improvised changelog
with all of the main things I focused on the new version:
> added 9 new scenes containing the main h-scenes of the game and missing story parts
^ (These scenes will be greatly extended, rewritten and improved on in later updates and
are simply meant as a placeholder to go along with the sketches)
~ 40 CG-Sketches to properly visualize the h-scenes of the game and give an example of how they will look like in the future
^ (some of which are lightly "animated" to improve atmosphere and show off which scenes you can expect to be animated in later versions)
> added roughly 30 Character Sketches, mostly nude variants of already implemented poses
> some minor bug fixes revolving around improving gamplay and fixing the game getting stuck in certain places
For everyone that wants to know what kind of work is left to do before the release or simply wants to see some of the stuff I've done the last few weeks this is your section:
There's 3 steps left to do before I can upload v0.2, everything is pretty much done by now.
- drawing the remaining sketches
- turning some of the sketches into "makeshift" animations
- finalizing the h-scene scripts with said animations and add some fitting music
Step one: Drawing remaining sketches
Now this is an obvious one.
I'm not quite done with drawing all the sketches yet.
I should have been done by now, but not all of the sketches turned out the way I wanted them to or
were simply too complicated for me to draw after all.
I will need a few more days to rework them and try again, maybe even change up the h-scene to make something more fitting in the end.
You might want to see some examples of what is coming though so I've put together a small collection of some of those CG-Sketches that I made the last few weeks, including some of the ones I uploaded on my last post to have them in one place.
(NSFW and Spoiler ahead! Keep in mind before clicking!)
https://in-dark-waters.blogspot.com/p/nsfw.html
Most of the CG's shown will be animated and have variations, but we'll come to that in the next step...
Step two: Creating makeshift animations
This one isn't actually a must do, but something I like to do to somewhat visualize the animation progress before deciding if I want to keep the picture this way.
It also looks nice if the game and it's scenes have some movement, even if it's just sketchy placeholders.
Since this step isn't actually necessary for the update I'm still debating on how many of the CG's I'm going to add like this.
Especially after wasting a lot of time with some of the early animations and putting in a lot more effort than was needed.
For a small example of what kind of animations I mean I've uploaded and linked some of the ones I prepared for the game the last couple days.
They're all scenes/CG's that I've already shown or were in the first Dream Molder demo, so there's nothing to worry about spoilers!
(Unlike the images I didn't go through the trouble of censoring them though, so please keep in mind that the link is highly NSFW!)
Click here to go to see Animation Examples
I might decrease quality of following animations to increase my pace and get out the update earlier, but we'll see how long I'll take for the next few and how much time I have left.
Last Step: Finalizing the H-Scenes
Pretty much the last hurdle before release, finishing the programming/script on the h-scenes.
This won't be a problem in itself, it is time consuming however since I will have to read through the hundreds of text lines over and over while I put everything in place (pictures, animations, music) to make sure everything looks and works as it should.
Depending on the size of the scene I normally take around 3-8 hours for one, but since I'm also retouching some of the CG's while doing so it might take somewhat longer..
Release and what's after
In the end though there is not much left to be done until the next release which I will follow up with a break from Dream Molder, taking time off to finish some of the animations I planned on doing for a while now.
These include another Braixen animation that was votet for on Patreon, finishing some NSFW animations for Lucario that I worked on early this year, some of the reworked Dream Molder animations and a couple of random ones I came up with over the time but didn't have the time to work on yet.
How many I'm actually releasing will depend on the time I have since Dream Molder has priority for now, but we'll think about that after I've finished v0.2
I already experimented with a couple of settings and sketches for the Braixen animation by the way and if you're interested here's a link to the one I'm most likely to use at the moment:
Likely Sketch for Braixen Animation
This is not set in stone ofc and everything about the sketch (or even the setting/sketch itself) might change.
But I liked the setting and have a small story idea behind it that I was thinking of posting together with the animation. Let me know what you would like though since I want you guys to like it as well and maybe you were hoping for something different.
But that's pretty much it for this post/progress update.
It's a bit all over the place, like always, but it's quite late already and I also need to write the update on Patreon after this.
The next post should be Dream Molder v0.2 itself in (hopefully) about two weeks!
See you then and thanks for reading!
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Progress Update on Char Sketch Demo v0.2 + some technical information
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
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