Dream Molder - Character Sketch Demo v0.1

Foreword

Alright, I've been putting a lot of work/time into getting this ready those last few days and it's still not quite done. Some missing character sketches, bugs and spelling mistake that I didn't see while rushing through every path as fast as possible, etc...

Most of all this is here to give an idea of in which direction/style game is going and get the story out to people that might have better writing skills than I do and have the time to / or are willing to help me write this.

If you want to help me write this you can always reach me over at Deviantart or Furaffinity.
(Those are the sites that I see it the fastest.)

Besides helping me rewrite the game your feedback on what you like/don't like is always helpful.
I'm mostly looking for information on:
- how to improve the story/writing
- where should I change the music

- where are CG's needed and where are they too much

- which parts do you enjoy most as a reader 

- which parts did you enjoy the least / didn't like at all

Every info to the above will help me immensly improving and building the game in the future versions.
Besides that, I'm also looking for gamebreaking bugs that stop your progress.

So if you run into something just let me know and I'll try to patch it out as soon as possible.

Once the demo is out I will take a few more days to finish the missing character sketches and patch out every bug that you find, then continue sketching and writing the h-scenes to update the demo as NSFW version.

That's it as a foreword for now, everything else will be some rambling and random info about the game and it's progress/making so far.

A big shoutout and thank you to all of you that so far supported me on my patreon, keep me going with their daily messages (You probably know if that's you ;P) and to those that went through the trouble of playing and commenting on the "Reading Sample".

You guys are great and I'll do my best to improve and release something enjoyable in the end.

-Dark
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Links:
Download: Win32
Browser Version: Browser Version Test

Summary + Changelog: Dream Molder Summary Page
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Random rambling

Me rambling and ranting about some stuff that I thought about for a while.
Gonna be cringy/whiny though so there's no need to read them if you're just here for the games!
https://in-dark-waters.blogspot.com/p/random-rambling.html

Random Updates and Thoughts + Patreon-Poll Winner

Hey everyone, it's been almost two months since my last update over here...

I've been mostly posting on my Patreon which is why I didn't do much updating over here. (Besides changing the progression sidebar ofc)
So let's make this a big one and cover some of the stuff that happened after Lucario!


Last month I focused on scripting/eventing the Dream Molder scenes which are about 65% done by now.
If the speed keeps up I might be able to finish and give out the Character-Sketch Demo with all the main routes of the story.

Just as in the reading sample I gave out before there's no CG's and H-Scenes yet.
However, unlike in the sample all of the scenes will be fully scripted and show character sketches while speaking and proper message boxes/names.

For anyone that didn't play the reading sample the whole demo will pretty much look like this.









CG's will be simple placeholders with a simple discription for you to know what's happening and a CG-ID for me to know which picture I have to replace them with later on.

<< Example




Also since the character-sketch demo is going to cover all the story paths you will be able to make some decisions this time around.



Back in the first Dream Molder Demo decisions only changed her affection to you to unlock different scenes and decisions in the end of the game.

This time it will have a bigger impact on the story itself, changing what happens and the ending of the story alltogether.


There will still be some smaller decisions just as in the old Demo, but for now it's just the big ones to keep focus on the story.

H-Scenes are the only thing that aren't scripted since I'm waiting for everything else to be done before making those.
To prevent confusion it will show/give notice that there should be one right now but will skip straight to the next scene instead.

This can take from the immersion and skip some of the dialogue, but I think the main story parts should still come through. It's just for now after all.

But yeah, if everything works out I can upload the demo around the end of next month.
So let's hope together.


Patreon Poll Winner / February Pokémon

In my last post I was talking about how I'm thinking of putting up a poll on my patreon so you could vote the next Pokémon for me to draw over february.

As my patrons know I did put one up and the winner of said poll was Zoroark.

I need to say this whole poll thing is more of a experiment right now since I  have pretty big motivational problems if I'm just not in the mood/have the right ideas to draw something.

Sadly the exact thing happened and I'm kind of stuck and drawing progress is going way to slow now. (I did get a lot of progress on the Dream Molder scenes instead though, so that's at least something I guess.)

My idea was to draw a comic and animate the r18 panels, so I would have some content for both sfw and nsfw.
Since I cant get anything done however I will focus on the one sketch that turned out alright and make some different variations of it.

Kinda sad that it turned out that way but I guess that's why I tested it.
Maybe I can actually get some more stuff done this month after all, let's just wait and see for now.


For anyone interested here's a little teaser of the sketch I'm working on right now:

WIP > Cropped NSFW Version

 

I'm going to upload the full/highres image on my patreon once the different versions are done.
It's not what I planned on doing but I hope some of you are still looking forward to it.

Happy Holidays everyone! (Edit-03.01.2019)

Just a quick update for everyone not following my patreon on what I'm doing right now and what's going to happen next.

What I'm working on rest of the month:

As posted before I took things a bit slower with Dream Molder this month and worked on the Lucario picture instead.
And even though I did like the feedback I actually wanted to make an animation out of it until today, which I sadly didn't get done in time...

I'm still working on it though and maybe I can still get it out before end of the year when I start investing more time into dream molder again.

Here's a little preview to the lucario animation:

This really is highly WIP.
As you can see some parts are still missing/not moving with the model properly.
But the model is almost done and I'm looking forward to trying around with it and see what I can do with it in the end.

I'm hoping to get a small moving/breathing animation loop like this for wallpaper use and maybe one with more action or even somewhat interactive.

But we'll see what I can do.
Of course I will upload high Quality Versions of it on my Patreon again, and if I don't get it done by end of the month I wont charge for it by the time it's out.

EDIT 2 ################

Happy new year everyone!

I already wanted to get the lucario animation out days ago, but the rendering is taking ages.
I have way too many different version and it takes up to an hour for just one to render.
That's mostly my computer that keeps freezing on me while trying to convert the stuff but worst is that I keep finding obvious mistakes that I have to correct, but always after rendering the file.

Sorry about the extra wait, I'll upload them the moment I can!

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What I do next month:
I got asked if I'm going to post art like this every month from now on, and I probably wont have the time if I want to get some proper progress on Dream Molder.
However, I'm thinking about doing this every second month and let you vote which pokemon in the time I'm not drawing anything.

Right now I don't have any idea for a Pokemon/Picture yet, so feel free to tell  me what you would like to see.

That's pretty much all the time I have for this post right now and I'll probably edit/look over it tomorrow.

So until then... happy holidays and a nice start into the week everyone!

Short Update

Hey everyone, just giving the short update I promised in the side-bar.

I was actually hoping that I could release the sketch demo before end of the year, but after running a few tests on the first couple scenes that I finished I found way too many bugs and little mistakes that still needed change before I can actually release anything.

And I'm not even done with all of them yet...

And since I don't have that much time to work on it at the moment I will most probably not be able to get it out before end of the year..

Seeing your feedback however I feel like taking my time to work everything out seems to be the better option anyways and I won't have to worry as much about it.
Thanks for that.

Most people probably aren't even interested in the sketch demo anyway since it will mostly consist of text.


Instead I'm hoping to at least get some random artwork out and maybe even make a H animation out of it.
Here is one of the few sketches I did that has the highest probability that I'm going to keep working on it:

WARNING / CENSORED BUT STILL NSFW (Update)

 

(Update: 14.12.18 Not much time to give info right now since I have to get up in the morning, but wanted to at least show the progress.
Picture is about done, with lots of different variations of it as well.
With and without breasts, male/female, "censored" one without gender and so on..
Even with shiny version of all of them.

Not quite satisfied with them, but probably not able to do it better at the moment either.
Gonna upload it on a few sites and think about adding a few patreon ranks to upload the projects files for it as a reward as well. Not sure about it though..
For now I'll just leave you with this :>)

I drew multiple version of it. A male, female and a anthropomorphic (the sketch) one.
If I'm going to properly colorate it I'm going to upload all of them on patreon, but I'll let you know when I actually do.


The longer I'm working on the game the more I realize that I need some help if I want to finish it at some point, so I'm still thinking of how to actually take some.
If you have some ideas of how I should handle things let me know.

That's all for now, I'll update over here in this post if there's anything going on.

Last Update (probably) before Sketch Demo (Edit)

Hey again everyone.

I didn't expect to actually give text-only updates every month, but here we are...

I have a lot going on in real life at the moment.
There's always some days of peace and quiet inbetween, but I can't work on the game every day like I would like to.

Some of it has to do with work, some with family and my own health.
So until at least some of it is cleared up things will go a little bit slower...

Starting next year everything should hopefully be somewhat smoother again.

Until then I just have to push a little to get updates out and actually show some of the things I've done.

Sketch Demo

For anyone that didn't notice through the side bar, I started working on the sketch demo.

I'm not completely done with the character sketches yet, but through the stuff that is going on right now I don't have the patience/concentration to finish them either.

Instead I started importing and correcting the remaining text/dialogues of the game.

Right now I'm about 80% done with importing the planned text.
The last bit should only take a few days, followed by scripting some of the scenes and adding some tentative sounds and music.
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Edit: 
Just finished to edit and import the last bit of the text I've planned.
However, I think I would like to re-add some of the scenes from one of the paths I removed because I didn't like how it turned out in the end.
I will need to rewrite them for that and that might take some additional time but I hope it makes it worth the wait.

Also thanks for the feedback guys.
It might not seem like much but a few comments like that already give me the motivation I need to keep doing my stuff through the daily stress.
So have a nice weekend everyone! (10.11.2018)

Edit 3:
For anyone that noticed the 2nd edit, I got my computer back running.
I didn't lose any progress and can just keep working, sorry about freaking anyone out. xD
I will still need to keep an eye on the com for now but hope to not have any further problems until release of sketch demo.(14.11.2018)
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To put it together the Sketch Demo will include:

- every major path and decision of the game
- all/most of the character sketches that will later on be replaced with colorated versions

It will not include:

- any of the H-Scenes
- CG's and Background Images
- Minigames
- Extra and Bonus Scenes

This demo is pretty much for everyone that's interested or wants to help out writing/correcting the story.
Unlike in the reading sample character sketches will give some more life to most of the scenes.
Sadly CG's that are also a big part of the game will still be missing and only a description of them/placeholder will be in their place.

Updates after Sketch Demo

After finishing the sketch demo I will keep working on it in this order:

- finishing and fixing character sketches/scenes you think are simply ugly or need to be reworked
- sketching and writing dialogues for h-scenes
> Releasing Sketch Demo with additional H-Scenes

- colorating and animating the H-Scenes
> Releasing some animation samples for H-Scenes on Patreon

- sketching the CG's and Backgrounds for the game
- scripting menus, options and some addition game stuff like extra decisions
> Releasing new version of Sketch Demo, complete with all sketches of everything in the game

- colorating the sketches until 100% of the games art is colorated
- adding or making better fitting music for the game (likely because of rights of use)
> First release of early version of the game

- making animations for some characters, CG's and additional customizations
- adding bonus scenes (with some additional H-Animations)
- implementing some mini-games
- some after work in every area of the game
> Full release of the game


There are/is quite some steps/time until the full release at the bottom, but this is what I'm hoping to do after the sketch release.

To be honest I'm getting quite impatient because no matter how much work I do I don't seem to get anywhere...

Maybe I will take a break and work on a different game inbetween, but for now I will follow the plan though.


I hope this post in itself shows what's going on with the game right now and there's some of you that look ahead for the sketch demo.

Like always if you have any questions or anything just leave a comment, I'll answer whatever I can.

Alright then, have a nice weekend everyone and I'll see when I upload the sketch demo. :>

Back to drawing and customisation

Hey everyone, just a small post to keep you up to date.

The progress over the last few weeks was quite slow since I was gone over the end of the month and then got sick right after, but I hope that it's going faster while I'm gradually getting better again.


Reading Sample
Last month I released a reading sample and got some feedback to help improving the story.
It wasn't exactly the feedback I was hoping for but as long as someone responds it's better than nothing I guess. xD
So thanks to Sparky66 for reading through everything and giving his thoughts. :>

The reading sample is going to stay online for a couple more days, but as soon as I have the time I'm going to take it down again until I have some more stuff to test for you guys...

The next thing is probably going to be the sketch demo, at least as long as I'm not taking a break from drawing the character sketches again what takes us to the next thing...

Character Sketches

I finished a little bit over half of the character sketches now, only missing a little bit over 100 sketches before I can start putting together a proper demo for gameplay tests.

Most of these character sketches are going to be poses for Braixen (~50) what is way too much
and could have been completely avoided by using expressions instead of poses, but I'am hesitant in using those.

If someone wonders what the expression/pose thing is about...

Poses swap the whole posture of the character in a scene to give a detailed image of how the he reacts in certain situations.

This can not only make the game look more alive but also help define the character and/or help out if the game lacks the writing.

While this probably (at least in my opinion) looks best, drawing a different pose for every scene would be a lot of work and in cases where you need to hire a artist for your game not even affordable.

That's why people draw expressions instead.

Pretty much the same thing as poses, but instead of using the whole body to describe how the character feels it's only the face or sometimes an arm/something similear that's changing.

This takes a lot of work from the artist and can also decrease game size if you have a limit for that aswell.

Most games use 1 pose per character and only rely on expressions like this to save budget and can make the game look boring, especially if it doesn't have anything else to go for.

I did plan on using tons of poses at the start, but this is obviously not feasible for me to create in such a short amount of time by myself. Especially since I'm still not good enough to keep them in a good quality.

I will still try to keep some poses, but keeping it up so I can actually finish it someday is definitely more important.


Instead I will try to animate the different expressions later on using Live2d, what I already tested over the week while I was too sick to draw...

Animation and Customisation

I already mentioned in earlier posts that I want to implement some kind of customisation for Braixen and the possability for a shiny at game start...

Using Live2d I already tested for a simple way for me to implement these things without having to put in tons of scripts and grafics.

I added a simple/subtle breathing animation to one of the sketches and added an option to color/replace parts, what seemed to work completely fine ingame.

This is just a simple test of course, but you can probably expect animated characters and changeable hairstyles like in this in the full version now that I tested it.



There's some big stuff coming up in real life and I will probably have to take some breaks from drawing inbetween, but I'm still hoping to release the sketch demo including samples for the h-scenes before end of the year.

We'll see how it goes.

Change of plans

Hey everyone, just a quick heads up that I'm changing the process of making the game up a little.

Since last update

After posting the last update I started drawing nonstop for like 20 days and drew around 100 ( roughly 45%) of the Character Sketches I needed.
But after around 70-80 of the sketches the speed and quality definitely dropped and it was obvious that I need to take a break.

To not loose any time I started preparing for the first release/demo of the game instead, by designing the UI, implementing some scripts and making replacement grafics to use until I have the actual sketches later on.

This means there's at least a "playable" version of the first scene, right now that looks somewhat like this:

I made a similear "sketched" version for the first dream molder demo back then that looked somewhat like this:

Sketch/Story Demo for reading

Unlike the sketch demo back then that I only used to test for myself, I'm planning on releasing the new "sketch demo" for you guys to read through it.
This way I can collect feedback on what I have of the story right now while showing at least some of the stuff I did so far.

This also gives you guys the ability to proof read and/or translate it into your own language since I've got a few offers for that as well.

However, I want to make clear that the demo will not contain any of the backgrounds/CG's and H-Scenes yet and will only have placeholders for now. (Like the blurred out BG001 up there)
Most of the functions and mini games, as well as additional decisions wont be implemented yet either.
So it really is just a for reading and those of you that are interested in the art and animations will have to wait a little bit longer.

But for those interested in the story and general writing, I'm trying to hurry things and put the whole thing together asap.

Monthly future Demos and Updates

After releasing this Sketch/Story Demo, I will start to draw/sketch the missing art for the scenes and release them every month on my patreon.
So there's finally some stuff to see and actual benefit of beeing patron (beside knowing that you help me make this thing ofc xD)

This way you will see the game progress together with me, the work I put in it and be able to influence it by telling me what should be changed or added.

I have a lot of plans for the game in itself and I'm going to share all of them once the first demo is out, but for now I will need to transfer the raw story/dialogues into the game.



One last thing..
I'm sorry that you guys have to wait this long, but it's clear that the project in itself still too much for me to handle and I lack the experience, time and composure to work on it faster.

This just shows that I should stick to smaller/ short-story sized projects for now, or at least as long as I don't have a team to work together with.
But that's the future, so until then I'm going to concentrate on this and hope you stay around. :>

Have a great week everyone.