08/12/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Hellooo~ooo everyone! Time for this week's update. 

Summary

• Finished the Raif CG

• Started Daaz CG

  • About 50% done with it

• New BG

• Finished drafting and revising the bonus scene

Writing

This week I finished drafting and revising the bonus scene for chapter two. This is a group scene so there is only one and it's just under 5000 words (4885 - that is the coded word count).

This brings the total word count for my "short project" - which is what this was supposed to be - to 636,000 words. About 50,000 words shorter than Changeling. So....technically shorter? I guess?????

Anyway I intend to get this coded over the next couple of days in terms of BG, Sound, and Characters.

Art 

I have completed a CG and started on the next one...

CGs are around 70% complete. I have three more to finish after doing the one I'm currently working on for Daaz.

The CGs are proving interesting for sure, given the customisation available in WSC.

So this is a brief explanation of how CGs work when you are doing customisation and have flat, 2D, static artwork where everything is drawn manually every time it's shown.

First of all, in Renpy, the CGs are composited from multiple files using something called "LayeredImage" which is just a built in function for composited images in Renpy. Sprites are also made out of layered images. 

You can see that here where every part is its own image.

Every CG is going to have different requirements depending on the angle Wil is shown at or how much of the body is shown.

But at the very least, in most cases I will need a base/background (typically the environment + the LI without Wil being shown). Then Wil's body, Wil's head, Wil's clothes, Wil's eyes, Wil's Eyebrows, Wil's Mouth, and Wil's hair. All on separate transparent layers.

All of these individual images get layered together to show the CG you see in the game.

Now, I don't always need all these layers. The first CG shows very little of Wil so I don't need things like the body or clothes. And you can't see enough of the face that two faces were needed.

In Raif's chapter three CG, you can't see enough of Wil's face for there to need to be two individual heads. You just can't see enough of the distinguishing features for it to matter.

But for instance, in Asher's chapter 3 CG you can see the entire face from the side as well as part of the body. 

So the "parts" I need for each CG will vary a lot depending on the pose, angle, etc.

Wil's body is coloured in greyscale by me, and then recoloured by a shader in Renpy so I don't have to colour all the individual skin tones. I colour in grey and the colours are applied automatically.

But Asher's CG required both head/face shapes, and multiple bodies because you can see enough of the bodies that I needed to differentiate between them. There were also different variations of the clothing needed. Which is a total of 16 files at minimum.

But this is where things get tricky. There are small variations in various body shapes outside of just the obvious fact the chest area differs. For instance...the neck

I could potentially get away with not paying as much attention to this sort of detail (would players really notice that body 4 doesn't have an adam's apple despite being the more masculine base? Eh...). But I always try as much as possible to give people as complete an experience I can instead of stripping everything down to being portrayed as 'neutral. And that means trying to pay attention to what details I can realistically pay attention to. 

But even small variations like this can be a pain in the butt when dealing with flat artwork.

The thing about static 2D art is that in my case, I don't fully render every part of every drawing. I think this is pretty common because there's no need to render what people aren't going to see.

I don't draw what's behind the characters because there's no need to do it. Most of the time. If you remove Wil from a CG, there is a MC-shaped hole there. 

But this doesn't work for customisation. Different shapes (face shape or body shape, hair shape) have to be compensated for. You can't have an MC-Shaped hole if the shape of the MC changes based on what features they have.

For instance look at this hair that is falling over Wil's shoulder. Yes. That red blob is hair. Don't question me! But you can see that if the hair conforms to the shape of the Adam's apple, then it is going to have a weird gap when layered with the other neck shape.

You might say that I could just put the hair behind the body layer and solve the problem. 

But the issue is that all the hairstyles are partially on top of Wil's base image (the body and face) while parts of the hairstyles have to be behind them. Hair often has a portion that is behind the head and a portion above the head, a portion behind the body and a portion on top of the body. Simplifying this would often mean not being able to draw Wil's hair in a natural way.

So this can get a bit complicated.

But the alternative method is to create files that conform to every combination of the face/body variations.

There are pros and cons of both these methods and it's hard to say which is going to be more annoying because where the "annoying" part resides changes.

I tried the "save all iterations" option for Asher's Chapter 3 CG. Drawing this CG was simple and straightforward. Coding it was straightforward but...

It was a lot of files. Over 145 files that had to be saved and named in a very specific way...just for the hair. You can imagine this is a huge pain in the butt.

For the layered hair option, the big struggle is just the complexity of layering individual pieces in the art file and in the code. It's not that bad when I can break hair into two layers but sometimes there have to be three or four layers for a single hairstyle.

And not all the hairstyles are easy to break into layers. 

Layering the hair this way is more work while drawing and more work to code. And I'm still dealing with a huge amount of files because I have to recolour the hair by hand since some of the hairstyles just don't look good when recoloured by Renpy.

I ended up layering Daaz's file this way and it has...also been kind of a pain in the butt. We'll see how coding it goes.

With WSC I really wanted to try to find out what the limit of customisation for a solo dev is. How far can it be pushed before it's too much? A lot of times there is a tension between players thinking something should be "easy" and developers thinking things are likely to be too hard.

And often there isn't really a case study to prove one way or the other. It's always interesting to step into that uncertainty and try to pull back the veil a little to figure out what it's really like.

And I have to say that I've already learned a lot about where this feature becomes too much of a time sink to justify.

For instance, I like having the head/face shape being chooseable independent of the body but, realistically if I want the MC in CGs - that's not  going to be an option going forward (especially if people still want all the body types. The heads are going to have to come with the body).

The amount of extra time that goes into having 8 possible permutations of body/face rather than just 4 or just 2...is pretty huge. 

Having hairstyles that need to be coloured by hand because some of them don't play nicely with the colour shader is also an issue.

Having this many hairstyles isn't really a problem but the fact that some don't recolour well unless I do it by hand (and even then it's a bit dodgy) definitely makes me re-think what styles are feasible in future games. Or if it's better to stick with one style.

That said, I like doing customisation. I think it's fun, but I am definitely learning a lot about where reasonable limits actually are for a single artist studio.

So yeah. Fun times.

Coding and Other Stuff

Coding wise, the big thing I did this week was coding the one CG. Ha ha.

Unlike solo CGs which are really simple to code, the CGs that have Wil in them require a little more effort to set up and test.

I also dumped the bonus scene in and got some of the basics (like BGs) set up for that.

Otherwise nothing major related to code.

I did some work on the guide this week but honestly I've just been really busy with other stuff and real life things. I have all the choices put into the guide but need to go back and double check it all. There's some weird branching that occurs and I want to make sure each character has the correct choice options listed for them.

The only thing left to really complete the guide is to add in all the CGs. the locations are noted but the thumbnails aren't added since they aren't all complete yet.

Upcoming Week

• Getting the bonus scene Coded

• Finishing up Daaz's CG

• Starting the next CG....

• Working on the guide...

The guide is actually done but needs to be double checked and I've just been busy with other things. ;o;

Well, to be fair, the guide also needs the CG thumbnails which I cannot add until they are complete.

My goal is to release the route to Patreon early access (meaning Yellow Tea and above) later this month.

I probably will not have all the CGs completed by then but I can easily update it with the remaining ones.

That is the plan but that is definitely still a couple of weeks out. Probably sometime between the 20th and 22nd.

Anyway, that's all for now. I shall see you next week!