The Legend of Lorra (hopefully with a better ending)

The flat chested Laura enjoys a cigarette before work.

Laura's design contrasts with Lynn's character probably more than any other. Where Lynn had virtually no script written for her when we first popped her out, Laura had several thousand words worth of scenes, descriptions, dialogue, and whatnot (that of course has all been revised by now too and made even longer). She also had some concept art up beforehand (as seen in earlier posts). She was ready to be drawn from the get go, but since Skrats took over as her artist, we ended up going through largely the same design steps that we went through with Lynn.

European Laura?

Artists are like actors in a movie, in that they can bring a lot to a character that wasn't there before just in the script. There's a lot of neat things that happen when making a VN, and seeing what your artists come up with when they read through the script and start envisioning things is one of those. This was one of the early roughs Skrats made for Laura in her "punk" getup, which after a bit of dialogue between him and her writer ended up more refined later on. 

Laura was my grandma's name so this just awkward to me.

Then we had some smut drawn of her in the interest of science, which I can bullshit as "it helped design her character frame so we have an accurate breast size for her." That part was actually somewhat of an issue for Laura and Jennifer, in the latter who's breasts started off large, then larger, before shrinking a bit back near their original size.

Here's the latest design for Laura's roughs. We tend to make a design for a rough, then a rough, and then from that rough a final sprite base which we then worry about making expressions for before finally coloring it. We only have about 4 more sprites we need to worry about at this point (though coloring reminds an issue), so the shift is now more towards CG, which I'll talk about next week probably. 

Surprised By Design: All about Lynn

There's nothing too special to report this week, though the formatted script has grown to 23,287 to 26,036 words, which is always quite good. So for some filler content, let's talk about Lynn's design. Lynn was actually a character who was sort of made up on the spot: we wanted to have a fourth heroine, but the writer for that heroine ended up in the hospital, so after about a week of brainstorming a general plot and working with PFM to make my ideas less bad, Lynn was made, but she lacked any art. That's where Eyedrop came in.

Originally, Lynn was just Chinese, but Eyedrop loves his KPOP and K-On!!s and suggested some pictures, like the one above, for how he was thinking Lynn should look. After some quick discussion, we came to a conclusion on what she would look like, more or less.

This is one of Eyedrop's earliest quick concept pieces on what Lynn might look like, or it might have been his first, I don't remember which. After a few more sketches, we began to refine more and more what worked based off of aesthetic design and personality in the still developing script.

Although Lynn had very little writing when we began designing her, what was important was to make her distinct from the rest of the cast: Nikhila was Indian/South Eastern, perky, financially secure, and impulsive; Laura was tsuntsun, rebellious,  abrasive, well off, and ginger; Jennifer was a bit of a hodgepodge of Central and Eastern European things, controlling, rich, and patronizing. Lynn was then to be more of a counterpart to Jennifer, and in particular from the other two women, much less well off.

Another big reason for her character though was that I didn't want to write for another office worker, which we had two of already, and Jennifer was already one of Walter's bosses.

We agreed that Lynn needed short hair, but how exactly it would look wasn't too clear. This was us dabbling around between how her hair looks during work like the teenage girls we are. It is all very important when writing Office Space 2: Noir Boogaloo.

Eyedrop wouldn't stop hitting me until I  put up this true version of the topless Lynn. 

And finally, we figured out how her breasts would look. Again, we we're going for something more distinct: Jennifer has nice legs/hips/chest; Nikhila gets a solid B or B+ in everything (and I would argue she has the best hair); Laura is DFC with a nice ass; and Lynn is just sort of skinny with average breasts. We probably would have made Lynn the DFC if Laura wasn't made first, but it still gives variety since you can go with Lynn if you want to date a Chinese woman or Laura if you want to date a Chinese boy.

Either we'll bring up another character next week or talk about CG. Thanks for reading!

Hey June, Don't Make it Bad

June is here in force and so are we along with many other fine OELVN devs. In the above are Nadia (or Nadya for fellow true believers, by Skrats) and Kara (as a "Piano Witch," by Eyedrop) from an art thing we did with the fine gents at CannonGirls Studio, and judging by the source of much of the blog's traffic, most of you already know that. If not, here's their blog where you can yell at FabulousResults for not giving that particularly well developed blonde pictured above her own route like I do every day.

As far as progress goes, our writing is going well as of late. Act 1 is currently at about 23,287 words ready and formatted with another 14k or so awaiting formatting and about 4k more in need of writing. As you can see, Act 1 is looking at about at least 40k words after we put in the necessary revisions, which feels pretty good, especially considering we have had to throw out a lot more than that to get to this point.

Art is also progressing, though not quite as quickly as the writing is, and the lineart for at least half of the sprites is finished, and the CG is still in development. Music is currently on hiatus, so we'll see how that ends up later. Needless to say, if you're interested in doing art or music, we're also interested.

I was talking about a "Days 1 and 2" demo back in may, and after some internal discussion there, it may or may not happen because it might just make more sense to focus on releasing the demo than a sort of proto-demo. But that will now, at this point, largely depend on 2 factors: How quickly our art and music develops, and how quickly PFM gets into the Planetside 2 BETA. Do you have any strong feelings on the matter? If so, drop by and yell at us, or leave a comment here.

Other than that, I'll be making some small modifications to the blog over the next few weeks and shooting for more weekly updates.