👙 Dev log: new looks

Hi guys!

4 new looks are added to beta this week.

Not sure what to add here, as 1 picture beats 100 words, and 1 game session beats 100 pictures in our case =P

Let's better talk about how those progress from concepts to actual parts of Lolly's wardrobe!

Step 1. Sketches. Kit hides under the warm blanket with his tablet. The initial concept may appear from nowhere or I can dig into some images collections looking for interesting ideas. Most clothes require finding some references to draw it properly. Then it takes some time and many tries to find realistic shapes, colors and patterns. On this stage I focus on a general design, so I may use some shortcuts to save time. E.g. mirror left/right parts and distorting them to match the figure (which causes blurry parts), skip some invisible pieces, etc. Depending on how clear my vision was the result may appear very sketchy or sometimes pretty close to final.

Step 2. Final art. If things go smoothly, the sketch might be pretty good, so I just add some details to it and that's it (like it was with a striped lingerie set). But more often everything should be just redrawn from scratch to ‘unblur’ it. Also I have to keep in mind how the piece will match the wardrobe layers and animation limitations. E.g. panties should be narrow enough on top to have no intersections with legs moving. Or bras contain a separate ‘belt’ detail to be fully drawn, as the distance between breasts varies revealing more of it.

Step 3. Importable sprites. The drawing app on my tablet is good for drawing, but bad for editing. Also it has limited resources and can not handle too many layers. So it's time to get back to my computer to sort the drawn layers (if I need to make changes in future) and to find good color variations. Sometimes a simple ‘recoloring’ layer on top is good enough; sometimes it requires different layers for shadows and lighten parts, patterns and decoration details. Then all these variations are combined into a separate file as flat images, 1 layer per part.

Step 4. Wearable item. This one is easy: I simply create an in-game record containing all the data about the item. T-shirt, earrings or nipples reskin – all work the same way. Game should know where it's placed in the wardrobe, name (to show players), id (to use for saves), icon (oh, this also is drawn separately), which sprites it contains and what's the order to show them, how the item impacts breasts animation, hair, waist size, which variations it has, which interactive zones it covers and many others.

Step 5. Rigging. To animate it all I need to bind the sprites to skeleton bones. This is the most annoying step. I try to reuse rigs from previous clothes, but as we have many unique designs, these require a lot of adjustments anyway. Patterned clothes are the worst as any incorrect deformations are clearly visible. MyJLC has a pretty complicated skeleton, so sometimes Unity's tools are not enough and I have to find compromises for things to at least not look awkward. The most difficult clothes are tops and bras for now, as it uses more than 12 bones for bust only and should look good for multiple breast sizes with completely different bone positions. The 2nd nightmare were the panties earlier, as they utilized the tricky bones system to slide aside. However I completely reworked this part a few weeks earlier, so it's not a problem anymore.

Step 6. Compatibility. At this stage the item is already full-working. However during tests it often appears to be not compatible with some other items or animations. Some details may be visible through covers, some pieces may intersect with each other (the most challenges are provided by shibari strap and corset), some artifacts may appear when deforming the item during specific animations. Some of these are caught early, but most of them are found by my tester only during the final testing run before release. So thank Sjava that the game looks so good and polished! ;-)

Well, it was going to be a simple dev log first, describing the updates. But ‘4 looks added’ sounded too dry. So it transformed into a large post in the end. 
I know there are people interested in such articles. Thank you for sharing that, it warms my heart!

Have a nice weekend!