Update #51 Yearn to learn

Hey nerds, what's up?

I recently started watching a Youtuber who greets their viewers like that, so I thought I'd inflict the same mental damage on you in a sort of deflection move.

This week I finished scene 12, but scene 13 has taken me quite a bit longer. I have two great excuses though! First, I decided that I needed to make the MC's master bedroom, which I had meant to do for a while. I'm no interior decorator, but it's alright. There are much fancier bedroom maps that exists, but none quite fit what I had in mind.

This means that the weird room that you may have seen in the background sometimes is now furnished. This will be fully worth it once we get to the final spicy scene of the episode. Trust!

This is the room I'm talking about. In the background you can spot a screen which has a bathtub behind it. That will come in handy in future episodes, I'm sure.

The other thing I did was learning some extremely basic Photoshop skills. I've never used it before, so even simple things are, uh, not quite so simple for me. The top image shows the results of my learning this week. I got tired of having to hide the phone screen all the time, now I don't have to.

I tried Gimp at first, but apparently there's a thing called "non-destructive editing" which Gimp lacks. This lead to my attempts looking like a donkey's arsehole once I'd gotten the image in place and angled to look like it fit on the phone screen.

So, I had to get PS instead. Ugh. I hate Adobe. Stupid anti-consumer bullshit company.

Oh, here's a pic from scene 12.

Tanathil has some... interesting wardrobe choices for working out. Not to mention Ruru.

Anyway, with those two things out of the way next week should be easier.

I recently saw discussion about what amount of text is reasonable per render for these types of VN's. I'm firmly in the camp of keeping the amount of text per render quite low. I like having the characters look like they're actually saying the things the textbox claims they are saying.

Something that especially grinds my gear is characters speaking while they clearly have their mouth closed. Or their lips wrapped around an elongated object.

I'm also mindful of not getting too long-winded. Instead I want to be short-winded. Which is definitely an actual term. And yes, that only applies to the game, not these posts.

It also just breathes life into the characters. Real life people don't speak in monotone voices with monotone faces. Their facial expressions and body language change depending on what they're saying. Since us amateur game devs can't really afford proper voice acting, I find that exaggerating expressions is a reasonable alternative.

Anyway, just something I was contemplating. Here's a final render for you.

Does this illustrate what I was talking about? If not, let's pretend it does.

That's about as much as I have to talk about today. I'm done yapping, as kids say these days. Fuck, I'm getting old.

Thank you very much for your support, and I hope no one else calls you a nerd this week!

...

I mean, unless you like being called a nerd. In which case, NEEEEEEEERD!