Saturday Update!

Hello everyone! It's time for updates!

 Current image finalization: 12/733

OKAY I KNOW THE WRONG NUMBER WENT UP 😂 But I swear I have a good reason!

I did two things last week:

• Work on the primary basement background for about 30 hours- it is not even close to done though LMAO

• Rewrote one of the more boring/lackluster endings in a way that required me to add a bunch of new placeholder sprites

I'll start with explaining the second since it's easier:

Like I did in TPOF Alpha Testing, the final assignment I gave to my Alpha Testers was to choose their least favourite ending and tell me why, if possible. I had a lot of success in the past with this assignment- squeezing more critique out of my poor testers 😂

This time, I got some great data too, and massively improved a couple of the 'weak link' endings.

I feel very confident that the improvements last week were 100% worth the effort.

I'll keep the details of the ending to myself though ;) sorry!

-----------------

Now, about the background. This task dominated my week. I have never drawn a more complicated or labour intense background. Maybe image in general?

This is because of my camera motion/active sprite approach that requires the background be 9 times larger than a normal background [ 3 times as tall, 3 times as wide ]. This allows me to pan across the background and give the illusion of looking around the room. Anyone who played the TPOF DLC will recognize this- I tested the concept back then.

But unlike Fox's pitch black room, this background is fully visible and filled with workshop junk LMAO

The background was even MORE work, because I refused to use The Sims or any other method of 3D modelling. I've drawn everything in the background from scratch using nothing but a vanishing point grid in photoshop.

My reasoning for this is that I want it to have an organic, hand-drawn, comic book sort of look. My priorities are vibes over realism for this project.

Photoshop's vanishing point tool isn't really meant for this kind of thing [ it's meant for convincingly adding an image on top of something angled in an existing photo ], but it is possible to build a fictional area and render the grids onto a layer. This is a useful starting point for art!

With the help of the grid and ✨Math✨ I was able to construct elements of the background, one by one.

Once I was done sketching, came 2 days of frankly, excruciating, hand inking LMAO

 I also chose to completely forego the use of stabilizers. Everything is 100% done by hand, naturally as possible.

I really wanted a hand-inked look. Plus, especially now in this climate becoming increasingly dominated by AI images, I wanted to make something as human as possible.

Here's some examples of the half-finished background in action:

 I'm very happy with the result!

Next week, I hope to be able to complete the colored version- at least for the daytime variant. This background will need a few versions for lighting and some details swaps for things like opening drawers and stuff.

But we'll get there!

-----------------

Oh, and it's barely worth mentioning, but I did play with music a little last weekend for fun. I started a third track. It's not anything yet, just an intro and a beat basically.

But the part that I'm proud of with it, is that I figured out how to do something pretty cool 👀

So, I purchased a subscription to the sound and music library that I got a bunch of the TPOF music from. From there, I grabbed a bunch of machine noises >:]

I found this one machine noise that was a sort of rhythmic pulse. TBH, kind of an annoying sound by itself. BUT

Ableton lets me look at the waveform of a sound and even grab parts of it and stretch them. I was able to see the peaks where the pulses happened, and tweak them to fit the beat of a song exactly. Then with a little pitch shifting- it was quite nice!

This beginning of a track lets the sound play normally for a second or two [ with an overlayed pneumatic air gun startup because why not ;) ], then switches to my modified version where I made it match a beat.

I think it's a really cool way to start a song! [ I've attached it below if you're interested in hearing that ]

-----------------

And I think that's about all I have this week! I'm sorry I technically made the progress bar go down LMAO, I swear that won't be happening often. This is just a weird circumstance.

Stay safe and have a fun weekend guys!!