Tuesday transparency report

Hey guys!  I know you want a clearer idea of exactly how much is left to do, so I carved out some time yesterday and today to do a full audit of all the required art assets our illustrator lovely Victoria is working on.

(She and I have been back and forth with art specs, test versions and image drafts, but we didn’t have a single online document keeping track of all the different assets required.  This is because there’s just the two of us working solidly on it right now*, and we both have huge frightening to-do lists, and the reality is that admin tasks like this get cut when tiny teams are in crunch mode.  😰)

The next episode is going to be the biggest Female Agent release so far, with five different avatar stages across the whole Lifepath.   The artwork requirements are much more ambitious than in any previous release, with more individualisation based on previous choices (e.g. if the heroine is a rock chick, she’s supposed to wear different casual clothes to college from “normies”; she can habitually be a sexy dresser or a modest dresser; etc).  As a result V is working on more art assets than ever for this next release.

I did the audit and there are currently 71 scenes still requiring art assets.  These don’t all have to be drawn from scratch – some are mostly done, some are tiny (e.g. one is literally just a thong, but it has to be drawn to fit the new age 18 body shape), and as V said in her report last week, she has built up a library of assets that can be tweaked and customised.  But each asset still is drawn by hand (with love) in Illustrator and needs to be coded into the game, so this is obviously going to take some time to work through.  We will keep you posted on progress in the weekly transparency reports.

In the meantime there are 5 scenes I’m still editing, which I’ll get back to work on now this audit is done.

Transparency is supposed to be transparent, so I’ll be honest and say I didn’t realise exactly how much fucking art I’d actually specced for the Lifepath.  I’ve done my best to keep the overall pace fast, but it’s impossible to montage through two-and-a-half decades of a girl’s life without needing a fucking lot of clothes.

V and I are planning to co-ordinate on each individual list item in advance (to reduce time spent in art versioning) and she’s going to work smart with accessories that can be reused across multiple scenes in order to get this cooked ASAP.

I’m sorry it’s not in your hands yet guys.  I feel like my vision for this was probably too big, too ambitious.  We’ll keep working on it every day as hard as we can. 🦀❤️‍🔥

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*plus our lovely contributors and testers ❤️