March Reckless Sympathy Update!

Hey folks!

So, my vague and self imposed Juneish deadline for the release of part 1 is creeping ever closer, so I've kicked things into high gear and dived headfirst into one of the remaining tasks that's scared me the the most: doing the backgrounds! I finally got to something I'm satisfied with (pictured above) so let's talk about how I got there. This'll be a bit of a long one, since I want to do a play by play!

STEP 0: THE JOURNEY

Reckless Sympathy's setting is vaguely late 19th century European in vibe, which posed some interesting challenges with creating backgrounds. My first ideas were to use filtered photo backgrounds, a classic of low budget visual novels like Tsukihime and Higarashi. I really love the aesthetic a lot, but lets just say I'm not exactly in a place where I can go on a photo tour of old French Rococo buildings or whatever. So that idea went out the window pretty quickly, as did 3D modeling backgrounds in the vein of Coquette Dragoon (go play Coquette if you haven't), another big inspiration for RS. 3D modeling isn't exactly in my skillset after all.

So what is in my skillset that would look nice at the low saturation of color's I'm going for?

After a lot of thought, I ended up deciding to break out the compressed charcoals to do some serious physical media drawings for the first time since college. Simple black and white, a tactile feel that you really can't recreate easily in digital, and that kind of slightly out of focus haunted vibe that comes wit the medium. It's perfect!

I talked a bunch with a brilliant friend of mine (@t_hornapple on twitter, go check out his absolutely gorgeous art of trans mascs in historical settings), and he helped me iron out a process. I absolutely couldn't have gotten this far without him!

STEP 1: LAYOUT

So I start by drawing a floorplan digitally in Clip with all the major features of the room, like bathtubs, chairs, light sources, so on. I like to do tiling and rugs at this point too, since it's much easier to do geometric patterns when you can look at it straight on.

STEP 2: GETTING TILTY

This is a really finicky step, since I gotta use a lot of The Mind's Eye to figure out what angle I want to be looking into the room at, how extreme to make the perspective falloff, etc. I use the free transform tool to bend and stretch the floor into the shape I want.

STEP 3: DRAWING UP

Then, I extrapolate off the lines on the floor to draw the objects in the room in the 3d space. This is both the step where I start to get a little wonky on perspective since I'm not being that precious with it, and the step where I realize just how much of the painstaking detail of the room I designed will get covered up by foreground furniture. Check out the elaborate wall patter I made, which is all covered up by furniture except one half of one panel towards the left of the bath.

STEP 4: ERASING AND PRINTING

This is where things get Physical. Excuse the horrible fading on the print job here, I was running out of ink. Since the final paper I'm using is 11x14 inches, I have to print out the guide image on 4 sheets of paper and jigsaw them together. This creates some warping, but hey, I'm not perfect. I tape the pictures down to a little usb lightbox I got ahold of (damn these things a cheap now!), and get together my bevy of charcoal sticks, sharpening tools, and various erasers as I prepare to get charcoal dust on everything I own.

STEP 5: DRAW THE REST OF THE DAMN OWL

Using the lightbox and the printout as a guide, I charcoal out the room, doing everything I can to preserve the finer details(though this is ultimately futile. If I was doing inks, I could get finer. I'm not doing inks. I do charcoal. I also add in a bit of shadows and extra detail like the figure in the mirror, to make the space a little bit more believable.

STEP 6: SCANNING AND SO ON

My scanner is tiny, so I have to do the scan in 2 pieces and assemble them digitally, but it ends up coming together I think! You can see smudges from my hands, fingerprints, bits of eraser littered throughout, all those little tells that something was made physically in the world before being digitized, and that's exactly what I'm going for. I'm still working out how to convey different times of day without redrawing the whole image, but I've got a few ideas kicking around.

STEP 7: AND SO ON????

Yeah, so, that's my process with backgrounds for Reckless Sympathy. Part 1 has, I believe, 13 backgrounds, not counting cgs. I've got 2 done completely, but I have printed digital layouts for all of them, so I'm really motoring over here. Once I'm done with that I can get on to digitally painting the sprites, work on music, and start pulling it all together in Ren'py!

It's been a long journey, but I'm starting to believe I can actually finish this thing! Thanks for sticking it through to the end of a long post, and I hope you liked this peek into my design process!

Catch you again soon!

~Benn