Devlog #10 - i promise i'm still working on the crowd scenes

wow it's been longer since the last devlog than i thought. i'm the busiest boy in the world. but i'm here and i'm back to talk about what i've been so busy doing! as you know the gallery update turned into the gallery + crowd update, which would add special new sprites, animations, and CGs for all of the girls. i've now completed rosalie's, and thought i would share the process with you to tide you over till i finish the last two (which are now written and sketched!)

we've done like. over 15 scenes by now, over the course of 2+ years of development, and we're always trying to figure out the perfect workflow. the way we did it at first was i would just draw whatever i wanted, and then leo would model a background, and try to make it fit the art.

this is a stupid way to do it. don't do it this way.

now the workflow is leo will make a space first (like the break room for the joker loss scenes), i'll thumbnail what i want to draw, and then we'll either take a few screenshots of the location to find an angle for the sketch, or i'll make a sketch we then import into the environment and test placements for it till we find one we like. it depends a bit on whether the character will be interacting with any furniture or have overlapping elements.

so let's look at an example!

i thumbnailed the composition for rosalie's crowd scene first. honestly i did this before i'd even written the script for it, because i knew it was going to be about rosalie being jazzed to get fucked in front of joker. once we had this, leo and i went through the casino environment and picked a few angles to take screenshots of. this is the one i ultimately used:

(leo was in the middle of making a new model for the table and hadn't finished the texture yet)

next step was to create a base sketch. i've included her face here, but there's actually 8 separate layers for rosalie's various expressions (two of which are an entirely different head.).

pretty rough! it takes a lot of adjustments to get 2d things to look right against a 3d environment. lot of scale, lot of overlap. the red lines at the top and bottom are the "bleed" lines, indicating how far the art needs to go to make sure it ends behind the letterboxing. anybody who's worked in storyboarding knows how important it is to have closed lines past the bleed.

so from here, i drew all of rosalie's expression and state changes as their own sketch layers. then it came time to figure out what elements don't change at all, and what parts needed to be separated. this is when i ink and color!

this image is made up of five separate parts. joker, rosalie's head, rosalie's expression, rosalie's torso, and rosalie's ass. technically joker and her torso could be one part because they never move and don't overlap, but waves hand i like to keep things organized.

oh god oh fuck oh shit no no no

from here it's pretty much 'draw the rest of the owl', in that it's just a matter of inking and coloring all her expressions, making sure they sit nicely on the base, and that anything that changes is properly set up. ultimately ending up with the final image when it's imported into the game!

doesn't that just look nice :]

here's what it actually looks like:

lol. lmao. movie magic.

anyway i will keep working on these dang scenes! i keep saying they're more ambitious than the previous ones and they ARE, DOG. way more expression changes than usual. but it is supposed to be a special rare reward! once they're done the whole update will be done and we'll be able to move forward on meredith! i am so eager to have this dang update out!!!

--TT