Devlog #9 - making mommies and milves

we're a little over a week into the vote, so i thought i'd write up a post about the design process for meredith and kim and share some of the development art! (and also remind you to vote, if you still haven't)

first of all, how did we land on the two concepts for our first vote? i'll confess, we didn't have these two planned from the very start. they were invented Just for the initial poll. (which is not to say we don't have other characters already planned, we do! we just didn't want to start with them). games like this live and die on archetypes. characters can and should be well rounded, but there will always be a little seed of Type from which they grow. the big boobed bimbo, the cool girl, the mean girl, the disaster--from these our initial cast was born. we did in fact ask on twitter Years ago what people's favorite girl archetypes were, to help us figure out what we should include. i'm not sure that we fully listened with what we chose, but it was a good start.

so for our first poll, we wanted to pick two strong, popular archetypes that could reasonably compete against each other. as i've said before, i wanted to make it a tough choice. it's no fun if there's an obvious favorite. i want a healthy competition! thus we landed on mommy vs milf, with goth gf thrown in because Of Course we have to have a goth gf.

but, like, a goth gf with a specific flavor and not just '30 year old's out of date idea of what mall goths wear'

anyway. that's enough words let's look at some sketches.

for meredith i started with her face and hair. the face came Pretty Immediately, you gotta love the big heavy black eyeshadow eyes. i tried a few styles, looking at irl goth black hair styles. i still really like the thick braids, but i was Really into the one eye covered look, and explored that further when i moved on to future sketches.

also i'm so sorry but her nipples are not actually pierced like in that sketch because My Ass Forgot when i made the sprite. but also with the type of historical goth she is, she may not have gone for that anyway.

next was outfits! we hadn't settled on exactly what type of goth she was yet at this point. i recall leo specifically requesting 'the vibe of enid's mom from okko' which is where that morticia witch dress design came from, which i did not go with because it felt Too fantastical for the general style of the game. my Design Ethos for joker's trip is that the guests should remain within a realm of believability and not get Too OC-like, if that makes any sense. like the cast should for the most part be normal women with normal jobs. they can't all be Super Interesting Mysterious Women With Exciting Lives because then [syndrome voice] none of them will be.

and thus we landed on Librarian Energy. before we had the idea for museum curator that was literally what i thought her job would be. cool goth librarian who gives you the occult books. but i'd made the joke to leo about giving her an interest that they share so she'd be easier to write, and leo's a big science nerd, so she was made a museum curator. she loves a Specimen (and we both love biology, so she'll be easy for us Both to write).

there were some minor tweaks to her design when i began work on her sprite. her hair shape got cartoonified, she lost the "bib" to her dress, she got a big ol' ribbon cause i love a big ol' ribbon. losing the bib was actually in service of a clothing layer i really wanted to do, which was a thin shift, which made more sense if it wasn't attached to the dress. + on top of that, the neck ribbon being a removable item meant the bib would have just looked Wrong without it. but anyway.

this is pretty hot right.

in a grandma sort of way. ghost of an ass.

speaking of grandmas, or rather mas, let's move on to kim! kim's development was, in comparison to meredith, very fast.

this is it. literally this is all i did and that sketch on the left came afterward because i was like 'i Know i am going to make a devlog about designing these women i can't JUST have one sketch'.

but that's all it took. and there is a good reason for why it didn't take much. that's because i had designed this character before and already Knew who she was. because..........

i'm ripping myself off.

this is rin, an antagonist from my old webcomic (this art is from 2018. eugh). she was chief of the (magic) police and mother of a shithead son. and hot. she was pretty hot. leo loves her. leo loves her so much that i've drawn her getting railed multiple times for them. in fact here you go, have some porn on this patreon for a porn game.

nice.

anyway that webcomic was YA and i had a pretty strict rule at the time of not posting porn around it (most of the characters and a lot of the audience were teens, you understand) but leo loves this lady So Much. i asked them what specifically about her they liked, and thus: kim was born. obviously design elements had to change, but the Energy is the same. really the biggest change is that rin's main relationship was with her mostly-adult shithead son. that's not something we wanted to port over to A Porn Game so we made her deal more about her shithead husband. kim still has a shithead adult son, because otherwise she is not a milf, but by necessity he can never appear and only be alluded to vaguely. you understand.

most of kim's real Design Development actually happened during the process of making her sprite. it was important to me that the milf character Actually Look Like A Mother. that means putting a bit of weight on her, giving her a bit of sag. even rin doesn't really have the body of a mother of a 19 year old, so i tried to correct that with kim. give that woman wrinkles and a tummy. and a proper bush.

not that i'm going to show you all that so soon~ though tbh i should have introduced her without the coat. all of her best qualities are hidden behind the coat. such as the fact she is Stacked. and also Packed. With A Gun. she brings a gun to the casino. and she bets it. isn't she cool...

anyway, don't forget to vote! you have until the end of the month, and you are allowed to change your vote if any of this swayed you to a different side. just go to the form again and it'll let you switch!

-- TT

meesa go boing boing for rin kim

-LG