A little peek behind the scenes ...

Just thought I'd just drop another update/peek behind the scenes.

Maybe it's not all that interesting, but who knows! It might give you some insight into my working process, which I've hopefully got relatively streamlined now! 

Right now I'm working on 'Claire' which is - spoiler alert! - the name of the mysterious older woman you can pick up at the nightclub. To get from the main nightclub and back to her apartment, you first need to woo her (read: buy her a drink), and for that I needed to write some branching dialogue options, via the only bit of Girl Games I haven't coded myself - the Dialogue manager plugin: 

As you can (maybe) see, there's also some other functions that I did write being called - namely the relationship thing, which means that in future, she'll appear as 'Claire' rather than older woman, opening up a whole different dialogue tree and option, that will change depending on how well you know her. 

Then I spent some time working on a small function to switch out of the dialogue display stuff and straight into a cut scene - which is the first time I've had to do that in the game, but I'm sure will be used lots in future. 

All that done, it was time to write the cut scene itself. I'm writing these as Json documents, kind of like 'scripts' i guess, and I have a hopefully robust parser I've written that loads each one in and displays it whenever a cut scene is triggered. 

Here's Claire's so far ...

As you can see, there's still some more of it to write before you're back at her apartment, but honestly, now that I have all this working the way I want it, it's as simple as writing the lines of description and dialogue, maybe throwing in a couple of choices, and of course calling the desired background and foreground images ... 

Speaking of which, I figured it'd be nice to have a dedicated image of Claire in the cab, looking pissed off if you choose the 'Change your mind' option. So it was off to Mage.Space, which is where I'm generating the images using AI. 

Again, this was a pretty painless process - I actually find it really fun - and in this case it starts with a prompt: 

Which I run a few times changing the weights and scale and steps until I'm (sort of) happy with the result. Note: I often use either one or two celebrities in the prompts, which helps keep character looks consistent! 

Here's some failed attempts: 

And then here's the one I was most happy with: 

Still, there were a few things I wasn't happy with. For a start its in daylight - even though  tried to weight the words ((at night)) by couching them in brackets, plus her dress in the rest of the scene shows a lot more skin! 

So here's the next part of my process - doing some quick (and super crude!) adjustments in Affinity Photo, which ended up looking like this: 

I know - I'm no artist, but honestly that's enough for the 'base image' that I then feed back into Mage.Space to generate the final result! All I needed to do was lower the brightness on the windows to suggest 'night', paint in some crude 'skin' in the places I wanted it, change the hue of her hair a little and crop the image (all of which took me a grand total of 5 minutes). Then with Mage's img2img magic, I came up with this! 

Pretty good, right?! And maybe if/when you encounter that image in the game, you'll know the process behind it! 

Now that's done, I can carry on writing the short cut scene about going to Claire's apartment, that will then trigger then sex display stuff. 

Hopefully that all makes sense, and gives you a little idea of my process working on Girl Games. Let me know if you want me to write any more of these about any other parts of the game - any systems or working practices or whatever. Personally I find that stuff really interesting whenever I read about how other games are made, but I also realise it might just be really boring. 

And I guess the TL;DR version is: I'm hard at work on a fun little one-off hookup scene, which you'll be able to play pretty soon!