Chapter 11 scenes and artwork (2)

After reading your comments on the last post, I decided to showcase a bit more of the process that goes behind creating the scenes for ORS. I've talked about it in the past, but there's always some variations in the way scenes come together. 

Generally, I plan the chapter around some central plotpoints, and divede them in 5 columns: 

• Plot events related to Lena
• Plot events related to Ian
• Sex scenes related to Lena
• Sex sex scenes related to Ian
• General plot events

ORS is an erotic game, so logically the plot revolves around the sex scenes. I generally know which scenes I want to include in a chapter, and build the narrative around those. If, for example, I know I want to include a sex scene between Ian and Cindy, I first think about what kind of scene I want to create, trying to make it fresh, sexy and advance the character's relationship in some way. Normally there's also events that lead to or happen right after the sex scene, so I have to come up with dialogue that fleshes out the characters' relationship, give new information about them and also give the player the opportunity to affect the plot somehow through different choices. I also need to weave together all the different events from both Ian and Lena's POVs in a coherent structure, something that's been getting incresingly difficult as the complexity of the plot and the game grows, but it's a process I generally enjoy. 

When it comes to designing the scenes, the first thing I have to consider is how many illustrations and/or animations it will have. Ideally I would love to use as many pictures as possible, but creating each one takes quite a lot of time and effort, so I try to limit myself and choose the most important and essential beats for each one. I try to have a minumum of 4-5 illustrations and a max of 8-10. I select my reference images and order them in logical progression, taking into account the choices, options and variations it will include. For some complex scenes I've ended up creating diagrams like the one above: it helps me to visualize the order in which the events play out and interact together depending on player choice.

Cindy scenes are one of my favourites to draw, and I always try to make them extra beautiful. The most important and time consuming part of the drawings tend to be faces and hair, and those are the parts I can't outsource to other artists (not that I would outsurce Cindy scenes, those are mine to draw!) I also try to alternate between different ambient lighting, and that's something that I can only visualize in the final steps of creation, as it's hard to figure out during the line art step.

Here you can see the diagram I used for Chapter 10's Alison threesome scene. This has been one of the hardest scenes to plan and write, having a lot of moving parts and choices that made it possible to play the sequences in different interlocking order. In fact, the threesome scenes also fuses with the Ian and Alison only scene, making it even more complex. If you look closely you can see there's even a discarded drawing in there. In the end, I don't always follow the diagrams closely, as the scenes keep changing and evolving until reaching their final form.

In this last chapter Holly had quite a lot of scenes, since she has paths both in Ian and Lena's routes. In Ian's case, i decided to split her scenes in two different, shorter sets. In this case I think it works nicely, even if each individual scene is shorter and not as in-depth, it allows to better portray different themes and evolution in character's relationships. And I also tried to differentiate the scenes with the before mentiones ambient lighting, which gives the images a very distinc vibe. 

At this point, I've written and drawn so many scenes between GGGB and ORS it's sometimes hard to depict or describe something that doesn't feel like a rehash. One of my main focus lately has been to give something distinct when possible to each scene, both in character and plot development, and in visual entertainment, but at the same time the story needs to remain consistent and grounded, so sometimes repetition is needed to solidify character interactions and make them feel natural an believable. I'm trying to figure out what can I omit and how to make every single image ans scene count, making it feel meaningful and interesting. Trying to keep things varied is rather hard though, and sometimes I wish I could implement more stuff, but I'm limited by the amount of images I can create, the plot necessities and constraints and my own imagination. 

I'll make a third post about chapter 10 scenes, so if you have any additional questions, write them down in the comments!