Everything Is a Skill: Game Development Logs
A partner and I have formed Sweet Potato Games and starting making a Visual Novel called Romancing the sun. A dating sim where you find love or the sun goes out. In the tentative place between high school and life where the world seems close and intense, a bad date can feel like the end of the world and might be.
(A visual novel is a game that uses interactive pictures and text to tell a story. Often defined by choices the readers make and multiple endings but not necessarily.)
https://thesugarray.itch.io/romancing-the-sun
Devlogs collected here:
-Everything is a Skill
-My Uglier Character Models
-3-Way on the Screen
Everything is a Skill
I was talking to one of my friends that played the earliest build with Conney’s Ride. She remarked that the visuals got a lot better (but she prefers drawn sprites).
I flippantly told her she was wrong (because I am an idiot). I said, “I didn’t do any improvement, you just got used to the art style.”
I went back over my alpha observations and there are a lot of notes about the modeling and how players react to them. So yeah, I changed a lot about how I model and use sprites based on those observations AND I JUST FORGOT. I forgot that I learned things.
It isn’t uncommon. Humans have this bias where we assume that we always operate and think in our present mode but over our whole lives. There is also an assumption that other people know what we know other people know. Overcoming the stupid, ill-advised things we do takes time and work. It is a skill.
Taking criticism is a skill. Giving criticism is a skill. Interpreting criticism is a skill. Coding is a skill. Marketing is a skill. Realizing that you learned and changed is a skill, I GUESS. *throws hands up because I don’t want to look up the gif*
Everyone says it and I am too. I appreciate feedback and I am interested in people enjoying the game, story, and characters.
Thank you for reading. Chapter 2 is going to be a big one.
Rendering is half faith and guesswork that it won’t look like shit. Speaking of looking like shit:
My Uglier Character Models!
I’ll fix my ugly character models, if I learn how to, and if I must, I guess. Money will help.
I put a lot of work into getting Dawn right. She needed darker skin. She needed to be cute enough to carry a game. I am so inexperienced with Daz 3d that I don’t know if I could actually replicate her model. I’ve copied the model onto every drive I own just in case something happens to my computers. I really lucked out getting her skin darker and that the default skin has makeup applied (because I forgot makeup).
Unfortunately, due to poor planning on the writing, she isn’t the first character model you see in the game. You get Kusi and Grandma Daisy. Just the worst. This is because the stubborn idea where I think I want to add more love interests and storylines later. It is also due to the defaults and limitations of DAZ 3D. I could spend money on minoritized features for my models. They do exist, it isn’t like daz can’t make black people. My main resource is time, so that is the currency I spend.
Without spending money, you can make white men and women in Daz 3d. You can mess with the settings to make the texture and shaders lighter or darker. There are tutorials that I tried to follow to make the white skin darker. But in practice, it doesn’t look right. (I’m a baby).
I used face-transfer a feature where a photo of a person is applied to model. I liked this idea because it meant that a new skin would be generated and I wouldn’t have to play with sliders. And bonus, I’d get a unique looking character that won’t just show up in other games. The skin tone changes to match the picture but it can apply to the model in some funny ways.
These problems are all compounded because every model looks terrible in the partially rendered positioning phase of modeling.
Kusi can’t look down or right. Something about the way the face was applied made the limiter that keeps models from looking like demon possession victims just maxed out. I stopped playing with it when I got all of the Kusi assets I needed for chapter one and I couldn’t have quit fighting it faster. It was frustrating.
Then there was the eye thing. I didn’t quite get to understanding the eye thing. It’s shaders or iray or something.
Grandma Daisey works a bit better. There are still some of the face transfer quirks. I think she couldn’t really smile that well and her teeth kept popping out when I opened the mouth. But I actually got compliments on Grandma Daisy. “She looks like an old person!” That boosted my confidence. She looks okay while rendered. Daz 3d accelerates at beautiful young women. Older women or old women in grandma’s case kind of don’t work. So, a better model might come around but I am less willing to throw away the work I have done with her.
I was hesitant to lead with these character models but we lead with the story needs first, I white knuckled my way through playtesting them and tried to make the writing as good as possible, and I covered all the promotional material with the good character models.
I want to fix it but my main priority is finishing the game and focusing on what I am best at.
3-Way: Getting three characters on Screen
I was having trouble getting all three of my characters on screen for a dialogue scene.
I’ve done a lot of trial and error, as is expected while leaning. So, when my old sprite renders, that I had to resize and tweak, seemed to fit two to a screen but my new renders, that had all the correct ratios, could only fit one. I was confused.
Ren’py just didn’t trust that my three 1280x720 images would fit together. I wrongly figured it just would and the majority of transparent image would be fine.
So, I cropped out the extra transparency and bam. three characters.
September Progress
