Lemma Soft Forums

Hi everyone!

I'm working on my first Ren Py visual novel and would love to hear any feedback!

My game is tentatively called "Coming Out on Top".

It's a dating sim(?) where you play the intrepid main character, 22 year old Mark. The game begins when you come out as gay to your best friends, Mia and Cody, and follows your adventures as you date a variety of different guys.

It won't have any nudity though it will have suggestive themes.

Right now I am trying to get my art skills up to par before I go into better sprites and backgrounds. Here is a screenshot from the first scene, with a simple drawing used as a placeholder for Cody and a google image as the background: http://i.imgur.com/lkcDi.png I realize that my placeholding sprites are pretty gigantic. Everything is kinda clunky at the moment.

I'm also going to blog my progress here: http://makingmyfirstvisualnovel.blogspot.com

It will probably be slow going, as I gotta get my art skills up to speed. I am simultaneous working on my artwork as well as the script. My first working version will probably just have one relationship, and I'll add more as I go along. (Right now I have about 6 in mind.)

Any advice, suggestions, or criticisms is appreciated. Thanks! Hopefully this vn will appeal to somebody. It isn't traditional manga style art and the game focuses a lot on the player's choices and preferences.

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So your game is going to be cartoon-like but not cartoony?, your game looks intresting. I like to date male characters, i sometimes play games that have characters that are guys, who have the leading role in the games.

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http://berry-melon.deviantart.com/

Well, I don't want the characters to look photorealistic, but I don't want them to look super-cartoony either. But I guess the main determinant of that will really depend on my drawing skills.

Thanks for the reply! I feel like this will be such a niche game in an area that is already very niche. I'll be amazed if there are if just a tiny group of people who will enjoy this.

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How realistic will your setting and tone be? Even if you use non-realistic art, you can still tell a plausible, down-to-earth story. You can tell a more fantastic story with harem elements and unrealistic characters. And you can tell a story which is somewhere between those two extremes.

Do you intend for your game to fit into the bara genre, the BL genre, or neither of the two?

This is such a good and important question. I really don't know!!!

I feel like bara (didn't even know it existed!) emphasizes way more muscular guys than my game will, but BL kinda focuses more on deep relationships. I just give the player options to date many different men. I guess it's closer to BL than Bara, but the guys will definitely be less femme looking, for the most part (though not muscle men.)

It will be a pretty realistic setting. No magic or fantasy involved, just the plain everyday life of a college senior.

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Well, I guess I'll update progress on my game here. Did a crash course on human drawing and coloring using various Deviant Art and youtube videos, including some suggestions from this forum!

Updated one character, Cody, the player's best friend, as well as tried to change the look of my background using some royalty free art (yes, the living room is crooked.)




So here is another screenshot. Have written ACT 1 of the first relationship (between player character and his first romantic interest.) Have not drawn the first romantic interest yet.

I still have no idea if this is going to be geared towards a female audience or a gay male audience. Speaking in generalities, it seems they are sometimes two very different audiences, with different demands. I feel like the guys I will draw will be beefier than traditional boy-boy, but not truly beefy.

My art needs so much work! I feel like I am learning how to draw, color, use the program, and write a game all at once, but it's a fun challenge so far. Thanks for looking! If you've got any input, I'm all ears!

I should also add these are still rough placeholders, and I'm hoping to create much better looking sprites and backgrounds as I continue. A big problem in my sprite-making right now is that I don't know how to work cleanly (the sprites have all kinds of stray lines and pixels) so that is one major thing I want to tackle eventually. Also backgrounds: after trying a few methods I'm going to try another technique tomorrow (crosses fingers.) What I don't want to do is end up having to draw the backgrounds...that will seriously take me FOREVER...

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Trying new background techniques in GIMP as I mentioned yesterday.

Going to have to keep playing around with this, get rid of the graininess and extraneous elements.

As always, any criticisms or input appreciated!

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I'll ask you a few questions, cause I'll eventually start playing loads of ren'py releases on this Fourm when I get my new laptop, i agree beefcake does come to mind. So which audience would you go for?, gay or straight? I'll admit that I don't actually mind a bit of yaoi, but I've never seen any western yaoi. So cody is your characters best friend is he also eligible for wooing? or do you have other plans for him? last but not least, I think the second background looks way better, although guess I'd have no right to say what's better... I have to use premade backgrounds for my fan made ren'py game. Did you draw those backgrounds or are they photograph's.

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http://berry-melon.deviantart.com/

Congratulations, Obscura. You're progressing by leaps and bounds. For someone with very little experience, you made a very good character. I think Cody's forearm needs some work, it's a bit too long (were you trying to avoid drawing his hands? ) but it takes years for some people to get to this level.

And please post your steps to generate that background! GIMP has some interesting automation tools, maybe we can turn that into a Python script. I think you could reduce saturation a bit to make the character sprites stand out more, and as you said, smooth out the graininess. You will probably have to create another layer to add some lost details with the paint tool, like the leaves, or make some more serious touch-ups (I don't think there's much you can do with the TV only using filters, so it may be easier to draw one on top of it.)

As for your audience, I think that if you are going more for the romantic, "oh my God, I think he's going to kiss me" angle, you will attract more female players.

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Keep your script in your Dropbox folder.
It allows you to share files with your team, keeps backups of previous versions, and is ridiculously easy to use.

Thanks for your interest, Starshine!

I really don't know what audience I'd be going for! Hopefully both, but I realize both audiences traditionally have different wants. I'm a hetero female but I'm also a good dealer older, I think, than most yaoi fans (though I could be wrong). Right now I'm not sure what category the final game will fall into, probably closer to something for a straight audience, but hopefully gay audiences could appreciate it too. I could also be possibly the only person who enjoys something like this, of course, especially given that the art isn't manga style. Audience of one?

Cody is his straight best friend, and needless to say, "complications arise" later in the game.

Thanks for your comments on my grim background. I'm posting a new one today. (I hope I'm using this forum properly...I know I'm posting a lot. Maybe I should put this all in a blog?)

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Haha, thanks sciencewarrior. Your words mean a lot to me! Gah, I redid his arms about five or six times and then finally gave it a rest. Legs and arms (and hands) are going to kill me, I swear.

So, I'm going to actually post a new background, because I think it's better than the last one, and I also am changing the first environment to a dorm room. (The main character and Cody will be bff/roommates). Still over saturated like you've said (which I may reduce later on but also flesh out the character's colors so they stand out more.)



So far, after experimenting with different tutorials, this is the simplest process I found for making a background using GIMP:

general steps:
- create outline layer, set it to "multiply"
- change color of original layer, then use gaussian blur (one of the blur filters) up the wazoo

I'm still experimenting with this. Still having questions about how to properly colorize something.

Anyways, this is the tutorial to create the outline: http://ocaoimh.ie/2004/10/01/cartoonizing-photos-with-the-gimp/.

***Note about the tutorial: I dunno why he/she sets the layer to divide instead of multiply. I tried both but multiply looks way better, IMHO! At least for my purposes.

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I should add, the first tutorial I used was the one SusantheCat suggested to me: http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=14215.

It's OokamiKasumi's, and is indeed awesome, though it didn't quite work for me in GIMP (probably because I don't know GIMP well enough to follow it properly.)

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You know, scratch this. I discovered I have no idea what female players want. And I never expected to know what gay players want either, so... I guess it's a case of putting out there and see who likes it.


I think it's awesome too, but it uses a lot of plugins and filters that simply aren't available in GIMP.

I think you got to a point where it shouldn't be too hard to paint over all that "trash" from the work bench and the ground. But the left side looks more like a blurred photo than a painting. And those bright colors! O.O Should the door really be that shade of pink?

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Keep your script in your Dropbox folder.
It allows you to share files with your team, keeps backups of previous versions, and is ridiculously easy to use.

Thanks for the feedback, sciencewarrior! Yeah, I guess I went pretty blurry on the photo! And I kinda like the pink, though I have no idea WHY a door would be that pink. Will try to do something about that and the clutter.

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