It's day 1 of NaNoRenO and the beginning of By Your Side's development. I decided to dedicate this first day to the most important elements of the project...
First of all we have the logo. This is often the first thing anyone will see of By Your Side, and as such it needs to be a grand conveyor of the game's ideals. I have a fondness of relatively simple logos (recent examples being Tsuki ga Kirei and Sukasuka) and that fondness links well with the endless everyday lifestyle that By Your Side idealises. As a result, I ended up making an incredibly basic logo.
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With the most basic typewriter font imaginable I made a SciAdv style sentence-in-a-logo image.
Following on from that I began to draw the heroine's sprite. If you're a reader of my blog you may remember I wrote a post about animation a long time ago. In it I covered the rapid drawing and colouring process of an anime sequence created for the opening of my Visual Novel Aious. Since NaNoRenO's major limitation is time, I decided to use that very same process for By Your Side's art.
Here is the sprite's lineart. Unlike the lines seen in my work for other titles, this sprite's lines are completely flat. That means there is no transparency, no smoothing, and no blurring. With this I can precisely fill in every single area of the sprite with colour and not have to worry about manually colouring any aspect of the image.
It also helps because, frankly, my lineart is generally incredibly messy, and if you've zoomed in on any of my art you'll notice how imprecise every line is. Removing pressure and transparency from the brush limits the factors I have to keep under control and helps me keep everything consistent. It's basically a band-aid fix for my incredibly underdeveloped artistry.
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Lines as drawn compared to how they'll look in-game.
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As I mentioned, having such lines means I can paint-bucket fill every element of the drawing, and this time saving method is incredibly important because of the immense size of the sprite. This is by far the most involved and ambitious sprite I have ever made. Not only am I planning for the standard set of multiple expressions (with changing eyes and mouths) but I'm also including 2 different poses for each arm, giving us 4 different poses. That in itself isn't any different from sprites I've created in the past. The big factor here is... Outfits!
By Your Side is a simulation game, and with any good simulation game comes customisation. I plan for new customisation options to unlock as the player progresses through the game, and as such, outfits become a major focus. I'm also running with a doll system, which means I have to create each layer of clothing. This ultimately means that I'll have to draw several sets of undergarments, several tops, several skirts, pants, socks, jewellery, accessories, and so on... Add in the fact that multiple poses requires me to draw some parts of an outfit twice, and we have a lot of drawing to do.
I designed 4 full outfits which can be cut apart into seven different pieces of clothing (shirts, dresses and skirts.) I also plan to include at least three suspender belts (or Garter Belts if you're American) and matching pairs of underwear to go with them, adding another nine pieces to our original seven. I also have a couple cool sequined bra designs that I want to include for the old school glam factor, bringing us to eleven.
Then there's a couple hats and a couple glasses designs I also want to fit into the sprite, and knowing me I'll end up adding even more as I start drawing, so I expect to draw at least fifteen articles of clothing for this one character. But... This IS the only character, so it only makes sense I go all-out for it.
But that's enough of drawing the heroine today. I can colour her tomorrow, but I'm kinda getting bored of it now... I'm also kinda dreading the process of including all these outfit changes in the game because... I have no idea how to do that. I know there's a couple live methods of presenting sprites, but I have multiple layers of clothing, some of which have sleeves that get affected by pose changes, and also I'm planning on including some skin tone changes. It's a lot to wrap my head around.
So instead let's do the final important element: the living room background image! Now, I'm not very good at drawing backgrounds, and I've never drawn in this style before, so it'll probably suck... That's a warning.
The idea here is to draw out some vaguely correct geometric shapes, then fill them with random textures and lazily shade them. Hopefully it works out!I've also individualised the elements of the room onto separate layers. The TV, Table, Laptop and Bed Covers are all designed to lay over the background. Part of this is due to a planned 3D camera element which will interact with these objects, and part of it is because I want the heroine to, for example, sit behind the table or sleep under the bed covers. I may end up scrapping both of those ideas eventually, but who knows?
Anyway, the background gets colored, and then the other elements get exported. I also quickly made a night time version. It's essentially just a couple overlays and a window change, but it works well enough.
One of the best parts of working on both the logo and background image at such an early stage is that they can be implemented into other material. For example, with a combination of the two I was able to make the game's title screen.
Throw in some buttons along the screen and it's a perfectly easy screen to make.
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That's all for Day 1! Tomorrow I plan to finish colouring the heroine sprites, add some additional clothing, and then maybe look into drawing her into the background.
I'm not really sure how I'm going to define and present the customisable heroine sprites in-game, but I've got a month to figure it out. If anyone has any ideas, I'd very much love to hear them!