SNEAK PEEK: Some Animated Stuff & New Ideas

Well, I wanted to finish some things and show you how it was going, so I ended up taking too long to show you a sample of the game's progress. 😅 Sorry about that. That's why I decided to show it now.

And at the end of it all, none of the images I'm going to show now are 100% finished yet. The first one is from the new scene, which is almost ready. I believe that tomorrow I will finish all the drawings and code for this.

Regarding the menu screen, I followed a tutorial to leave the scene positioned according to the mouse position. The art of the characters was done by an artist I payed, and I left just a draft for the flowerbed with trees for now. What did you think of the idea?

Now the coolest part...

✨👀✨ Kind of contradicting what I said in the previous post about no longer needing to learn how to use Live2D to make better animations, I felt that I should try it. After all, with Live2D, we could see the characters' bodies moving through meshes, which would better represent... 😏 physics!

Well, I managed to make the Live2D files not only work in the game but also make the animation parameters of a model change according to a variable. To give you a better example, you can see in the image of the Live2D girl that the opening of each eye is linked to the position of the mouse on each axis.

And after confirming that I could do this, I paid an artist to animate the stepmother in Live2D, and I set her leg openings to open based on the mouse position to make it easier to visualize, and the result was what you can see there (Well, the image quality got low because of a zoom effect, so I still need to analyze how to avoid that).

Now, I wanted to address an important topic for the future of the game.

Although the scene in Live2D worked, I think it didn't turn out as well as I wanted. The pressure on her breasts didn't seem so natural to me... Maybe I'm being too much of a perfectionist, but in the end, I always wonder if I shouldn't just keep doing everything myself :v Also, some good quality artists that I can pay take a long time to draw, and I don't like needing to charge for the service. Maybe I'm not lucky enough to work with other people.

So, I thought of some options and would like to know your opinion. Maybe I'll make a specific post about this later.

What do you think about me starting to use 3D characters in some scenes? The idea is to request the service of a stylized 3D model in my drawing style, to really look like a drawing! And from that point on, approximately 70% of the scenes in WelCUM To The City would be done in Blender, just positioning the characters and speeding up the process much more. The downside is that it would perhaps lose some of the beauty of the drawing stylization, but the main scenes would still be drawn (the 30% part, the ones that would require better angles, expressions, etc).

Well, all of this for now is just an idea to try to speed up the game development. I need to do some tests before bringing it here to you. I found some 3D modelers on Fiverr who seem to do excellent work and I should be preparing model sheets of the characters to be used for reference. If everything goes well, all development should become more practical and faster after that.