This is the second post in the series. If you haven't already, make sure to read the previous one first.
Alright, so by now we have a good plan of what we want the chat we are currently creating to be about. We know the things that will happen, planned the branching and the events and have a clear goal in mind.
That means it's time to create the art assets for the chat. The reason this is done before the writing process begins, is to let inspiration strike. Often times when you see the visual that is taking place in a chat, you get additional ideas on what might happen. Maybe there is an interesting background element or maybe the picture came out in a way that supports a very specific story telling. That's the main reason why we didn't set the "what" part of the chat into stone yet, only having planned the general overview of it.
But before we can go and start creating, we have to figure some things out once again.
What is the character pose of the image
What is the girl wearing
What is the main focus and goal of the picture
The pose is probably very obvious on why it is relevant: without one we couldn't create any picture. It serves to underline the emotion of the picture, but sometimes is not set and might not matter too much.
The clothes however are very different: they matter a LOT and if you never stood in front of a wardrobe before and asked yourself what to wear tomorrow, you might not know how difficult it is to pick the correct lineup. Choosing an outfit is hard, and not being restricted to physical clothes and having pretty much every possible clothing at your disposal makes this process even more difficult. The most important parts are staying consistent with the character and paying close attention to her color palette, of which each girl has her own one.
Here is a picture of Lydia to make this point more clear: it's a near identical outfit, yet one of these breaks with her character and backstory. It's not a deal breaker, but again: it is best to have an intention behind all of these before you start creating.
And finally the main focus and goal of the picture. We should have this part covered already, otherwise we did something wrong in the planning phase. However, there is still a lot of variance in a picture, even if you have a clear goal in mind.
To illustrate this, let's take a look at Celines' encounter with a customer she had when working as a Hire for Anything. The goal of the picture was: show her camel toe and focus on her feet. Even with that goal in mind, the end result can vary drastically.
All of these achieve the main goal the picture has, yet only one can end up in the game as the final result. Scroll up again and take a look yourself: which of these do you think achieves the goal best? A panty shot from behind with a clear focus on her feet.
If you guessed the middle one you either remembered correctly or agree with my choice: that is the one that made it into the game.
Of course we have to go through this whole process for each picture associated with a chat. Luckily it is quite rare that the clothes change in between them. But overall it can be a decent chunk of work.
And that concludes the second part of this series. We now have the plan and the art assets for the chat, so the next step is to actually write it.
We'll look at that in part #3. I hope this was interesting.