Cerelea and Fairy chibi reveals + Devlog #130 + Illustration poll #5 is on!
Happy New Year!!! I hope you had nice Holidays ^^WAHOOOOOO
Cerelea and Fairy chibis WAHOOOOO!One of the easiest chibi BE sprite sets to draw, and one of the toughest...!On top of already being small, Fairy's boobs don't get too huge. I don't remember how long it took to get all ranks done for her, but it wasn't very long. The most challenging sprite wold be her KO pose, but even that was ok ^^Cerelea however, on top of being redrawn entirely (except the head), gets some massive growth. And, her top changes shape with every stage! The process was definitely a lot more involved.But I'm very happy with both! I hoe you'll like them ^^And in case you're curious, here's a couple gif showcasing the differences between Cerelea's old sprites and her new ones:
R4 and R5 chibis are available to $10+ patrons!
Phew, this was a busy month!Other than some fixes on the latest build now and then (which, I've still got a few I need to get to), this was a very artful month.Which means I don't have a whole lot to say, but let's see... First was finishing 2 new characters (as in, the full sprites! I'll reveal them once I'm out of chibis). What I mean by finishing is really just doing a bit of clean up, such as making sure there's no floating pixels or minor color bleeds, and adding the black outline! Not necessarily the most glamorous work, but it's gotta be done. Although adding the black outline can be pretty interesting since I can use it to strengthen a character's silhouette ^^
After that came Nightmare's chibis! Needless to say, she also gets some huge boobas. And being an important character, she has a LOT of sprites! It wasn't technically as demanding as Cerelea's chibis, but the sheer amount of sprites + booba made the task pretty tough in its own way.I needed to take a small break from chibis after that, so I took some time to write a bit of lore and further plan out that secret BE related thing I've mentioned a few times before. It's really taking shape, and I have a very very clear picture of what it'll be like now! I still want this to be a surprise so I won't say anything about it, but I'm happy ^^I was also running out of stuff to post on social medias, so I took a couple of days to make more! On top of recording a few fights, it turns out I never really showcased the chibi animations. I coded a lil thing to cycle them on a grey background, recorded them all for each character, and replenished my social media content without too much effort! Good stuff
And then, it was finally time... Slimegirl's chibis. I'd been fearing that one for a long time. As you might know, she is pretty unique in that she has the Height growth mod which affects her height on her chibi sprites. With each rank, she grows taller! It's pretty fun in concept, but I'd been struggling with how to tackle this for as long as I can remember.I considered a whole bunch of ways to make the task as easy as possible, including vectorizing her current chibi sprite to scale it up without losing quality, but no dice. In the end, what really really helped was the 3D models...! This allowed me to experiment a lot with the height I wanted. In particular, I'd been thinking about head size. Since the chibis have a pretty big head, simply scaling her up meant she would end with a massive head at R6! Which also takes space when her body could be bigger instead, which is more interesting. To avoid that, I needed to reduce her head size with each rank up to get her to end up with less chibi like proportions, while still making it look natural. For example, if her body's scale would increase by 125% with each rank up, the head would only increase in scale by 110%.Testing this stuff by hand to find the right values would have been tough, but the 3D model turned out to be especially useful for this! Thank you Random! :BAnd so with all the 3D model renders in hand, I started planning out how to draw her. It made the most sense to start with her R6 then scale that down for each rank according to the body scale and head scale values I needed. And so, I've been at it since then...! After some experimenting, I figured out all the specifics and have been making good progress. Her Idle pose is fully finished, her other main poses' lineart are basically ready, so it's mainly just a lot of coloring and booba left. I should be able to finish her in early January...! PhewBut yeah, I'm never doing another Height growth character for this game, it's just too much work. This doesn't even compare to the Cerelea chibis!Now, Slimegirl did win an Alt costume poll, which I've been thinking about a bit. I'll very probably end up making her height constant across all ranks of her alt costume, whatever it will end up looking like, and instead have her alt costume height be yet one more notch above her normal outfit's highest rank. That'll probably be for the best in that it's still height growth, but I can also follow my usual process and keep my sanity!
So yeah! That's a whole thing ^^
Of course I did take a few days to rest and spend some time with my family during the Holidays. I also started playing Look Outside, I heavily recommend it!
And that's pretty much all for now!Gonna finish Slimegirl's sprites asap, then get to Vuu and Rose, and that will be the main chunk of the chibis done! I'm thinking of doing one set of chibis per month after to cover the characters who only have a placeholder Zombie chibi currently. Maybe also designing and commissioning one more character a month if possible so I can keep catching up on the Monstergirl polls! And I want to get one of the poll illustration done before long too... Ideally, I'd have some time to code inbetween so I can start implementing all that and more for the next release. Busy! But getting there ^^
And now, the poll stuff!
The next illustration poll has begun! The theme this time is [Beach pic]!You can vote in the Discord server if you are a 2$+ patron! Here are the current theme and submissions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Drz4UD09YftgaihcwWq6McqiFTa2l77XJ9oBJ0hfDcoTheThis poll will be divided in 4 rounds, each determining a character to be part of the illustration!The first round will end on the 8th! ^^
And that's all I got for now! Thank you very much for reading! ^^