First Friday DevLog!

Welcome to our first FRIDAY DEVLOG!

Here we will talk about the state of the development, show some screenshots, discuss, and more! So… Why we don’t start? 

On today’s DevLog we will talk about Character design, and why is so important. When we started creating the characters we made a terrible mistake that made our artist Patricia mad. Since is our first time creating a Visual Novel we thought that we just have to create the characters, collapse all the layers, and export a PNG file but that was not true.  

Why is so important the character design?

That is a simple question to answer if your characters are not flashy enough or are not well-designed players will see that and your Visual Novel will not be as appealing as others. That is why you need to stay sometime in the character creation and decide well with the team how are going to be the characters, which ones are the main characters and which ones are not.

Diving into our design style, we first did what I said before “collapse all” and that was a really bad mistake because we have been forced to redo all the art one by one. 

As you can see here, we have to separate all the characters by parts, clothes, hair, accessories, body parts, nude body, facial expressions, etc. This is done to have the possibility to animate each character. What we made wrong was the left example, all collapsed without any separation. This is not as bad as you may think but it will make your Visual Novel look old or just poor in art terms.

To create this sprite sheet you have to separate the rendered parts in each “whatever program you use” layer and try to blend them. With the blending what we get is that when we merge all layers in one you are not able to know if the character is fully rendered or rendered by parts, this is the most difficult part and what makes the final art a masterpiece. We are lucky to have Patricia because she is an incredible artist that can blend each part without any of us noticing it!

After a lot of work and research…

Our team has managed to re-create all the characters with this workflow and we now know how Visual Novel characters are made. We are currently working on new characters that you’ll probably see soon, meanwhile, we will keep talking about stuff that happens during the development phase.