Lykan Projects

I really liked the idea that each of my sprites had their On Screen persona/character on the show and have a life away from all of that.

Names have yet to come.  That’s usually last on my list because I take forever coming up with names.

But the Lion is the Chef. He’s a bit of a hot-headed and temperamental one.  He graduated top of the class in a four year Culinary Art Program at a Community College. He’s not the best at what he does, but you’re probably better of not telling that to his face if you value your fur.

Off the show, he’s was a pop-star in a world famous boy-band, until his sexuality became big news.  His agent managed couldn’t get him anything until Hot Days, Mystic Nights: New Haven went into the works.  The producers didn’t seem to mind the scandals over the alleged sex tapes, in fact, quite the opposite, they loved them.  He’s really excited to be working on the show and is glad that he doesn’t have to put on the charade of celebrity girlfriends and fake affairs.

It’s interesting that I can play around with two worlds.  One in which there is a universe where people come into these psychic powers and sometimes end up at a paranormal hotel, where it’s cheesy and campy and has sexy guys getting gay, then a world outside of that that’s just as prejudiced and hostile as our own.

Sadly, I’ve yet to do the emotions for the raccoon.

Anyhow, he’s the cheerful, happy-go-lucky bellhop of the hotel.  He was pretty down on his luck his entire life, until he discovered his abilities just two years ago.  Now he’s found himself at the hotel, and life’s looking good.

Off screen, he’s one of the producers.  He was a child actor on several TV shows and became a producer for several successful shows.  After the finale of his last show, he realized that he’d love to be in front of the camera again.  Like his character, he was a late-bloomer, and realized his orientation later in life.  So he wants the elements of that to show on the show.

Art mimics life, and life mimics art, right?

Layers are amazing, they’re what make working in digital a life saver, that and the undo-button.

I learned a while ago that you could simply make sprites by omitting things that will be changed and build components off the things that do change.

And when it comes to expressions, there’s only ever really 3 major components that change. Eyes, Eyebrows and Mouth. There are other things of course, but they’re minute and on cartoonish characters, get phased out during the simplification.

Ever since reading Scott McClouds’ Understanding Comics, I’ve since seen the subtleties of what makes up different emotions. Just ever so slightly tweaked changes in the orientation of components of our face. In fact, he goes so far as to show us really what we probably think we look like, which are those same three objects. We have a conscious and mildly unconscious control over them, and therefore know their positions, and it’s easier for us to understand what the combinations of them form.

Emotions are easier to understand this way when you’re breaking them down into their simplest of forms.

I’m about halfway through all the expressions for my sprites. They each have different positions for their eyebrows, where they’re looking, whether their eyes are closed or open, the shape of their mouth. I’m on the fence about creating the anime/manga style expression symbols. The teardrop, the blush, the vein, that indicate different things. On one hand it makes things a little more comical and unrealistic—though we’re talking about animal people here. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot that can be said without those things, and I wouldn’t otherwise need the accentuation. I’ll eventually figure that all out when the time comes, I’m sure.

I’ve come across some quandaries before I get into the writing portion of all of this. There’s definitely going to be sex written into this game. I’ve seen a lot of examples where it’s sort of strewn about like candy in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factor just waiting for the poor hapless player to stumble across. I honestly believe that it’s something that the player should work for.

I’ve developed more or less a formula as to how relationships are handled in this game, and there’s calculations for the One Night Stand, the Love at First Sight, the Building Romance, so on and so forth. I can only hope that it all works out. We’ll find out when I start beta-testing this whole thing.

But here’s the problem, while I’ve built the game to be replayable, different endings and different possibilities. What can I do to make people come back to a new episode?

I wanted to make this a series of stories, each one telling a different aspect or angle of a larger story. I suppose even more different endings is my answer. At the end of each episode, I want the possibility for striking up a romance or a fling, or whatever with any one of the eight characters. Also, there will probably be guest appearances as ‘guests’ in the hotel. More on that later. But if every character is romanceable in the first episode of a game, what would make people want to play the other ones?

Of course, there’s the option to limit who’s romanceable. However, I feel as though that would be unfair… though it looks like the first episode of the game will more than likely be something that’s free. I suppose a teaser wouldn’t be too much of an affront to the players.

But again, these are all things that will and should be handled while I’m getting further along in the story. So after the expressions come the clothes. Then I can call the spritework complete. Work on the story, and then the CGs.

Here it is! The full cast!  After I revamp the cougar to fit with the rest of the style, I’m going to recreate their faces for various emotions.  Design up some cloths, and then the show will go into the writing and programming mode.

Last sprite! It’s a horse of course! Well, it was a really hard decision to come to.  I had started out looking at some sort of herbivore.  At first, I started with a bull. Then I examined what I needed in my table of elements, and wanted to go with a Water Ox.  Then in my search in between my other sprites, I stumbled across a gnu—or wildebeest.  Also in the herbivore family.  An Inex was suggested, which would have been awesome since I had just watched Kung Fu Panda 2, alas, horns are complicated and when I get around to creating the CGs then I don’t want to have to work that extra bit.  So it was back to the bull… but as soon as I started sketching out the muzzle, I realize that I’ve almost never drawn a horse.

Voila. Horse it is!

I’ve got one more base sprite left to go.  I figured that I would approach my sprites in such away to try and keep the style uniform.  I noticed a problem with the cougar, which is that I tried to increase the outline in order to separate him better from backgrounds.  In hindsight, it’s not very in keeping with how I do things.  So I should avoid doing the forced things.  I’ll have to go back and fix him to retain a similar style with the rest of them.

Also in keeping with building with a purpose, I’m going to put together the emotions for all the characters in the next wave.

I absolutely love being able to work with layers.  Originally I had about 4 different positions for each of the components (Eyebrows, Eyes, Mouth). This could create more than an adequate number of combinations for several emotions.

Then I ran across another person’s work for an expression generator, and there’s a lot more positions that I hadn’t touched.  So I’m back to the drawing board with it, but I know that I’ll have no problem putting it together.  The hard part of the base sprite is over.

Better yet, built into RenPy is something called LiveComposite, which allows you to layer things on an image.  Sai Paint Tools easily exports out into .png without any problems.  So that will not be a bottleneck to my workflow.

Onward!

I realized that ages ago, I had purchased writing software for NaNoWriMo. It’s called Liquid Story Binder.  It allowed you to generate crazy little things like Dossiers, Timelines, Mindmaps, and various other creative things.  Unfortunantly, it’s all sorts of departures from a horrid flurry of 50,000 words needed for NaNoWriMo.

However, now I see it serving other purposes.  It’s helping me create a much needed outline for my own story.  Also, cute little backgrounds for the characters.

We have our otter character for instance.  Yes, otter, there is one.  People keep mentioning that the cast is missing an otter.  There’s been an otter all along.

Anyhow, with the dossier, it let me think up a character for him on the show, and off the set.  On, he’s an attentive, wise-beyond-his-years, but playful at heart bartender who has telepathy and the occasional he sees a glimpse of the future.  And outside, he’s a former silver medalist who really wanted a career in acting and this is his first part stepping in front of the camera (outside of the cereal endorsements).  He loves the people he working with and is super enthusiastic, even when he screws up his lines.

Writing requires research—a lot of it.

I went through and thought about the origins of several actors as well. On top of the research and hunting for typical jobs you’d find at a hotel.  Thank Google.

With regards to the mindmapping, it’s quite a relief to use a mindmap just because it frees your brain a little from the restrictiveness of just typing something out.  I found it extraordinarily useful when I was playing Twee/Twine and creating that choose your own adventure game.  This won’t be too much of a departure from that particular style.

Happy New Year to everyone out there!

There’s a new banner, updated with the cast as I work on them.  I’ll be working more with their facial animation in the coming week.  I think I have most of the background pictures, I’ll just need to go through and touch up the ones I want to use.  So very glad that those are out of the way.

I’ve decided on how a relationship system is going to work based on decisions made by the player character.

One more screen shot.

I think this works as a title for the game. While trying to brainstorm it, I liked the name Haven. Thinking that this was sort of a place away from society where magic or the supernatural happen. Then I realized that the goal was to name the show that these characters play a role in.

So something cheesier needed to be selected. Something more akin to a soap opera. After some thought, Hot Days, Mystic Nights was born. Of course, this is also after figuring the setting.

It took quite a while to figure out what I was going to do for the setting.  I was half and half on whether I wanted a tropical coastal setting, or something that I’m a lot more familiar with, which is a mountainous region like the kind in my backyard.  That’s not to say that I haven’t been to places like Puerto Rico, Key West, Cape Canaveral.  So that’s going to come in handy when I’m writing.

I still ended up really liking the name Haven, and it wasn’t about to leave me.  So being a bunny, let’s just stick it in.  Which created this whole new dynamic.  They create various series on TV where it branches out to different divisions.  Law and Order: SVU, CSI: Miami, ST:TNG… why not do that?  Perhaps this could be a franchise from an established show.

So what does that mean for our characters?  They could be new actors, happy to get onto a show that they may already love, or it’s not as high profile and this particular series needs to find a way to come into their own and has a pretty rocky start, like ST:Enterprise.  Maybe with a foreboding of possible cancellation the way network television loves to cancel things… Caprica, Firefly, SGU, so on and so forth.

I’m pretty happy that things are falling into place.

Well, it seems that I’ve abandoned #6.  However Blake survived the horrible accident and will probably push forward into #7.  Though he was essential as being the template for all future sprites.  As opposed to the first attempt at a Visual Novel and none of those characters survived as I’ve tried a little harder to make sure the anatomy doesn’t go all screwy when I mirror the image.

I’ll probably have to redo Blake though, as his lineart is a lot stronger than the others.  Speaking of others…

The current project will feature about 8 characters.  Here’s 4 that are solidified and have a species.  The rest will be decided upon later.  I posted the picture to my SF account to poll some of the people following me there for what they’d like to see for the remaining 4.

Thus far I have two stories that will play out.  I wanted to keep using my sprites, and when in a forum dedicated to the Visual Novel scene I asked how often people re-use sprites, it was a definite ‘no’ or ‘no, and I’d be confused to see them in a different setting.  Then I started thinking in meta.  What if these guys were actors on a series of episodes?  Then that would be a plausible reason to use them for more than one visual novel.

So now I had to come up with a story that will fit an episodic content format.  I was thinking psychological horror at the start, but after finishing the Lost Room series I started thinking about a paranormal/supernatural thriller.  That might work out even better for a series as well.  So what could I do to bring people together?  A motel/hotel/resort!  Then my friend suggested that I could make something like Dante’s Cove—except that it would be good.

So this is the path that I’m currently walking down.  Wish me luck!