GAME OVER: Struggling Secretary's Forced Overtime! (Patreon)

Full video Here!  

Synopsis/Description:

Abby and Silenceyoursword's Silence enjoy the bondage/DID game "Escape: Forced Overtime," so much, they stayed late to enjoy it on company computers.

Big Mistake!

Now they get to enjoy the game for real!
Can they find the Boxcutter in time?

If Not, it's...

GAME. OVER.

The Rant:

Hehe.... 

This wasn't supposed to go this far.

It was only supposed to be a simple loop, of Abby and and Silence struggling on the ground...

Well, let's back up.

So, one day, while browsing Discord, I noticed that SilenceYourSword was streaming to their private Patreon Discord server. Silence, as far as I knew at the time, rarely streamed, so I popped in to see what was up. They were playing a janky little bondage game called "Escape: Forced Overtime." 

You play as a sexy secretary who, unfortunately, gets caught up in some industrial espionage, when she stumbles on a spy stealing company secrets. After being restrained, your goal is to walk/run/hop (if your legs are tied)/roll (if your feet are tied across each other, or you're hogtied) to the boxcutter knife somewhere in the level, so you can untie yourself (and get tied up again for the next level). 

It's a fun little game, though you can feel the limitations the developer ran into while making it. The physics and controls need a little more fine tuning, and the collision detection for your hand and the knife are ridiculously precise, which isn't always fun when your hand is a centimeter from the knife and correcting your pose so you can roll into it takes 10 min (and you may end up missing and ending up further than when you started).

That being said, customizing your damsel is fun (once you unlock the ability), the levels are never too long, and squirming around helplessly can be its own fun (especially once you start getting blindfolded, hogtied, or tied to a chair)

I recommend getting the demo, and, if you like it, tossing the dev $10. 

Anywho, Silence played through it a bit, and afterwards, even did a render of Abby! 

Naturally, I couldn't let that stand, and so I started roughing out a loop of my own:

However, at the time, I didn't have time to block out all the pieces I'd need to make it work, so I set it on the back burner, and came back to it a few days ago.

However, as I started putting pieces together for Silence, I slapped a blinking "Game Over" loop on my Ancient Parchments gif. 

And then both it, and the "Miss Pink" gif did pretty well on Twitter, which convinced me to up my game for this Game Over. So I added a new scene of Abby and Silence in the process of being muzzled (both they and their captors know it's a futile gesture) so I could turn it into a proper Game Over.

"Game Over"s are a bit of a cheat on my part. On your end, you see "10-15 seconds" (really 36 seconds, once you add in the pre/post-countdown sections) of struggling animation, whereas, on my end, I make 1 loop, let it play over a countdown, and then make a second loop for the first loop to lead in to. It looks like a lot of work, but it's comparitively less work than making a comic or animate short.

This is where the benefits of using a dedicated animation program come in. If I was animating in anything other than Adobe Animate or ToonBoom Harmony, I would have to copy the frames of the loop and paste them as many times as necessary to get to my countdown, and if I messed up anything, I would have to recopy and paste the loop again. 

whereas in a dedicated program, I can make an animation, nest it within a symbol, and if any changes need to be made, I can just make the change, and it'll be propogaated through the entire animation.

Nested animations also allow me to only focus on one part of the animation at a time, rather than having to focus on the entire scene. It allows me to set up Abby and Silence to have the same loop cycle (32 frames for the struggle, 64 for the post-muzzle) and then offset one or the other, so it doesn't look inorganic by having the shout/struggle in unison (it also allows me to add shout/moan animations after the fact)

And, you can tell by the amount of attachments, that there were a lot of nested animations!

I decided to try something different with the attachments. Instead of just the video and/or its component parts looping for eternity, I decided to break it down into the characters as well. Just a little extra for my patrons (as such, I'd very much appreciate it if you didn't spread those extras around) Let me know what you think!

Also, some of you eagle-eyed supporters might have noticed that fade-in from black doesn't start on the first frame, but rather literally on frame 2. This is a cheat on my part to get around how the preview will look on Twitter and/or Discord when this goes public. It's not a great look for the static preview to just be a black box, so a one-frame discomfort is a small price to pay.

What do you think?

 Let me know in the comments! 

Your feedback lets me know how I'm doing!
Thank you for your continued support and patronage, and I'll catcha over yonder!

-Saunter!