Devlog - Art Schedule (Patreon)

Hayo, devlog-chan here~

So we have a schedule that lists out all of the art, animations, and other asset work we plan to do for the year. It has placeholders for the survey winners and the like, but it's a basic roadmap that lets us know how we're doing time-wise, what comes next, reminds us what to post and what we'll need to set aside implementation time for, etc. It's handy!

Last year we'd been trying to steal unscheduled time for UI work, and that worked pretty well for a while, but when we upped the pace on non-UI art work it slowed the UI work down too much. So we took the remaining UI work and spread it out based on the pace we wanted to set and actually scheduled time for it, and found that all the high priority UI stuff could be done by October, as well as all of the idle animations for the remaining characters, and all of the survey obligations. 

And while that lined up pretty nicely, we want to start adding new characters again so we can finish up story mode and just have some fun designing new characters and scenarios for them, and a prerequisite for that was that we wanted to make sure the idle animation backlog was empty - reason being, we want to animate new characters as they're introduced from now on. 

So we took a look at the schedule, and realized that if we slot in the remaining animations, we can have most of them done by the end of May, and the last two done in June/July. So we shuffled things around, and long story short (too late!), that means that we'll be done with idle animations in the coming months, and also we'll be adding new characters!

That does mean May is going to be The Month of Animations though - ideally they'll be broken up with new art as much as possible, but in short order we're going to animate the Angel, Mermaid, Spider, and Mouth Fiend. With those done, and only the Innkeep and Shopkeep remaining, we'll be in a good position to start adding new characters again.

It's not exactly earth-shattering, but it does mean we'll have one of those long-term goals (close out the animation backlog) done, and that means on months that we don't add a new character, we'll be adding even more art, improving the existing animations with facial expressions, attack and hit animations, and the like, and animating more sex scenes, all while still finishing up the UI.

So look forward to the character animations being done, and a new character option once again appearing on the survey! \o/