Poll: What re:Dreamer Art Would You Like To See Next? (Patreon)

If you're here, you've probably noticed that the long-awaited Zoey's sprite finally arrived in the 0.7.0 release. Having high-quality art is very important to Espeon and I, and thanks to everyone's extremely generous support, the Patreon is at a record high, and we've built up a respectable art budget.

So my question to you is: What do we do with it?

The Zoey sprites that we have now are in a state that will let us coast off them for a while, so the idea is that we want use that coasting time to plan what we do with the art for the game now that the rush to get the sprites in the game is done, and we're asking you all to vote to decide what to focus on.

As a reminder:

• $3 Supporters have their votes weighted normally (1x).
• $10 Backers have their votes weighted 4x the normal strength.
• $20 Sustainers have their votes weighted 10x the normal strength.

Our options are:

1. Finishing Zoey's front-facing pose

Way back in Friday Update #2, I shared Zoey's cleaned sketches. We've got a very good assortment of her outfits already: her male uniform variations, male boxers, 4 sets of female underwear, a white T-shirt with several variations, men's bluejeans, women's bluejeans, her casual mall outfit, and obviously, her naked body. But that's not her full toolkit. She's still missing her sarashi breast bindings (both tight and undone), Keisuke's hoodie, casual mall outfit coat, female tracksuit, female one-piece swimsuit, and comfy white ribbed sweater (additionally, there's the white V-neck T-shirt and black jeans outfit option from Keisuke Day 3, but that's little more than a sketch right now). Finishing these will open up a lot of new avenues with the story.

2. Beginning Zoey's side-facing pose

Remember, Zoey's placeholder sprites have 2 angles. TiltSHIFT's sprites will expand upon the poses available to work with (from 1 to 3 for the front, and from 2 to 3 for the side) but the total angle count remains the same.

Zoey's sprite design document gives the details in the "Poses" and "Expressions" section. It's hardly exciting to see the same character in the same outfits (except now from the side), but the core idea behind this is expanding Zoey's range in a way that one angle can't do, enhancing all of the current content, and opening up more personality for Zach/Zoey in the future. I've talked it over with TiltSHIFT, and should we decide to go with this option, he's confident he can get the side-facing pose to the same place as the front-facing one in far less time (he wasn't expecting the multitude of outfits to be as complex as they were, but he's more experienced with what we need from him for the sprites, and I've given him a detailed folder organization scheme to speed up his workflow).

3. Commission more HCGs

With the exception of the Keisuke Day 1 shower scene, all our HCGs are placeholder. Some of them blend in really well with the rest of the content (Zoey's casual mall outfit was deliberately modeled to match the placeholder HCGs at the mall), but others stick out like a sore thumb (Zoey no longer has purple hair, so the placeholder HCGs from the same game as her placeholder sprites don't match the new sprites).

Commissioning HCGs could mean one of two things here:

3.1. Replacing existing placeholder HCGs

It's rather boring, but this needs to be done eventually. On the upshot, some scenes, like Zoey's Day 1 masturbation scenes, could be heavily reworked with a proper custom-made HCGs to really fit the story, rather than being approximations of what the story should be. For instance, Zach is supposed to be masturbating in his dorm using his phone camera to check his new female anatomy. A custom HCG could add that detail, as well as use Zoey's actual design, Zach's actual dorm room, and more.

3.2. Commissioning brand-new HCGs for planned scenes not in the story yet

This one is rather self explanatory, but to truly understand what you're voting for here, you may have to spoil yourself on the future details of the plot as outlined in Friday Update #7. The plan is to prioritize something new for Britney's early content (say, a sex scene on Day 1 where Zach is being measured and fitted by Britney, but the intimacy of the moment becomes sexual very quickly); after that, Keisuke's exercise regiment for Zach after the end of his first week of college classes in a girl's body could turn very sexual in a number of ways.

4. The Zach-to-Zoey transformation HCGs

This is it's own separate poll option from 3.2 because it's a very delicate matter that requires as much attention to detail from Espeon and I to realize as the other options, if not more. To put it bluntly, the problem arises from a gender bender transformation HCG set being fetish content that probably needs a specialized artist who is comfortable with making that content to realize. A lot of western gender bender artists have great focus on the transformative act, but with a conflicting art style to this game and a level of quality that isn't up to par with what Espeon and I want, while most Japanese/SE Asian artists focus much more on the aftermath of a transformation than the process, and the language barrier between us would be a very significant hurdle to overcome (we got lucky with TiltSHIFT and Myumi both knowing English).

The third option, using an artist we've worked with before for this HCG set, has the issue of potentially driving a wedge into our working business relationship. Again, it's fetish content.

Consider that this HCG set is going to be the one of the first things a reader sees in the game. With that in mind, I'm personally of the opinion that this HCG set has to be absolutely stellar in quality, and the little details I'd like to see as Zach turns into a voluptuous girl would require an artist with a decent level of savviness with gender bender content. Incrementally showing that transformation with the right details gender bender fans crave in a high level of quality is a tall order for any artist, and I don't think anyone we've worked with is capable of doing that. Plus, we'd be taking a gamble on a dozen revisions with our artists hoping that we can fine-tune their work to that level.

This is something we are committed to getting into the game, but since we're going to do it, we're going to do it right.

5. Miscellaneous art

This is an eclectic mix of somewhat easy but rather boring art tasks that need to be started sooner rather than later.

5.1. Keisuke edits

We gave hakei, our artist who did a great job with the Keisuke sprites, a bad direction. Based on the TiltSHIFT and Myumi's usual styles, we asked him for a style of harder shading close to cell shading on his sprites, thinking that's what we were going to end up with. However, Zoey and Britney ended up getting a style of softer blending and gradient shadings (though with a few hard shadows in places).

Some differences between them are good. Britney and Zoey are girls (despite the complaints of the latter). They have soft, pinkish-white skin with lots of curves for the light to blend into. Keisuke is a man. He's got a naturally darker complexion, and he's muscular and straight-angled. While a certain level of contrast between the male and female sprites are going to express the differences between the sexes every second they are on the same screen, Keisuke's shading needs to be toned down a bit (also, he probably needs thicker outlines). From the 0.7.0 previews alone, it's rather noticeable that he and Zoey don't have the same style of shading.

Unfortunately, hakei is busy with making a professional comic and can't take on our commission for an edit. This is a shame, because I made a full Ryouichi artist reference sheet and was hoping we could commission him to make those sprites as well, but he's simply not available for work.

He kindly gave us his raw files for the Keisuke sprites, so all we have to do is find an artist to do those shading/lines edits, but it's going to take at least a little effort to do that.

5.2. Finishing Myumi's Britney sprites

Plain and simple, Myumi ghosted us. The last time we communicated was back in December 2020, and he's not been online anywhere since the very start of January. He offhandedly mentioned moving into a new place sometime back in early December, and while I've personally experienced a friend going offline for 6 weeks while they moved into a new place, it's been over 2 months without any contact from him. I genuinely hope he's okay, but the fact of the matter is that he's not responded to Twitter DMs, a wellness check email, or even TiltSHIFT trying to contact him.

Britney's sprites are in-game already, but they're missing their last two poses. Myumi had done the flat coloring for those, and with the reference of the first pose being done in the same file, it's very conceivable to find an artist who can finish his work. We'd hope to avoid using TiltSHIFT if possible since we want to keep him as the constant Zoey sprites/HCG pipeline, but if worst comes to worst, Myumi was commissioned specifically because his style was very close to TiltSHIFT's.

5.3. Various character sprites

I covered this back in Friday Update #3, but we still need sprites for Ryouichi, Zoey's mom, and Rich. The artist design documents for all three are rather far along (with Ryouichi's being completed), but those artists still need to be found and commissioned, which is something that takes time.

5.4. Backgrounds

It's second fiddle in importance to the character art, but backgrounds are on of the key "visual" aspects of "visual novels." With the exception of Zach's dorm room, every background in this game has come from DLsite royalty-free background packs. There's only a single holdover in the backgrounds from the days of wildly appropriating assets, an that's Zach's dorm room hallway.

The current background for their dorm building definitely doesn't show it, but Zach and Britney live in a former convent. Their university purchased it a few decades ago and converted into freshman student housing, though they've done a poor job of maintaining it, particularly the men's wing.

To make a long story short, after lots of Googling and discussing the options for the building with the patrons in our Discord server, we settled on a real-world basis for their building.

Located in 3.1 miles/5.0 kilometers away from University of Portland (the basis for the university in re:Dreamer), Villa St. Rose Convent was a convent and girl's school that was built in 1917, closed in 1993, fell into disrepair until it was purchased by an urban planning group in 1998, and was turned into affordable housing in the early 2000's.

Even in a city as historically Catholic as Portland, I'm simply not going to find a better basis for their dorm; even better, I'm only going to have to slightly fudge the location (Zach is currently written as living at the spot occupied by the Holy Cross Catholic Church 12 minutes of walking north of University of Portland).

The plan would be to take the picturesque view of the above blog post's vintage photograph and ask an artist to copy it. It's not quite a 16:9 frame, but the background can easily be scrolled and cropped for whatever we need.

This poll closes on Friday, March 12, 2021 at midnight EST. Until then, I'll be making edits to the existing intro for the game to heavily condense the rambling and make the new sprites really shine, as well as making a Friday Update about Zoey's new expressions.