Friday Update #14: Facing Forwards (Patreon)

Howdy folks. This update's little showcase focuses on Zoey's face and how she's going to be getting a whole lot more expressive from here on out.

Yes, we all know Zoey is cute. But she's honestly a bit more muted with her expressions than I wanted, and I've been working with a smaller set of tools for her than I would like given that her 3/4 side angle poses are still only a sketch.

Not counting this unique towel clutching pose that's a modification of her B pose, she's supposed to have 6 overall poses from 2 angles.

Her artist, TiltSHIFT, has been working on commission from us, and we are only one of his clients. We've got a great business relationship, partly because returning commercial commissioners are lucrative for an artist and provide a regular source of income, partly because I'm very understanding with his delays and the complexity of what we're asking him, and partly because Espeon's suspiciously wealthy furry pockets have room in them for generous tips, but our reliance on him for much art forces him to be a bottleneck (artists matching his style are hard to come by; Myumi, who is Britney's sprite artist, has been missing for close to 5 months, throwing any plans for further art from him out the window).

Our current priority with him is finishing the transformation sequence HCGs, so the 3/4 angle poses are sidelined for the near future, along with the expressions they had.

Now if you'll recall, Zoey used to have a placeholder. TiltSHIFT's sprites, while incomplete, are enough to send this purple-haired imposter to the the recycle bin of my computer, but that's not to say that I miss the versatility of a 3/4 pose.

Espeon's called me "disturbingly good" at editing anime art in Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint, but I can't create a new pose of a sprite we have the rights to use out of thin air (the above is for a design document for the anime girl race queen on Zach's phone wallpaper and potentially a costume for Zoey in the future; the source is BAMI on pixiv, and my edit is included as an attachment to this post).

But while I can't do that, we can get more expressions from TiltSHIFT for cheap and only partly divert his focus from the transformation sequence.

So that's what we did.

Zoey now has 10 new expressions and a gloom layer to play around with; I was also able to make her new blush layers from the files TiltSHIFT delivered. Everything that's new is labeled with green text on this reference sheet I use while writing.

So with 40 eyes to choose from (23 non-duplicate eyes + 17 yandere edits with reduced glow), 30 eyebrows, 35 mouths, 11 blushes, 4 gloom levels, and 4 emote permutations, Zoey's face by itself now has a whopping 7,392,000 possible combinations.

This is enough versatility that I can make almost any conceivable expression I would need.

A face for the smartass "Never been better. Why are you asking?" reply Zach gives when asked how he's doing when he inevitably experiences menstrual cramps a month into the game's story? I've got it.

Me playing with red haired version that I'm personifying as my authorial identity and going "What the fuck why is this doing weird things to my brain?" Here.

The same, but in a weird AGP fantasy? Yeah.

A continuation of me stopping because this feels weird? You know it.

A picture I can use to replace the genderswapped Mikoto from Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun that I've been using as my profile picture for the last few years? Probably. (As a note, the red-haired edit I've made will eventually become a palette option for Zoey's sprites, along with the purple-haired and yellow-eyed placeholder color scheme and a blonde-haired blue-eyed one, thereby finally giving truth to Zach being my self-insert.)

All these expressions for Zoey are already in the game and will be debuting in the new Britney content update in the 0.8.1 release this Friday.

P.S. I know the reference sheet is going to get downscaled to a tiny size being embedded as an image, so I've added it and the full-sized Zoey expressions it uses as an attachment to this post.