Friday Update #29: Share Wear (Patreon)

Hey folks, CaptainCaption here.

This week's Friday Update covers clothing; specifically, the sources of Zoey's various outfits currently in-game, the outfits we'll commissioning from her in the immediate future, and the results of a recent poll to decide what outfit we'll be commissioning from an artist on Skeb for her to wear, partly to prototype it to see if it'd look good enough on Zoey to commission as a full sprite outfit, and partly just because we can.

Also, given the rate of art output from our primary artists, we've been stockpiling an art budget much faster than we can spend it, and that's apparently kinda bad for taxation of an LLC. Considering that I'm a recovering gacha dumbass who couldn't balance a checkbook if it were on a flat table, I'll trust Espeon's accounting sensibilities on this one.

I want to start this off by saying that when I began working on re:Dreamer, I had no idea how women's fashion worked. While I've learned a lot of various things while working on this game, women's fashion is not one of those subjects.

There's a bit of a meme that writers have weird Google search histories, but I'm pretty sure that The Algorithm™ thinks I'm a cross-dresser. At least I already have those godawful FictionMania discrete lingerie marketplace ads blocked!

So while I might not know the term for the precise type of sweater Seasonal Anime Girl #302 is wearing, I can identify what's hot and what's not.

Starting off, we have the first outfit you see from Zach, his male school uniform (and its female counterpart).

Almost from the start of game development, Espeon and I made the unusual choice of Zach's university, a former Catholic college, having not just a dress code for their students but a uniform. A similarly early design choice was to give Zach/Zoey black hair and red eyes, so I wanted to choose colors that complimented that.

The female school uniform was designed first, prototyped in Koikatsu Party with a model of Scathach from Fate/Grand Order (back then, we were shooting for a slimmer and taller Zoey of about 5'7" and E-Cups at most). At first, I was afraid that the obvious choice of a black/red/white color palette would be too harsh and monotonous given her black hair, red eyes, and white skin, which is why the skirt is navy blue.

An old Britney sprite by Myumi actually has this planned outfit fully rendered, but after messing around with Clip Studio Paint and talking to people in the game's Discord server, I realized it felt off somehow.

It took a few iterations of testing and making a black hair/red eyes edit, but I eventually concluded that my earlier fears of a monotonous color palette were unfounded.

The male uniform was in fact always designed as a black/red/white thing, with the reasoning that it felt more like the outfit of an old institution attempting to modernize itself.

The school crest is actually stolen wholesale from Persona 5, a game I have such negative interest in playing that you'd have to pay me several thousand dollars to do so (maybe this can be a Patreon goal after the $3,000 one to make me take HRT succeeds?) If I could do it again, I'd probably just go for a red St. George's cross.

Next up is Zach's white T-shirt/denim bluejeans combo (in fact, as I type this, I realize I am wearing a white undershirt and bluejeans).

I'm of the opinion that humble bluejeans are one of the sexiest pants a woman can wear, and giving it a breezy white T-shirt sends that casual sexiness factor into the stratosphere.

Source: official art from the Tsukihime artbook by Takeuchi Takashi

Tsukihime/Melty Blood's Aozaki Aoko wears one of the most basic outfits I have ever seen on anime girl, and it's fucking perfect.

Now these two jeans are respectively explained as men's jeans and women's jeans in the artist design document (and to avoid conflicts with "men" and "women" sharing the same string of characters, "boy" and "girl"), but that's not really true.

The high-waist men's jeans actually are a hand-me-down from Zach's mom, and he is very reluctant to wear them unless he's doing work that might ruin his pants or put into a desperate situation (like having to walk across campus to Keisuke's dorm building). They're well-worn and have been distended at the waist and hips, which is why they slip over Zach's big bubble butt and curvaceous childbearing hips and need a belt to stay up. Yes, this doesn't make any sense given that Zoey is taller and thicker than her mom, but I needed to explain away a plot hole of Britney giving pants to Zach because he has nothing that will fit him to wear the dining hall when he in fact does have something and wears it in the Keisuke route.

The women's jeans are either brand-new or close to being that, and ride much lower on Zach's hips and have a sketchiness to them that Britney explains in pretty decent detail. Yes, Zach ends up with the same women's jeans regardless of the route, despite each route having a different way he gets them. The budget for commissioning a third pair of jeans isn't an issue, but the practicality of getting them from our slow artists is.

While not requested from TiltSHIFT in the design document for this outfit, I ended up making my own versions of the T-shirts that fit the various bra shapes and level of sweat on Zoey's body. I can't show you the nude version because of Patreon's ToS, but these 3 versions (dry, damp, and wet) are created by the stock shading, tripling the strength of the softening glow layer that's the same color as Zoey's skin tone, and keeping the stronger skin glow while making the areas around the nipples and armpits slightly transparent to let the underlying clothes (or lack thereof) to peek through. I've since been reminded that wet clothes have a way of sticking to the skin that wouldn't give them the same contours as a dry version of the same clothing, but I'm justifying this by saying that the T-shirt isn't wet so much as just quite sweaty.

While I can't show it here because of Patreon's ToS, the bottom hem of the T-shirt is a precision-designed weapon to show just enough of a peek of Zoey's vagina to activate those horny monkey neurons in my brain.

Moving on, we have the casual mall outfit from the Keisuke mall story and a companion outfit with a sort of trench coat (internally defined as casual_a and casual_b).

Source: 残念な姉との幸福論（ラブコメディー）

These two outfits were designed to mirror the borrowed placeholder CGs of the mall date, with input from Sustainer patron harryhenry, who requested his Sustainer patron request be to consult with me about Zoey's outfits (although in this case, I basically just showed him these CGs and said "are these good?" and him nodding his head).

The pantyhose legging will be torn after having sex with Keisuke, so whenever the outfit shows up after that, it'll be without them (until Zach replaces them because he realizes that wearing shorts in fall/winter in Portland, OR is a bad idea).

Our next outfits are Zoey's female underwear (explained in-game as Sexy, Cute, Plain, and Sports, but defined as a, b, c, and d in the code).

Source: oryo

Source: zeroamu

Source: idk, some random underwear store online

Source: TonyG

This was similarly a collaboration with harryhenry, who had a lot to say about the various style of brassieres and panties that went over my head.

The only one that I was kinda insistent on was the sports bra + spats being sourced from fan art of Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII.

Next, we're going to be covering these two seemingly unrelated outfits at the same time.

Source: halcon (fun fact: I own this dakimakuri, and it's not bootleg either!)

As I said on Twitter, "one of the best parts about making an anime visual novel is that you get to put whatever outfits of your coomer-tier anime waifus you want on your female characters."

From fairly early on in the Keisuke planning, I wanted a sex scene at an indoor pool with Zoey wearing an athletic one-piece women's swimsuit. It has red and purple color variants, but I'm not posting this here because holy cow this post is getting long. Believe it or not, the thigh garter actually serves a story purpose, as it's a heart rate monitor connected wirelessly to Zach's phone for use with a fitness app. Ai is going to have a lot of fun telemetry data to work with when Zach has sex with Keisuke while wearing it on his body.

Loose sweaters are a staple of casual sexiness, but this loose ribbed turtleneck sweater also lends some strong MILF vibes to Zoey when combined with the right facial expressions.

Another athletic outfit is the women's tracksuit (which has a red variant which I am not posting here as this post already has an absurd amount of images).

Source: koissa

Unlike the one-piece swimsuit, which is a bit tight around the chest, this outfit contours to Zoey just about perfectly.

That being said, a jacket top that doesn't do that is the men's XL hoodie Zach borrows from Keisuke (similarly to the previous 2 athletics-oriented outfits, there's a red variant I won't show for the sake of brevity).

Source: some random online shop

Surprisingly, there's not a lot of good reference material of anime art of a girl wearing an oversized bulky hoodie on Danbooru and pixiv, but there's thankfully a really good gender bender doujin I commissioned a translation of years ago that devotes a significant number of its pages to just that (by coincidence, it's also probably my single favorite gender bender doujin I've ever read, and considering that my gender bender bookmarks folder on exhentai is at 1,816 entries, that's saying something).

Once again, due to Patreon's ToS about adult content and pirated content, I can't link to it directly, but what I can do is tell you its title (Eng: [Chirimozuku Cha (Aji Pontarou)] Otsukaresama desu Nyotaika-chan! | The Possessed Genderbender-chan! / JP: [チリモズク茶 (安治ぽん太郎)] お憑かれ様です女体化ちゃん!) and list these six completely unrelated numbers (173279).

There are three other major outfits in the game that are somewhat redundant to post (such as the many variants of the men's school uniform) or that I won't risk posting here because they really skirt the line in regards to adult content (the boxers, the naked towel, and the loose/tightened sarashi chest wraps), but let's move on to the outfits of the future.

I recently posted about the upcoming compression bra and new trendy casual outfits, so I won't repost the same information here. For the record, Myumi is still working on them, but he had a family emergency pop up that caused a delay.

There are a lot of outfits we want to give Zoey someday (i.e., an elegant formal evening dress, a few Halloween costumes, a women's golfing outfit, a cozy sweater accessory, a magical girl cosplay, a hot lady knight cosplay, a race queen outfit, an oversized naked boyfriend dress shirt), but this post is getting very stuff with images. I'm going to be wrapping this up here for that reason as well as how I'm starting to get so hungry my body is breaking down, but if you're curious and want more, here's a link to my massive Zoey references/ideas folder on Dropbox, as well as a more coherent Google Doc of the outfits we will be commissioning in the near future.

On Wednesday, I showed two outfits to you folks and asked patrons to vote between them for which one we'd commission Zoey art on Skeb from an artist I've had my eyes on for a while.

The results are in, and the red sweater of Yor Brair from SPY x FAMILY won out over the maid outfit in both the weighted and raw polls.

This means that you should expect an upcoming Skeb commission from machi (ritovoyage) of Zoey...

...with her ponytail hairstyle...

...in this pose...

...wearing this outfit...

...and making this face.

re:Dreamer 0.10.6 drops for Sustainer patrons on Friday, June 10 and will feature more of Zach and Keisuke trying to figure out how the fuck a curvy girl like Zoey is going to work out without causing herself discomfort or a crowd of oglers swarm around her.

Until next time!