Friday Update #30: The Feminization Arms Race (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the day wait on getting this Friday Update out, but I tricked myself into spending 8 hours disassembling my keyboard and making "frankenswitches" from Kailh BOX V2 Whites and Kailh BOX Crystal Pinks for it that I ended up hating because the Kailh BOX V2 switches moved over to a firmer leaf spring like the Kailh BOX Royals without mentioning it anywhere and this lead to an extremely stiff typing experience that was so fatiguing that I had to undo all of my work.

Anyways, now that my clinical OCD with computer peripherals has been aired, let's talk about Zach/Zoey.

Source: commission from Avaloki

It's a well-stated dev tidbit that Zoey was intended as a 5'7"/170 cm woman with large but manageable DD-Cups.

Source: why are you even asking?

This... is not a 5'7"/170 cm woman with large but manageable DD-Cups.

TiltSHIFT, her sprite artist, deviated pretty heavily from the design documents and made her to what I measured as 5'3"/160 cm with 32H U.S. boobs.

Her nude A pose (the one with her hand on her hip) came first, and while it looks a little on the bigger end of things, it was acceptable. On her later poses and outfits, TiltSHIFT  made her chest a lot bigger, and after Espeon and I went back and forth with him on several revisions (one of which made her chest size larger), we had to accept that he wasn't getting the idea and had to accept the difference.

More like "TitSHIFT" amirite?

The reduced height for Zoey meant that Zach was also shrunk in size to a scrawny 5'4"/120 lbs.

The current Zach we have is a short little man, and while Zoey honestly is a little too short and a bit too busty for my personal strike zone, Zach looks pretty good.

So that's part of the reason why we're getting him sprites for a short 15-20 minute intro day to show what his life is like before he gets turned into a woman.

We commissioned Natsuko a few months ago for Zach sprites as a preliminary test for him drawing Rich sprites and polishing up any male characters in the CGs, and he hit it out of the park.

Unfortunately, we weren't playing baseball, and Zach ended up way too hot and masculine.

With a heavy heart because this art is so good, I needed to ask for a redraw. One of our artists already made a mistake not following body types for our main character, and we couldn't afford a second.

So I sent an email that explained that it is an integral plot point to the game that Zach has to be similar in appearance to Zoey. He took the news because I worded the email very kindly and clearly (part of my reason for being overly verbose is that I have a fear of being misunderstood; a related fear is getting people mad at me over text, which is why I so rarely push against our artists when they are delayed).

Natsuko took the news very well; also, he was in fact supposed to deliver sketches to us beforehand because I was worried about this exact thing happening, so it worked out without a redraw fee, even if the completion estimate got pushed back a month.

The "twink" dial was turned to 11, and Zach's testosterone levels were dropped lower than Bitcoin's value.

Overlaid with the flatter chest of the compressed male uniform, you can see that the body types are much closer to each other. The shoulders are still slightly off, the waist is much thinner on Zoey, and she's got curvy hips and a thigh gap, but those are details I can work with and hand-wave away with the explanation that nobody really paid much attention to Zach before and his facial structure has stayed relatively similar; plus, red eyes aren't exactly something you see on a person every single day, so Zach gets a boost to maintaining his identity just by keeping those.

Overall, I'm really satisfied with where these sprites are going, and Espeon and I are definitely commissioning Natsuko for Rich sprites as soon as these are done.

Now, onto the arms race for my own feminization...

If you weren't aware, this Patreon page has a $3,000 goal:

I, CaptainCaption, despite being a cis male, will pledge to take an  estrogen and antiandrogen combination for at least one week. Those of  you with a forced feminization kink, eat your hearts out!
This could  potentially be a long-term treatment for my early-onset Parkinson's  disease and other hormonal issues, so it's not just for the meme  (consult Friday Update #21: The Mother of All Omelets for the full details).

I was reminded of my approaching doom when I was editing the tracksuit for Zoey to match the colors of the tracksuit from the placeholder CGs being redrawn by TiltSHIFT as a request from a Sustainer patron (they'll be added this update).

Source: your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man

Source: [Kukudou (ckj)] Noroi De Nyotaika Shita Megane de Noppona Ore Ga Namaiki Kouhai to H Suru Koto ni Natta Koto no Tenmatsu | [くく堂 (ckj)] 呪いで女体化した眼鏡でノッポな俺が生意気後輩とHすることになった事の顛末

I made some joke about how it was like Squid Game, but instead it was re:Dreamer and the big ball on the ceiling is full of estrogen pills... which made me remember, oh wait, that's what's going to be happening to me.

Part of being a good writer is knowing when you wrote something good and working from there.

I refined the joke to:

Squid Game, but it's re:Dreamer and the big transparent ball on the ceiling gets filled with estrogen and anti-androgen pills as the number of eggs the game has cracked increases.

I feel like I'm walking on eggshells right now, to say the least.

Before I go, let me show some snippets of what I've been doing for the upcoming 0.10.7 release.

Much like with Keisuke's route recently, Zach is going to be zooming ahead to the weekend in Britney's route, meeting her in the campus' old theater on Friday around 2:00 PM before the theater club shows up.

And then I got bored and made some edits to the sprites, shifting away from my goal of testing the background and a reverb effect on the SFX in the spacious theater to sell the size of the structure...

Let me clarify: I was goofing off with these and I do not plan to do body swap with re:Dreamer as there are already 4 other anime art visual novels on TFGamesSite that focus on that (Press-Switch, Student Transfer, P.D.A. - Personal Data Altercator, and Palladium). If you want body swap, go play those.

Anyways, the tool I used to make these into gifs had too much dithering, so I'll just be adding the mp4 files to this post as attachments.

Zach and Britney body swap:

Zach and Britney palette swap:

Zach and Britney body swap & palette swap:

Zach and Britney body swap and palette swap (with two Zoey sprites):

Zach and Britney body palette swap (with two Zoey sprites):

I also made this for some reason:

You can see the ADHD interacting with the horniness in a time lapse as I get distracted from that genuine attempt at testing the background art!

re:Dreamer 0.10.7 drops on Friday, June 24.

Until then!