Samantha Taylor Sprites (Pose 1 Sketches) by TiltSHIFT (Patreon)

Hey folks, a quick update on Samantha Taylor (Zach's mom) and the sketches from her first pose, which are complete outside of very simple things like a tears and sweat drops layer.

Based on people's feedback, I've worked with TiltSHIFT to make some small changes to her, mostly with making her hair less messy to make her more distinct from Zoey and changing the sweater for the winter outfit to have a braided pattern with tighter ribbing.

You might have noticed that Samantha's pupil direction in her expressions sheet is very... expressive and varied. This serves two purposes:

The first is logistical with getting the most bang for my buck, so to speak. re:Dreamer uses separated eyes, eyebrows, and mouths in its sprite system, and given that I adjusted all of those parts to be distinct from each other, she has 8,000 possible expressions not even counting blushes, glooms, tears, sweat drops, and yandere eyes. That granular control is really helpful at times, and I've noticed that Zoey often lacks precise eye direction for where she is looking as many of her 37 base expressions have duplicate eyes. If you were curious, Zoey has a theoretical upper bounds of 50,653 possible expressions with just her eyes, eyebrows, and mouths (and about 13 million overall possible combinations if I factor it the emotes).

The other reason is its in-game use beyond granular control of making her look at something. From an Author's Note on the subject:

Samantha's eyes are different than Zach/Zoey's (they're pinker and brighter than her child's reddish-brown eyes, and she needs glasses or contacts to see more than 3 feet in front of her), but she can't see in the dark like they can (a previous Author's Note mentions that Zach's eyes are so sensitive to light that he can basically see in the dark, or at least much, much better than the average person in extremely dim lighting, and he has an uncanny ability to track moving objects with his eyes, which was why he was so good at bunting back when he played baseball in elementary school and was a useful player despite his other lacking physical attributes).

Despite her bad vision, her eyes (and her brain) excel in processing the visual information it sees and noticing minor details. She can use this to speed read at an astounding 800 WPM with next to no loss in comprehension or lack of memory as she can briefly capture the image of a page in a book like a camera snapshot and very quickly process that information to read before her photographic memory stores it away in her brain like a filing cabinet.

More broadly, she displays an uncanny ability to notice visual differences or things "out of place." For example, she can differentiate extremely minor differences in color (which is quite helpful for art), notice a very minor deviation in a fabric texture (which much be repaired at once), spot a forged signature ("Zach purchased something with my card and lied to me about it, once again"), see dirt ("There's dirt everywhere!") and notice when something has been moved ("Well, I didn't touch it, so who did?!").

This also gives her the ability to notice very minor changes in someone's facial expressions, which she uses to tell if someone is lying to her (and which is why Zach might be able to get away with lying to her over the phone but not in person).

Of course, as this is all affected by her OCD and paranoia, she has a number of false positives with this broadly-scoped visual ability for small details. She can tell when someone is lying, but that doesn't mean she can tell if they are telling her the truth, and maybe she's cleaning a spot on the floor that didn't need to be cleaned. And is that chair crooked? She might be wrong about it, but she has to check. Her brain won't shut up until she checks. She can't take the chance that she is wrong.

It's meant to be a little uncanny how she sometimes avoids eye contact, which Zach notices more if his Awkwardness value is lower. For all her pleasantries (and Samantha can be an exceedingly pleasant person to talk to if you catch her in the right mood), she's slightly like a feral animal trapped in a cage. Or is she a feral animal on the hunt?

Samantha's second pose has been started, so expect updates on that one soon with some other random blurb about her, most likely covering what she can hold: a knife, an artist clipboard and pen, a wine glass with various degrees of fullness and emptiness, and her two pairs of glasses.