Developer Diary 44 - Full Circle (Patreon)

When I decided to redo Bubblegum Sunday, going full body seemed a no brainer. Everyone (including me) wanted to see more of their characters. And there is so much potential there, from being able to add in pants and shoes to more sexual things like genital options. It just made sense to take this extra step as we graduated from our old engine to the new one.

I expected this change to be a breeze, but it turned out to be anything but. As I talked about in the previous post, I set up artwork for a full body pose following a perspective grid. This made sense to me, as then the background would line up nicely with how she is standing in the scene, ‘grounding’ her, as it were. This, however, introduced a sneaky reality: the perspective meant we wouldn’t be looking at her feet head-on, but actually more from the top. That doesn’t sound like a problem necessarily and it didn’t cross my mind right away, but once I got to drawing shoes for the test build it hit me. I now need to split up shoes into front and back pieces. Now, this in and of itself isn’t too terrible, but it adds to an already increased complexity.

(This shows how shoes like these would need multiple layers to work)

When I restarted, I had one goal with the art: simplify. While the artwork for the GM version is great, it is far too complex for it to be flexible in any way. It needs to be simpler because I now need to draw a whole body and I also want to have a lot of clothing options in the game. Having the shoes split up like this, just really irritated me. I wasn’t achieving my goal of making things simpler at all, far from it.

(The art as it was designed up to the point of introducing test clothing)

There’s an easy solution here, but the whole issue made me look at the whole picture. I got entranced by the idea of tilting the character slightly sideways, rather than head-on. On paper it seemed great. Lips would be more plump looking, lashes peek out better, hair can be more obviously flowing down her back, dicks look better at this angle, you can see her shoes nicely. The benefits didn’t seem to end! In practice though, it fell on its ass, hard. Firstly I couldn’t figure out where to place her arms to save my life. Every option seemed wrong. On her hip? Well, we want bigger hips. Secondly, perhaps even worse, where does she now look? BGS is meant to have a ‘Tamagochi’ feel. You are taking care of this character. She is yours. She needs to focus on you, the player. A slightly tilted view sounded so great, but in reality, it sucked.

(While she was flat on the ground now, it just felt awkward in every way possible)

Disenchanted, I went back to the front view. Initially trying to give the original art legs that stand on a ‘flat’ ground, I quickly realized I wasn’t gonna get away with this one. With simplicity in the back of my mind, I tried yet another approach: stylizing the character and giving her a doll-like appearance, steering away from the realism we had before. This seemed to work well. I deliberately angled her feet inward to give her a slightly shy/dumb appearance, which also worked well for showing off the shoes I was going to add. The whole time I worked on this design I was happy. This could be it, I thought! I showed some people the drawing to get initial feedback and it seemed very positive. Everything seemed to line up. A good neutral pose with a girly feel to it, arms in a relaxed neutral pose, far away from the hips so they can be expanded, and feet at an angle to show of some sexy heels. I was finally on the right track. Or so I thought. Once the drawing was in a good place, my programmer showed me a build (with the original perspective based art) and I just felt weird. This looked way better than what I had. It felt Bubblegum Sunday, and what I had just drawn didn’t. All that effort to just come back to where we started off. I guess I’m now at the point where I’m curious to hear your thoughts as well. I realize we are comparing a semi finished piece of art with a sketch, but still. Do you think I need to keep exploring the new ‘doll’ approach to the art?

(By itself an interesting approach and direction that ticks a lot of boxes, but compared to the original, I'm conflicted)

I really want to believe in the doll-like approach and will keep developing it further to satiate my own curiosity, but please let me know your thoughts, I always read them and try to reply!

Alba