Rogue-Like Update 12/11/2021 Paper Dolls (Patreon)

Ok, still working hard on the next update, should be fun, but I don't have a lot more to report yet. I've mostly finished Jubilee's expressions and basic clothing and have her sprite actually in game (but still have a lot of polish and details to work out there). Since I don't have a lot of updates, I figured I could talk a bit about how these sorts of sprites work, to get the maximum customization variety out of them.

The character sprites I use are essentially paper dolls. They are layers of opaque and transparent parts stacked on top of each other to produce the finished piece. When I'm drawing out these characters, I need to keep in mind how they will relate to each other, which piece of clothing or body part should go in front of the other, so that they end up looking natural. You might think this is easy, the shirt goes over the bra and the jacket goes over both, fine, but there are often edge cases where you would want a portion of a bra to end up on top of the shirt. Of course you can solve this by just adding layers, having two, three, four layers for a single item of clothing, but the more layers are in the sprite, the more lag it can add to the game, so I try to minimize this the best I can while also achieving the best visual outcome I can.

You also have to decide the conditions in which a clothing piece will be shown or hidden. Is it always visible when worn, which may be the case for a skintight item, or does it hide itself, or a portion of itself, if other clothes are over it, like a loose tank top might under a tight shirt? Artistically, this is easy to do, but in the interests of having the minimum number of "checks" in the code, you want to keep these sorts of exceptions minimal, so while designing the art you want it to be as flexible as possible for the outfits you intend to make.

And then you have the animation. While the main sprite does not have much in the way of animation, the sex poses do, so the pieces may need to be able to move in certain directions. For example the breasts tend to need to move up and down a bit, and since you can wear clothing during these activities, this often means that the clothing needs a way to move in the needed directions without looking unnatural. Sometimes this is easy, but in some cases it can be a real challenge to figure out how to shape the clothing so that it fits at every position. Storm's sex pose, for example, had some real issues getting her tops to work in such a way that her breasts could move up and down, while things like bra straps would not seem to detach completely or clip through her breasts.

Figuring out what works and what doesn't, and planning ahead for these things, is one of the most interesting puzzles of putting together these character sprites.