February 14 Update (Patreon)

Two items of business, then a content post.

1) I'm participating in a big "Lusty Hearts Lewd Bundle" with a number of other devs. I joined these just as part of my obligatory marketing efforts, but they've proved surprisingly successful. Please take a look and see if any of the games interest you!

2) There's one new map along with all the faces, so don't miss it. As part of trying to do this game right, I'll make any revisions if there are errors in the mapping, or even just sections that feel bad. Please feel free to offer any feedback.

OEA Facesets

This week I finally get to share something that I've been working on for a while! As you know, Once Ever After uses a variety of different artists, and I've had a rough time getting reliable people on many fronts. One issue was getting faces for the random NPCs, which I hoped would really make the Tale variants feel distinct.

The first artist completed a number of sets before going AWOL on me, online but not responding to messages. Eventually I had to contact another artist. Rather than replicate the style exactly, they offered to try to replicate the art style of the main characters better. Compare the two, old first:

This is one of the few setbacks that was actually a plus overall. I did have to commission some pieces of art twice, but it actually wasn't horribly expensive, for what I think is an upgrade.

I've been working on this step for a while, so it's actually done, all these faces distributed around the game. Twenty four unique faces, over a hundred when you consider all the variants! It is my hope that these, as opposed to faceless NPCs, will make the game feel higher budget and be a richer experience overall.

For example, the main "roles" in the story can also have variants to increase the feel of diversity overall:

Those are just Little Red Riding Hoods from various dimensions, nobody important. We also have various unique faces and misc roles:

Or remember those villagers above? Every single Tale you visit, you get a new version of them reflecting that Tale:

I'm not entirely convinced this experiment will be successful, but I'm going to try to perform it as well as possible. Please look forward to future updates.