Beach Paradise Devblog 2/28/23 (Patreon)

Greetings again gravure enthusiasts! I'm here again to talk about upcoming content and changes for Beach Paradise. In my last devblog, I intimated that the next version would release at the end of this month. I usually don't give projections on release dates, and it's usually because I'm really bad at them!

Yes, the next version will be taking longer than I had planned at the time, but for good reason. I'm making big, sweeping changes and doing housekeeping on just about every part of Beach Paradise.

Upcoming changes to body proportions

In my last devblog I talked about design philosophy with respect to the girls' bodies and proportions, and despite that I make no apologies about taking creative liberties, that doesn't mean I'm immune to criticism. Beach Paradise deviates in key ways from DOA5 and DOAXVV, namely in an effort to produce variety and a more desirable figure.

In order to illustrate this, I'm going to talk about one of the more extreme examples of changes I've made to a base DOA5 character.

This is default Ayane.

Now, there's nothing wrong persay with her aside from some technical gripes like low polycount in some key areas like her breasts. It really all comes down to personal preference, so I'm not going to say the things I did are objectively "right", but I'd like to be specific about what I wanted to change. The most obvious change I've made to her is that her breasts are much larger. I didn't do this just because I can. I did it because I chose to model her after her much larger breasted DOAXVV/3 variant. This also gives her a meaningful distinction from the other "common" body girls because she has significantly larger breasts than all of them. I just made some of her defining characteristics more obvious in that sense to give her more of a distinct look compared to the army of identical common body girls in DOAXVV.

Aside from objective, uncontroversial changes like increasing the polycount, increasing texture resolution etc., something that personally bothered me about all of the DOA5 girls bodies is that they have really wide torsos and waists, something you might call "barrel chested". Almost all of the girls are in the 18 to 23 age range but, in my opinion, they have somewhat dumpy or masculine proportions which defies what I would expect from a young woman presumed to be athletic. I'm not gonna go crazy and give them chiseled washboard 6 pack abs because they're fighters but generally speaking, it doesn't fit with my mental image and isn't even consistent across the franchise where in games previous to DOA5, the girls had much slimmer, trimmer physiques.

Compare this to an earlier iteration of Ayane which is far less barrel waisted/chested than the Ayane of 5 and VV

Quite a difference right? The DOA of old has a more youthful appearance in terms of proportion, with a narrower torso, slimmer arms and thighs. Still not my "ideal", but this kind of body has had a precedent, and there are aspects of it that I wanted to emulate in this next version of Beach Paradise.

Beach Paradise has always had wider hips and bigger butts, but keeping the other proportions the same while expanding the hips made their hips look too large proportionate to the rest of their body, or at least this is what one user expressed to me in a constructive criticism which I, upon reflection, decided was correct. In order to give the girls less of a "barrel" figure I simply made things bigger and neglected to make things smaller to counterbalance those changes.

This set off a flurry of manic work hours deep into the night wherein I revisited the bodies of every single girl in the cast to make a new stylistic approach.

The plan was simple. The view was that the existing Beach Paradise bodies were, by and large, too bottom heavy in terms of the entire skeleton. Think of a pear, when the goal is an hourglass. Depending on how observant to these kinds of things you are, the difference can be substantial, or you may not even notice a difference without looking at them side by side.

In the case of Ayane, it's somewhat subtle.

Left old, Right new

A sleeker, narrower body to give her a cuter, more youthful appearance. In general that philosophy was applied to most of the girls. The differences you see here are somewhat of a blanket approach I applied to most of the girls that're young and give off a youthful aura, and in my opinion suits most of the girls better. Not everyone is going to prefer the new look, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Of course a secondary objective to going over every girls proportions was not just to try and fit them into my mental image of what they should look like, but also to give a more varied appearance and fine touch to the cast to distinguish them better. As a result some of the girls had very drastic changes.

Of the more drastically changed girls was Sayuri. Sayuri to me is a little bit of a playground since she's a guest character that doesn't have a years long lineage, so I feel like I can really take a lot of creative liberties with her.

As one of the oldest girls with a "mommy nurse" aesthetic, I feel like it was a matter of course to give her massive, ungodly huge breasts.

The curious case of Naotora Li

Now, up until this point I've made an effort to explain that my changes are guided by a mixture of preference and precedent, but in some cases I'm fixing flat out errors, and in the case of Naotora, her default model and my own rendition of it kind of had a fucked up skeleton, with her collarbone actually being completely messed up, and her neck and shoulders just kind of being weirdly proportioned.

Of course, I also made a mistake completely of my own accord... I forgot her breast mole! I've restored it in all it's glory for all her costumes, along with fixing her skeleton which was just flat our wrong in vanilla and to a lesser extent BP.

Quality of life and housekeeping

The changes I've listed up until now, being a broad sweeping revision of all the girls proportions, is a tedious and time consuming process as it has to be applied retroactively to all of their costumes. It's less fun and glamorous than adding new content, but it's important, and the longer I neglect it the more annoying it is to fix it. That however includes a quality pass on all the girls costumes, all of the scene lighting and camera work, etc. Lots of scenes have outdated lighting (in terms of my workflow) that need to be revisited, and there are probably a lot of broken or messed up scenes and lighting cuts that need to be fixed. Again, this is not a fun process but if I don't do it when I'm motivated it will NEVER GET DONE!

In terms of quality of life, I'm adding wet bodies into the hairstyle selection for nude bodies so you don't have to do that bizarre hotkey stuff. Just cycle to the end of the hairstyle list on the nude slot and you'll get all the hairstyles but with the wet option instead.

I'm also looking into moving the DOAXVV guest characters to the unused PP slots, such as Alpha and Phase 4, for convenience of navigation. This sounds like it would be a simple process, but trust me it's not!

Conclusion and future Surprises

Normally I like to keep people posted on everything I'm doing, but this time I want to keep some things under wraps and surprise you all! The next version of BP will be a major update, moving into version 9.0, and there's a few big things that I want to keep from you until the time comes! At least one of them is a very long awaited and requested feature.

I hope you're all looking forward to the next update!

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