Update - Fumi stripped by Nega Fumi! (Patreon)

This week's image

Nega Fumi has captured Fumi!

Working on Nega Fumi

I've been really happy recently with how easy it is to pose and render these Nega Fumi shots in the cave, because my computer just finds them really easy to process. In fact, I did design the combat rooms with very simple, memory-efficient sets so that they would render fast and I could do all the boring monster graphics really quickly. High-definition scenes didn't seem important when doing the combat graphics and it reminds me a little of the low-res environments in combat mode for games like the Final Fantasy series.

The practical upshot of this is that the environments for the Nega Maids' scenes don't look all that impressive, but I can make those scenes so easily that I can afford to illustrate them at a higher rate than I normally would and still do work in the background. I hadn't really planned to make a whole bunch of Nega Maids pictures, but with these things rendering so easily, I might as well do a few  alternate poses and angles here and there because it's really easy to do it. Normally rendering pictures can be quite a lot of work just because the computer handles both the posing and the rendering slowly - but that's not the case when I've just got a couple of characters in one of these simple environments. Frankly, it's just more fun to work this way a lot of the time.

It's taking a while, in part because I (mostly) haven't felt particularly inspired by the Nega Maids scenes so far; they've eluded me a little bit, but the Nega Fumi scene seems like it's shaping up solidly to me. The other thing is that these characters need some grounding - an intro and some complex programming - before I can really get into just adding fun content for them. Once I've got that out of the way I might be able to explore the concept a little more enjoyably.

Now, all that said, I can say I'm hoping to put Nega Fumi's stuff in to this month's update. She's the one I've been focussing on first and it's her stuff that I'm targeting as the "big" feature of this next update, with the Iku + Rio ending in there as additional icing on the cupcake. :) I just haven't been really sure (and I'm still not sure) if I can get all of it done in time, because I need to add that additional grounding before I can include a full Nega Maid. If I pull it off, though, then I think this will be a pretty great update! If I don't, well, I've got some backup stuff I'll throw in instead and it'll still be a good update, but I'd rather hold on to that content for an upcoming month if I can, since it'll make more sense if I put it in more coherently in one go.

The good side of things is that with the Nega Fumi scene I keep finding myself expanding it in little ways; I just find myself more interested in the scene if I think players are going to be more interested in it, so sometimes I find it easier to work on these scenes if I make them more ambitious, not less.

PAT design work

More than I have for a while, I've been working lately on refining the design for PAT. A lot of it is still up in the air right now, but I'm feeling good about a lot of what I've done recently. I think the plot and gameplay makes a lot more sense than it had been, and I feel like Nobuko's design is looking good now. (Even if her ponytail is a bitch to pose; I may have to start messing with custom d-formers just to control her damn strands. Talk about unmanageable hair!) I've also revised Shuji's design a bit and experimented with some other stuff, like giving Shizu a backpack and maybe sometimes a teddy bear, for the cute.

Sometimes the more design work I do on PAT, the more distant the project feels from me, as if it's going to take years before I can even make it. That's not true, of course, it's just that in these early stages it's best to be a bit perfectionist, because once I get going on full-speed development it's a little hard to go back and redo stuff that I got wrong from the start. 

Also, it doesn't hurt to have an archive of interesting notes, poses and visual ideas to work into scenes later on; that's a great resource and building that stuff up helps me to get to know the characters well. When I'm working on PAL these days it's really pretty easy for me, because I know the characters so well that writing them doesn't take much thought; I just tend to know exactly what they'd all do in a given situation. Sometimes that's a bad thing, because it can encourage me to be too lazy; it's good to have a challenge to stretch me to achieve more ambitious, interesting stuff. At the same time, there's a sincerity to the writing that comes from having a lot of familiarity with the characters, which hopefully showed through in stuff like the Kimiko/Iku threesome recently. (That's what I was going for, anyway.) Anyway, the point is that I need more familiarity with the PAT characters because I don't yet have the comfort of having written them for years, even if many of their stories have been in my notes files for a long time.

Are you keen to see an update focused on Nega Fumi? Do you think I'll make it on time? Any other comments, questions or suggestions? Put them in the comments below!