A Perfect Ten - Backstory and Current Progress (Patreon)

A Perfect Ten is a game I've been working on on and off for a few years now. It's a bit of a passion project at this point, and it's something I'm going to be focusing a bit more on. I thought I'd share the backstory, some old and new artwork, and what I'm doing with the project going forward.

The Original

APT originally started as a Batman Beyond parody game, starring  Melanie Walker (aka Ten, get it?) but then I changed it after Something  Unlimited (which was called Injustice Unlimited at the time) got contacted by DC about their game. They were shut down at the time and I got worried mine would get shut down if I continued too, so I changed it to an original game that just used the same art style. 

In the original incarnation, you played an original character who lived in Metropolis  and was about to finish University. Melanie moves in next door, and you  would get to know her and be able to gradually discover her past as part of the Royal Flush gang. Throughout the game you'd be able to buy different outfits that essentially transformed her into other DC universe characters for H scenes.

Here's some of the original artwork for Melanie.

I really tried my best to replicate the DCAU style as accurately as possible. I wanted the game to look like it was taken straight from the show. At least as much as possible. Since that's something that would have set it apart from Something Unlimited. I love that game and have followed it for years, but it takes a lot of liberties with the art style and isn't entirely accurate to the cartoons. That's not a bad thing or anything, it works great.

OC Do Not Steal

Having to completely change a game's main character and world required a serious rework and redesign. At the time, everything was hand drawn, so this took a lot of time. Eventually though, I came up with Angela as a replacement for the main heroine. I wanted to make her similar to Melanie, but distinct enough that she'd be her own character. In the game she would then "dress up" as other characters in the same way Melanie would have. The biggest difference  being that there wouldn't be an involved backstory with Angela like  there was with Melanie.

Here's some artwork of Angela as I tried to decide on an artstyle.

Originally it was literally just the DCAU style, just like before. I just changed up the design to make it an original character.

I then thought that maybe I should make at least some adjustments. As much as I wanted it to be accurate to the DCAU artstyle initially, I wanted to make it different enough that I wouldn't get in trouble. So I changed up the part where the hips connect to the upper body, since that's one of the more iconic parts of the art style.

Then I thought that if I was just going to make something original, I shouldn't be taking any part of the art style anymore. So I came up with this more comic book looking version.

I really ended up not liking it though. I wanted to keep the coloring simple so that CG could be made more easily and updates could be pushed out faster, and this art style didn't work well with the basic coloring at all. I'm also just not very good at original art. Which is why I mainly just color now when I want to do something 2D.

So, I ultimately decided on the previous version, with the more rounded mid-section.

Actually Starting to Make The Game

With an art style decided on and everything, I was finally able to start making the actual game.

The game was always meant to be an old school dating sim type of game.  Similar to games like Ganguro Girl and Sim Girl, but with some updates and some inspirations from SLG visual novels like Tsuma Shibori.

I did my best to create what I wanted, but I was struggling. I didn't  have programming experience and I was very slowly learning how to use the engine I was using. Nonetheless I got some scenes made and a few outfits as well. At this time, I was posting on a forum and doing polls  for what costumes would be added.

Here's some artwork of the costumes.

This first one is based on Mary McGinnis. Which was the first outfit that I thought of to be included, even back when the game was A Perfect Ten. She gets basically no love from the adult community, so I wanted to make sure she was featured.

Since it wasn't a DCAU game anymore, I was free to do costumes from basically anything, and I ran with that idea. Here's some of the other costume designs.

There was one of Felicia Hardy from the 90s Spider-man, which was decided through a poll.

There was Maddie from Danny Phantom because Maddie is my favorite cartoon mom.

Jessie from Pokemon because she doesn't get nearly enough attention.

And then Black Canary because I always thought she was by far the hottest character in the DCAU. I had never updated her artwork, but here's what I did make.

Not being limited to DCAU characters made things a lot more interesting  and varied. Which made it a lot of fun trying to interpret these characters into a different art style. 

The Little Engines That Failed Me

Since I was struggling with the engine, I decided to try and move over to RPG Maker. I had made plenty of games with it and was much more experienced with it. I made a few  different areas, but none of them looked quite right. In order to make  it really look the way I wanted it to, I would have had to make a bunch of original assets. It was also a bit frustrating being unable to use any of the scene artwork I had made, because it was all 720p, while RPG Maker didn't allow for variable resolution at the time. So I gave up on RPG Maker and went to Tyranobuilder. Ironically, now I'm switching back to RPG Maker from Tyranobuilder. Since I recently discovered that you can't transfer saves between game versions for games made in Tyranobuilder. APT is a large open ended game. Expecting people to start from scratch everytime there's an update is just cruel. Luckily, now RPG Maker is a lot better than it was. Creating an open exploration based adventure game I think will also be fun.

Another Change in Artstyle

Things were going relatively smoothly for a while with Tyranobuilder, but then I took an extended break from making the game because I was focused on other things, like working a day job. When I came back a few months later, I found the artwork to be just... bad. The character artwork I think was pretty solid overall, but the scene artwork wasn't very good and the quality wildly varied  between scenes and costume. Here's some examples.

As you can see, not great. I'm sure you'll also notice that there's two of the same pose in different costumes. That was to make it easier to create more than just one or two scenes for each costume. By creating a base and then drawing the costumes onto it, I was able to save a lot of time creating artwork.

Anyway, by happenstance, around this time is when I discovered DAZ.  For fun/curiosity, I made Angela as best I could using DAZ assets, and was actually pretty happy with the way she turned out.

And here she is.

So I remade one of the scenes in DAZ, to see how it looked, and I was  pretty happy with the way that looked too. Which is right here.

So I was considering  switching to DAZ, but had to make sure that the costume element of the  game was still feasible. I wasn't able to completely replicate all of  the costumes I wanted, but I was able to do a few that were close enough.

Here's a Mary McGinnis inspired costume.

And here's Maddie.

They aren't exact, but I still like how they turned out. So, the game was switched to DAZ. I finally had an engine I could properly use, and assets that I liked. I was able to get to a  working build and about 30 scenes. I was getting close to an initial release build. This was about two years ago.

Plot Twist

You may be wondering why there's no build of the game yet, if I was  close to an initial release about two years ago. For one, I got a new job that had a lot of forced overtime that kept me from working too much. And to make matters worse, about a year ago, my external HDD died. It fell off a desk and broke. The entire project was on that external. This was soul crushing. Years of work just gone. Not just of this project, but of various other projects I  had done some initial work on, all of my colorings, my old VN collection, basically everything I thought was important I kept on this external, just in case something happened to my PC. 

Luckily, a couple months ago, I was able to get that HDD partially working. I was able to get the main  project file and most of the art assets. A lot of the DAZ renders I couldn't get, but I was able to get most of the files, so I just had to render them again. And at this point, all the files I was able to recover have been rendered.

The Present

And now we're finally to the present. I'll be starting on the RPG Maker version soon. I won't be able to get the look I was initially going for, but there's plenty of modern assets that can be used these days at least. I'll be using all of the DAZ assets I've created already, so at the very least that should speed things along a bit.

As for the Tyranobuilder version, I was going to release it for fun, but Tyranobuilder released an update a few months ago that kind of destroyed the build. It kind of still works, but a lot of the buttons were moved or broken and it likes to just not load. There's also a lot of assets that will be in the game later that I don't want to get ripped and released. Since that could spoil future updates, depending on how much content I end up doing an intial release with. Which entirely depends on how long it takes to make the base game and how long it takes to do things in RPG Maker. I may end up releasing it in all it's broken glory once everything in the Tyranobuilder version is out, for fun.

The End

Normally a big in-depth behind the scenes post like this would go in the development journal tier, but I wanted more people to know about the project and it's history and all of that. I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes/preview of the game!