AHE: New Artist & Tertiary Characters (Patreon)

We're now welcoming Goorie to the team, an animator who was both affordable, interested in working with the project long term, and able to adapt his art style to better mesh with YeMcBear's character designs.

At the moment, Basem_S1 (our background illustrator) is taking a break from orders, so I'm putting in new orders with Goorie back to back as fast as he can complete them. Once Basem returns, will likely settle on doing either a regular one animation order a month, or two orders a month.

Since we will have Goorie's work supplementing YeMcBear's character design work, I'm pivoting her to focus a bit more on tertiary characters, and I'll be allotting them a position each month.

Now, what are we considering "tertiary characters?" If the primary characters with a ton of focus throughout the story are Brian, Emily, Stephanie, and Kelly, then the secondary characters are the ones who appear less frequently such as Chloe and Rebecca. Tertiary characters are ones who have only one or two appearances throughout the entire story, but are still necessary to allot time towards designing and illustrating, if we don't want the convention (and therefore the game) to generally feel like a ghost town.

Examples include Ryan (Hipster Mister), Megan (Steph's friend), and Sarah Star (Kelly's sister, the bigshot cosplayer):

Emily months (June, October, February) will still feature two Emily illustrations each time, but will now also include a single Out of the Blue illustration set; Mrs. Rivera, Teen Emily, Teen Brian, Teen Michael & Tanya, Brian's father, Lauren (bullied Emily), Teen Will & Mark, etc.

Stephanie months (July, November, March) will still feature two Stephanie illustrations each time, but will now also include a single Panels & Purchases illustration set: Chrissy-Cat & Mark (sitting), Mary & Mark (standing), Foxy & Bill, Amanda, etc.

Kelly months (April, August, December) will still feature two Kelly illustrations each time, but will now also include a single Cosplay Contest illustration set: Jordyn, Melanie, Fletcher & Liz, Bosatsu & Ogre King, Joe & Ghost Whine (judges).

Miscellaneous months (May, September, January) will still feature item batches and secondary character sets, but will now also include the general 'Main Story' tertiary characters we need, such as: Alley creeps, Mr. Gary (security), Dan Andrews (Sunday Morning Gazette), Akari (Darkmasku boss) & decoy Darkmask dude, Mega Mikuru & Qin Wanwan (Sarah's lackeys), Marina (first aid station in Atrium), and etc.

These were always necessary, but very difficult to allot any weight or priority to when there's so much we need for the main characters. But, now that we have Goorie working on animations (and therefore covering most of the ecchi bits) I'm finally comfortable having YeMcBear expand her focus to cover more of these things.

That's all, really. Just was super excited to share some changes and planning with you guys!