[NSFW] Planning CGs for Intimate Scenes (Patreon)

(Minor spoilers for story content released in earlier versions)

We're nearing the very end of our dev cycle this month, but that doesn't mean we can't share a little more about what we've been doing this month.

Mice Tea, as you know, is an erotic visual novel. We want you to care about the characters and their story, but if the sex isn't hot we're not doing a great job.

The scenes are written first, like almost everything in the game. The scenes are usually some of the longer sequences in the game. After all, who wants just a paragraph of banging and that's it? That means there are a lot of foreplay and position switching and all that good stuff.

That does present a challenge for our artists though. What should they draw in that scene that would take up multiple real-life minutes? It wold be great to illustrate every little pose and expression, but that gets too expensive. Instead we have to choose one or two representative scenes and use those. The questions is what ones to use.

Here we have our artist UltraBondageFairy's first pass at planning for a sex scene. This is Margaret and Felicia's first intimate moment together. It's a scene that's been in the story for a few versions now, but there's only been a placeholder sketch so far.

As you can see there's a lot of variation in composition. There's competing factors at play like how much do you want to focus on faces or bodies, how much a particular character should be featured, and how many variants you can make out of a base pose. Even after so much planning, we determined that all the variants here didn't quite get across the vibe we were going for. The main theme of the scene was mutual pleasure; Margaret and Felicia copy each other's actions for much of the scene. Most of the thumbnails drawn have one character in a more dominant position. Instead we worked on a more equal framing.

(The exercise wasn't a loss though. Don't be surprised if you end up seeing one of these compositions in the future)

These poses fit our needs better, and also showed off both of our characters faces and bodies in appealing ways. UBF then moved on to a rough sketch.

Even at this stage there's still a lot of tinkering to be done. In the current version things like face positions, tail placement and other stuff have changed. But I'll leave that for you to discover when you play version 8.10 soon.

Thanks for your support and we'll see you later!