The Confession v0.3 Development [2]

Arc 3 Status

Completed:
- Draft
- Overarching story
- Music selection

Required:
- All renders
- Dialogue
- Animations

I would put this at about 20% done so far or maybe even 25%? It's interesting because between the art and the fleshed out dialogue, I can expect it to easily take 4-8x the amount of actual hours I've spent on writing. I think that's more of writer's block than anything. The actual outline of the story took about two hours. Actually getting around to doing it took about two days.

But it's not like I've been doing nothing in the past four days since I've done v0.2.1! I've been doing research to improve my art on various levels: Theoretically (why does art or animation look good?) and technically (how do shaders work?) and realistically (how do I get this into Koikatsu?).

The help from Dussop cannot be stated enough! Most of my artistic improvements are a result of Dussop or KoikDaisy, but I'm also grateful to Puggy for their wisdom and advice on how to improve at animation.

What I've learned

Here's an example of using new shaders with Sara (xukmi/SkinPlus).


I was experimenting with KKUTS because the art from Out of Touch was great and I saw that's what they used. However I came to the conclusion that what I was enamored by was the model work and that the shading from the clothing wasn't to my liking



Compare this to Dimension 69 which is done entirely in Koikatsu with SkinPlus and other types of lighting.

Despite this, I might actually still use KKUTS. The reason is that KKUTS gives a more diffused lighting system and I have used the basic shader in Koikatsu from the beginning of the story. If I start to use shaders with heavy contrast, the difference in style could be quite jarring. This is a clear benefit of using sprites like Dussop has, where replacing their sprites accounts for the entirety of the occurrences in the story. But even this story is not immune to that because of course, there's still old events and animations.

Otherwise, I've been experimenting and trying to come to a good solution to my nameless and faceless MC. To each their own, but for this story I want the reader to live vicariously through the MC and feel some level of agency over the narrative of the story. Having our character with their own name and face detracts from that experience without, in my opinion, contributing enough to the story.

And thus, we have to have workarounds for this.

This looks like a normal and sweet picture! (Excessive clipping! Our MC's hand going through his body is not canon)



But actually, due to the size of the camera and perspective, it's actually an impossible shot because our textures and models get in the way of our shot. This is what it actually looks like:

I'm pretty happy with the way the game is going and what I've been learning so far. The Confession may not be the best game I ever make, but for me it's a promising start of what I might build in the future~

Thank you for reading.

Developer Technical Note: Updating this because I said I would be using V+ shaders (xukmi/SkinPlus) because of the higher contrast, ultimately I opted for using the KKUTS shaders. This is because the documentation online for KKUTS shaders are better and the contrast is less heightened relative to V+ shaders. Additionally, my art evolves as the game goes on. In this update there's a specific animation event that sets the boundary between old art and new art. I tend to use animations for significant time changes, tone changes, and in this case - an art change. That being said, the V+ shaders have a bit stronger of a contrast that I thought didn't fit with the pre-existing art style. In the future I plan to move to a different engine, so until then I decided that using better documented shaders would be in my best interests than learning the ins and outs of an engine I'm not committed to.