♥ NaNoRenO Week 2 ♥

(This is a post originally from Patreon, that I'm now mirroring over onto the project for anyone interested in the process!) 

Hi Everyone! ♥

We're now ( very nearly) half way through NaNoRenO! 

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- I GOT SICK  -

As the heading says-- Just like last year, I got sick!!  I definitely lost a day or 2 to that in total. As of writing, I'm still a little under the weather-- I hope to be better soon!! ;___;

That being said, I still put a good amount of effort this week, and I think despite the conditions, I've made good progress!

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- Expression pass 1 - 

First thing was building the sprites using the sketches from last week-- I started with ferns and was very happy to get the top of the head dependent on whether the hood was up or not! 

it turned out to be extremely simple, just seperating out the top of the head, + needing to add "if_not" to my layer statement:

declaring the up hood variant...

....and adding the top of the head that's dependant on it!

I split up Esca's eyes into a ridiculous amount of parts just becuase I feel like he'd be the kind of person to close one eye frequently. 

(Final ver will be in combination with other things LOL)

Fern's was a little easier, but he does have 2 different arm expressions instead.

Sienna's the only one without expressions right now, but I'm not even sure I'll need any for her...

I gave a loose pass adding in expressions to what I have of the script currently, though it'll definietely need another pass towards the end.  

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- Backgrounds!! - 

After that, I moved onto getting my backgrounds more sorted! 

I really like how the mine artwork cleaned up! I thought the looser sketch was pretty strong, but I'm really feeling the tighter ver.

I also have an outdoors bg and one in town, both that have been a little harder to wrestle with, the town one especially!! I tried a more on the ground angle and realized the sprites covered up most of it:

And now I have a second version I'm sure I'll like once I'm done with it but for now I'm really not really feeling it:

Early week 3 will be spent finishing those up and bringing them to the level of all the others, and hopefully getting to watercoloring all of them.

3/5 Cleaned up and onto tracing paper!

At this point, it'd probably be more work to digitally ink everything than actually just do the watercolors, so I'm confident that'll get done by the end of the Jam.

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- Planning for watercoloring- 

Fitting everything onto an A4 piece of paper and scaling them all up by roughly the same thing

In Hot Cocoa Magic, my other watercolor VN, the size of the bg is also the size at which I painted the sprites, but since the bg was blown up more, the texture of the paper shows more and it's almost like the sprites are higher res.

(As you can see, in physical form, the bg's about the size of the sprites-- I had to slightly scale UP the bg image, while shrinking the sprite ><)

Not the biggest deal in the world, but I'd like to reduce that look this time. It helps that the bgs are a little smaller (and about the size of the sprites anyways.)

Luckily, this is naturally the kind of size ratio the 2 main elements have, and I'm using full A4 size paper, so we should be better off this time around:

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- Sprites are finished! - 

After that, I was back to my sprites-- This week wasn't really one I managed to do much writing for, I just didnt have the brain for it.

I'm currently sitting at 6.3k words, which isn't /terrible/, but compared to last week's progress, it's not very much.

However, I did manage to completely finish my sprites! All inked and digitally colored, and they'll stay as the finished version until I'm able to swap them out for watercolor versions (which may even be after Nanoreno, depending on how things go...)

There they are! All 3 of them! <33

I also decided that instead of wrestle with making sure all my white outlines match, I'd let feniks incredibly useful outline shader handle it for me. (I love feniks' tools so much...they're amazing, and extremely cheap!!)

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- NO MORE HOURS PROGRAMMING EXPRESSIONS (I may be stupid,) - 

I found an amazing time saving way of building my layeredimages this week and I am so happy....I can do in an hour what previously took a day!!

previously, I would hit ctrl+T and hover my mouse on the correct pixel when zoomed in to get the co-ordinates needed to tell renpy where to put the layer.

Tedious, but not so terrible as make me dread the process-- I did always wonder if there was a more efficient way of doing things.

So, procrastinating on having to fix up my sprites with all their finished assets, I poked around to see if there was any automated way of getting a layer's co-ordinates-- TURNS OUT THERE IS!!

In photoshop, you can use scripts to automate different processes-- here's one I found that spits out a txt file of the layer's co-ordinates!  

I also hadn't realized there's a default one that exports all your layers as cropped pngs. Super handy! That was also a tedious part of the process I can now skip T__T <33

All this in the blink of an eye...I'm so happy.... (pic of notepad and exported assets) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- Rare use of scope knife - 

Also, I think I might have to drop the CGs? I attempted to sketch some this week, but I'm not really feeling anything I doodled. 

I'll keep the single one I have added in currently (And will finish the art for it digitally for now) but It's a lot of work I'd be adding and as it's not entirely nessicary to the final project, out it goes for now.

(That's not to say I wont consider adding some back in in April!)

I did manage to clean up the CG though!:

Feeling good about this one!

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PLANS FOR WEEK 3

I really need to have more to work with! So (other than recovering) I need to get back to writing! Hopefully I'll be able to fill everything in.

After that it'll be a tie between backgrounds and UI work (since the sprites are done). At that point, I'll see how everything's shaping up, and I'll adjust my plans there.

So the plan is:

• - STOP BEING SICK
• - Tackle the script, try to get it finished
• - Finish the bgs! get to watercoloring
• - UI spruced up

That's everything! I hope everyone's been going well! See you next week! ♥