New character vote, animation draw, stuff.

Character Vote

First of all, I said that the next character vote would start this week, so you can start suggesting characters and scenarios. Keep in mind that while you're voting for the characters themselves, suggestions for scenarios still help a lot, especially since I'm not familiar with every character I animate.

I've decided to move the character voting to the animation page

http://kyrierua.blogspot.ca/p/character-voting.html

Animation poses.

Where's the Tharja animation!? 

Honestly, I just sort of lost motivation halfway through this animation. I'm having a lot of trouble choosing poses lately, and so it seems like I always end up settling on something iffy. The main problem with patreon animations (as opposed to game animations), is that because it's a voted character people expect to see the character's face, and in general probably want to see the sexy bits. This makes it difficult to come up with poses without re-treading the same ground (I'm not great at poses to begin with). Especially when I'm not familiar with the character I end up racking my brain trying to figure out what people would want to see, but at some point I have to just settle on something and start animating, which never feels great.

However, that's something I need to deal with and improve at. With game animations I can sit down any day of the week and animate something. I'd say I have fewer limitations, but surely animating the same character over and over used to feel like a limitation too? I don't know. Half of me wants to do a Patreon game instead because it would be much, much easier, but the other half of me wants push through animations, stop sucking at it, and give people a little consistency at least for a while. Either way, for now my consistent inconsistency annoys me, and I'm not sure how to deal with it.

Plans

Yeah, "plans". You can probably disregard this part entirely if you want -__-

I'm going to take a break from Noaika for the rest of this month. Mostly because I want to go visit family, but also because I need a break from it anyway.

With the rest of my time I want to finish;

Tharja/animation player
Cave-story animation

First animated Character-draw

At least. Other than that, I'm going to try and finish as many of the extra animations as possible. Hopefully it will be easier since I'll be doing each animation all at once, as opposed to throughout the week.

With the rest of my free time, I don't know. There are two mysterious things I could finish, I need to finish the animation tutorial, or I could start thinking about the Patreon game more. I've been thinking about how I could make the Patreon game work as a game template that everyone has access to.

Anyway. That's all for now. Tharja will be within a day or so, and I'll choose a winner for the animation draw soon.

Shilleka Animation

Went back to animating with shifting instead of frame by frame. Though I did do two different poses the way I would in Frame by frame, and used shifting to tween between them the way I would with game sprites.

Planned on releasing two today, but every time I sat down do this one I ended up procrastinating and working on something else instead. Sorry about that -__-

So, I'm setting a deadline for myself with the remaining animations, I have to start releasing one a week again, starting with this one. Other than that, the animation player is done, but I've still got to put all the animations into it, dividing them into loops, choosing sounds, etc. It's not time consuming, but it's just sort of tedious so I haven't done them all yet. I look forward to finally putting sound to these, because sound is pretty important to me when it comes to H-content.

Anyhow, that's all for now. Oh, and thanks for all your input on the Noaika question. Helped me come to a conclusion a little easier.

See you next week.

How? Also, colors.

How exactly do people still not understand that I only make money per animation, and not per month, and also then go on to say that I'm begging for money, despite not having a Patreon link anywhere on my site?

I don't under the stand.

Question about customization in Noaika

Anyhow, more importantly I have a question about Noaika, particularly when it comes to skin and hair color, as well as breast size.

Originally, the plan was to make it so you could change attributes of your character through various means. For example, having sex with certain monsters changes some of your stats, but it would also change the way you look. These effects could then be re-applied with less debuffs once researched.

The second method has to do with the familiars. Basically, there are various familiars in the game, and they all look different. They have two modes; one where the familiar floats beside  you (like in the demo) and a second mode where it fuses with the player and gives passive bonuses based on it's stats instead of attacking. As a part of this, I figured it would be really fitting if you took on the colors (and maybe breast size) of the familiar.

(Also, colors are changed through code, not re-drawing)

However, there's a problem with both of these; the player may want to take on a certain appearance, but NOT want the stat-change, or game mechanic associated with it. For example, you might want red hair all the time, but you don't want to use the red-haired girl familiar, or you may not want to use the fuse mode. Not only that, but you probably wouldn't get the exact appearance you want until far into the game.

I can't really figure out how to deal with it, because this is yet another example of a situation where as a developer I want to do one thing, and yet as a player I'd probably want the opposite. As a player, I know I'd just want the ability to customize the character from the beginning, yet as a developer it just seems like a missed opportunity to not tie it into gameplay.

As it stands, I'll probably resort to the same thing as usual, which always seems to end up being "well, add an option for it".

As a player, how would your prefer customization to be handled?

Question about GM animation player.

Well, I've stopped procrastinating when it comes to the GM animation player. Since I'm working on it at the moment, I figured I'd ask some questions about what you guys want.

First, though, for now the basic controls are going to be:

Automatic (toggle)
Next stage
Previous Stage
Speed (don't know what the display will be)
Back (to animation select menu)
Toggle Sound effects

However, since I'm doing it in GM I'll also be able to do some more nifty stuff. Some extra features I'm either going to add or am thinking about are,

- Button to change the color palette, fighting game style.
- Do backgrounds that can be switched between (shared between animations)
- Controller vibration, because why not?
- Zoom.

I'm also thinking about doing controls that will effect the animation. For example, I could add a mode that makes the animation play at a base speed, but make it so every time you press the button, the animation sort of speeds into the thrusting part of the animation, or something similar.

The reason I can do any of the stuff above is because it can more or less be applied to any animation. I could do other "gamey" elements (pleasure meters, etc), though I don't see myself doing that unless I make an animation meant specifically for it.

All that said, is there anything specific you'd like to see me do with the animation player? Be it controls, advanced stuff, or even some sort of game mechanics?