Vampigeon

I had no idea what would be "the hard part."

And that's not even a play on words about dongers. I first started working on this thing back about a year and a half ago. I really did think that actually writing the game, particularly the programming bit, would be the challenge. Instead? Well, look at this nonsense:

278 unique assets? For someone who, at most, does, like, 15 panels for a comic, that is some nonsense. I'd definitely never done anything at this scale, and it shows. For as much as I enjoy how it turned out, the amount of bespoke screens should have been far, far less. Ah, well. On the bright side...

This was some excellent art practice

It's weird to say, but...I feel like everyone who does cartooning stuff should draw naked people? Even if you don't show it to anyone. The quantity of art I needed to draw helped, but also the fact that a lot of them were poses and angles and scenarios that I'd never done before. As such, I think my art got a lot better by doing this.

In general, a thing I've tried to do a lot with my cartooning is to push for things like camera angles and scene-setting. It's something that a lot of gag strips don't do, but I think can really help. I'm not a draftsman, you know. I'm never going to work for DC or anything. But mood is something that you can do even if you're unsure of yourself in other areas. If you're an artist, don't think you have to wait to be at a pro level before you mix up your camera and lighting work. I pushed myself here even further, and I quite like it.

That being said...

Fuck trees.

I still hate drawing trees. This?

Bane of my existence. The last time I draw trees was this arc from my old strip, Game U:

Which you'll notice has a copyright date of 2009. I managed to put it off for 15 years, but I ended up having to draw trees again anyway, and hating it. Enjoy my next sexy game: "Let's Bone Down Inside This Shipping Container."

Speaking of Art Stuff

This is the largest-scale project I've ever done. By which I mean, this is the thing that, in its released form, has the most stuff in a single release. One of the things that webcomics allows for is for art to gradually evolve. You start off drawing a character, and over the course of drawing them, things get sort of condensed and polished and simplified. In my experience, the character you design is always more detailed than how they end up looking. And that just takes time, which you have in a webcomic because each update is largely self-contained.

You can't do that for a project like this. The character has to be consistent, which is tricky when they naturally evolve as you draw them more. The biggest difference is in the character Carter:

I had to go back and re-draw all his expression poses because the design had changed so much. It's one of those things I never would have thought of. Speaking of things I didn't think of:

It's a Sex Game, You Dingus

So, one of my favorite games is Shenmue. That's a game that strives for verisimilitude. You're on a martial-arts revenge quest, but you also have to, like, go to your job and buy batteries for your flashlight and wait for the bus. I love it, but, you know, it's not for everyone.

I bring this up, because, when I was designing the sex scene...scenes at the end, I really tripped over myself trying to make it more "realistic." Like, I had this complicated branching path thing, and I had it where you only had a certain number of screens before the characters finished, let's say.

It never occurred to me to not do it this way. I'm not, like, a connoisseur of the Boning Game Genre, so I initially designed it to be way more complicated than it needed to be. Trying to make the programming work for the branching choices and for the menu screen (the game engine, Ren'Py, does not make image buttons easy) to do what it needed to do so that only certain choices would display if you'd gotten to certain points in the scene.

I was banging my head against it for hours, when my husband was like (and I'm paraphrasing) "In those kinds of games, don't people like to go back and, like, see the different options."

And yes. That makes total sense. I was making it harder on myself for no reason other than a play toward realism, but for no benefit to the player. It's a videogame. It's fine that it's a videogame. I didn't need to make people wait for the bus. So thank you to my husband for that suggestion. It's the main thing that allowed me to actually finish this dang game.

Wrap-Up