Kit Of Dreams

I enjoy being creative.

[kaijusoup]

working on visual novel! 

[kitofdreams]

Your witch is SO CUTE! I love her!

[kitofdreams]

My first mistake so far of what I'm sure is many to come as I learn LOL In my regular art, I tend to minimize layers for lineart on actual characters just to be efficient. One really good habit there that turns out to be a bad habit in sprite creation. She's super cute, right? The problem, I forgot to set up her eyebrows, eyes, and mouth for sprite expressions or animations, so now I need to go those over again. But figured I'd share in case it helps someone else.

However, Not all of my asset creation from yesterday went bad. I knew this character was one I could re-use quite a bit for background nonsense, so I mad her in base format. There is an additional layer that marks roughly where to place the eyes and mouth, but I forgot to turn it on.

I felt like this was a really clever way to approach this, This is for a new reporter character, so I wanted at least 3 generic "I am standing here delivering the news" poses. Since I started with the arm down base first, I was able to make the other 3 poses by simply copying the line art and re-drawing the arm for each post. It was a super quick way to do it, and now I can dress this base up however I want! Plus, having learned from the mistake of the first one, I will have the expressions and the necessary facial features in their own folder. There probably won't be an update on this one for a bit, as she's a background character, and others need a bit more time. It was an easy starter to my asset creation day for Pure Saline.

[kitofdreams]

Pure saline title screen

I am planning to do asset work for the most part today, but for now I finished working on the title screen this morning. I may change it a bit later, but for now I'm happy with it.

[kitofdreams]

So why not just jump straight into the deep end?

I am Kit Of Dreams, and I have been fascinated by visual novels for awhile now. I have experience with art and writing, but I have very limited experience with Ren'Py outside of asset creation. I have never finished a Ren'Py project, and I'm making this blog to document what will hopefully be my first two novels, because I decided to sign up for both the Underwater and Spooktober jams at the same time. I'm unsure if I'm over committing by doing two together when I've never completed one, but I'm excited to see whether I sink or swim my diving into a project with an actual deadline. I hope to share the things I learn along the way, be they wins or fails, and introduce part of my tiny inner world to anyone who's interested. To start, I'd like to introduce the two stories I selected for this, both might wind up being kinetic novels, but we'll see. One will for sure, they other I haven't fully decided on. The first title is "Pure Saline", and is the one I'll be starting with since the underwater Jam opens in just a few days. Pure Saline is a deep ocean lab horror story. The story takes primarily in the underwater facility, where the people within are almost entirely cut off from communicating with the surface world for security, a decision that may compromise the security of their mission entirely. The second title is "The Glade", and will follow the progress of Diya, an excited young fire lookout that is fresh out of training as she gets assigned to her first lookout tower. The story will be a blend of inner dialog, diary entries, and her spotty connection with the outside world. While I intend for this to be a bit of a slow burn (within reason of course), I'm actually pretty excited to start this one, even if it will be the simpler of the two.