IYN Devlog #12: Sprites and Theme Music Preview

Another Devlog Day is upon us! Last week I had family visiting so I mostly spend this week making a bunch of progress on my main sprites. Now the whole main cast has fully functional sprites for their base poses, with various brow, eye, mouth, and arm pieces. Here they are all together! (Background is a placeholder for the flower shop)

Heights slightly off in this one! I'm still working on positioning.

You may think "now why does it take so long just to draw a couple characters?" in regards to it taking a week to draw just Lily and Pickles' base sprites. I touched on it briefly when initially showing Oleander's sprite, but these sprites are made of many, many layers both to make them more dynamic in what I can mix-and-match on them and to future proof them for added pieces. This was already the case with my Don't Toy With Me sprites but the In Your Nature cast has a lot more layers to work with since they also have layered outfits that can be changed with each day of the story. Their bangs and the back of their hair are also separated to ensure the face pieces layer correctly, leaving room for changes to be made without having to precisely match every line.

In essence, it's a lot of work now that will keep things looking polished and save me more work down the line since I know I'll be adding things later. While the alternate poses will need to be prepped for outfits as well, these poses are the basic ones used for most situations so they will be the most complex of the bunch. (Which is my way of saying hopefully the other poses don't take me nearly as long ☠ )

As for the outfits, while most of them are already planned, I realized I never finished up Oleander's wardrobe. Pickles' also has the least developed sense of style so I only have some basic doodle ideas for what kind of look to use for his other outfits. Expect later down the road for me to put up some designs on my twitter to get some community feedback on!

Lily and Fawn both have fully planned out wardrobes so theirs are taken care of, even if right now only their default outfits are ready.

Luckily Lily's pajamas outfit will give me an excuse to pull her bangs back, because I went to the trouble of including her other eye for all of her expressions. Have a peek at the forbidden forehead.

Sprites aside, we also have our first track from our composer, Waffle! So I'm sharing a little preview of it here in the devlog. His work is so nice and he's so good at capturing a mood working off just his own ideas and my scattered descriptions of what I want, haha. I'm excited for the rest of the soundtrack and to share the full piece with you closer to the release of the demo.

Speaking of, I admit I was a little disappointed that I didn't get more done this month. I've still been making progress but this wasn't one of my better month's. So I'm going to set a goal for myself. I'm not sure of whether it's realistic, but I'm gonna try to get all demo assets ready by the end of August. That means having the most commonly used backgrounds done, the sprites ready, and the GUI/menus all fixed up.

It would be really nice to release the demo during the season the story takes place in as well as to have all of those things done to make future progress on the game a lot faster. I want to finish the fanpack soon too though. So I guess we'll just see how things shake out and I'll just hope I make more progress than I did this month!

Thanks for sticking around for another devlog. I'll see you next Devlog Day!

-Karma