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Changing our illustration artist
🕑 Added 2021-11-28 17:46:44 +0000 UTCHi everyone! Since our last post in October, we made a significant decision regarding our art direction, which we want to share with you today.
The situation so far
We first hired Lumix back in 2019 to illustrate the game's sex scenes and some of the more important and hard-hitting scenes of the story. She was a great match for the role, as she specializes in drawing anthro and feral scalie characters, has a really good art style and relatively affordable commission pricing.
However, this decision was made before the pandemic, and more importantly, before we redesigned many of the game's core concepts and story direction. About a dozen sex scenes were envisioned in total originally, but this has changed as we properly defined the dating arcs of our main dateables, as well as the main story itself.
We realized we would need more sex scenes than we could feasibly afford to commission Lumix for, given our limited budget. The pandemic also hampered Lumix's commission queue times as she opted to focus more on character adopt auctions to sustain herself. We also did not want to exert more pressure on her by demanding that we get priority over her other work.
So, we discussed this situation internally and ultimately decided to end our collaboration with Lumix. We still had 3 commissions waiting in her queue, worth over 1300 dollars. We have since requested a full refund on these, but rest assured that we gave Lumix ample time and reasonable terms to refund us, as we don't want to put her in a tough spot with our decision.
Of course, if you like Lumix's artwork and also want to support her, you can visit her page and ask for commission opportunities, or bid on her frequent creature adopts.
The next steps
This decision meant we needed a new illustration artist. But recent developments have made it obvious that the artist we needed and wanted was right here with us all along.
Weisser Rauch has transitioned from being just our background artist, to drawing everything outside of character sprites. He created our custom UI, all of the game's promotional and concept art, drew detailed internal reference sheets (including genitalia) for all of our characters and more recently started making illustration pieces, such as the close-up shot of Morias sleeping on the bar table, introduced on day 6.
He has lots of experience drawing all kinds of creatures, although he is particularly fond of eastern dragons and Asian-inspired motifs. If you haven't already, take a look through his FA gallery, we're sure you'll enjoy looking at his art! His style is heart-warming and full of expressiveness, and his talent shines brightest when drawing high quality, fully shaded pieces.
Although most of his art is SFW, he ultimately wanted to take up this role when we proposed it to him. He's been with us long enough to be familiar with our story and characters' personalities, and he even had direct control over some of the cock designs when creating the ref sheets, given some ideas from the team.
We decided it would be best to have a trial run for a sex scene illustration made by him, and we chose Garreth's first sex scene which was previously illustrated by Lumix. We will discuss more about this in the upcoming Dev Diary post for November (check out the others if you haven't!), but the gist is that he did an amazing job re-making the scene (and took just under 2 weeks to do so), which further confirmed our belief that he is fit for the role.
Conclusion
Fortunately, we only received two finalized pieces from Lumix, so there wasn't much at stake with this change. While we would have liked things to be different, reality often teaches us to temper our expectations and learn to think creatively. By acting now, we prevented this situation from becoming a larger problem, and we feel confident that we made the right call for the long run.
The refunds money will be put to good use. Half of it will be given to Rauch to create the scenes that we originally commissioned Lumix for, and half will actually go to our now more involved programmer, Wattson! He will be implementing our story content and enhancing the back-end framework of the game, and we believe he more than deserves the credit and the financial backing for that.
The good news is that you will surely start seeing more of these illustrations being created for the game from now on. So be on the lookout for them as more game updates roll by, and stay tuned for the Dev Diary post where we'll show off Rauch's work, as well as other things that happened this month.
