Biweekly update #3

Art

Very round shapes

Dev spotlight

Sketch pictures

Most of the TU gameplay time is spent in the default view, which is the familiar screen where the character stands on the right and speech bubbles appear on the left, or on the overmap. But, TU also has sketches or "story pictures", that are used when the writer wants to visually represent a detail or an action that default view can't show. The sketches are used for the sex scenes, and pretty much all of the lewd pictures (aside from nude character sprites), are represented with the sketches.

The sketchy, "unfinished" style for these pictures is a deliberate choice from my part. This is mostly because of the amount of pictures needed for the game, and the effort needed to produce higher quality replacements for them would require far too much development time. Consider that V2 of Teraurge has 500+ sketch pictures in it already, and you'll understand the decision. The abstract style also allows me to use colors in an evocative way to convey emotions through the visuals. This strategy can easily be seen in the case of pinks and purples, which are used to represent feelings associated with sex, affection, pleasure, and Greens being used for unpleasant smells and sickness.

The sketches and the text descriptions are supposed to be complementary and they are used to explain different aspects of the scene. For example, if the player finds an object with a complex shape, the sketch will illustrate the shape and the text will convey other qualities not explained by the sketch. I often edit out text descriptions that duplicate what the sketch picture can already answer, since the text descriptions usually over-explain the scene before the sketch pictures are added.

Smells purple. Relevant detail on the right and empty space on the left. The sketch pictures might sometimes seem incoherent in terms of shapes, but the player seeing the character sprite before the sketches usually fills in what the shapes are supposed to be.

If anyone's wondering, the sketch pictures are drawn in Corel Painter. I make them with three layers: background canvas, color layer (overlay blending), and the black line layer. I sometimes use line layer for color highlights to get very vivid colors, but normally I constrain them to the overlay layer. The line art for the sketches is made using a pen brush (with max grain) with the tilt feature enabled. The tilt feature lets me create large strokes without touching the size slider or changing a brush and it is generally cool to use.

The tilt feature is really cool.

The sketches usually follow a format where the main detail is on the right and left side of the picture is either left blank or is ambiguously rendered. This is because the left is normally partially covered by the text description boxes.