September Devlog - Pam & Aziza's 3D Comic and Early Catgirl Care (Patreon)

Hello again and welcome back to another devlog. Most of this month has been dedicated to commissions but I've also had time to produce a pretty cool comic featuring my new characters as well as get a bit more work done on Catgirl Care.

Let's dive in.

Pam & Aziza's Comic

In last month's devlog, I introduced my two new characters, Pam and Aziza. As discussed in that post, these characters were first written up some time around or before January 2016 so I've been excited to finally share them with the world.

Pam and Aziza are fairly complex characters so I felt that just drawing some doodles and putting them out into the world wouldn't communicate who they are very well. Instead, I decided to do what I did for Sabrina and Lobelia: a short comic showcasing the two.

You can read Pam and Aziza's comic here. It was more difficult than I expected it to be but I think the final result turned out pretty good!

One thing that made this comic stand out from some of my other work was the experimental approach I took with the backgrounds. They're all 3D renders!

I've used 3D in my art before. I'll occasionally pull up a pose doll to figure out a complex pose or I'll recreate a room's walls and floor to get the perspective right. I even used a 3D model as a basis for the backgrounds in the previously mentioned Sabrina and Lobelia comic.

What's different here is that I decided to include the 3D render in the final picture, meaning that the renders need to fit my art style and look cool.

I wrote two scripts for the Pam and Aziza comic. The first one was a bit longer and included a monster fight scene that I ended up scrapping and the second one is the one I drew. For both, I planned ahead to have the whole comic mostly take place inside of a dungeon so that I could create one 3D environment and reuse it for the whole scene.

The environment was built in Blender and I decided to use this as an opportunity to learn how to improve my 3D lighting skills. For my past few games, I've been very fixated on creating good background models, textures, and learning to write shaders. That said, the secret to a good 3D scene has always been good lighting.

Here's a few things I've learned: Prebaked lighting is more performant and can be combined with non-baked lighting for moving/changing lights. Emissive textures make light sources glow and look pretty. A little bit of fog adds a lot to the ambiance.

Nailing the camera angles with my 2D drawings wasn't too hard but I did have to go back and fix some renders which took some time. At the end of the project, I think this style of background works pretty well and I may occasionally do some more 3D backgrounds in the future (especially in cases like this where I can reuse them a bunch).

Please give the comic a read and let me know what you think! It was a ton of fun (and work) to put together.

Catgirl Care Model Progress

I was hoping to have this model a bit further along before making this devlog (commissions and comics took priority). That said, the model is still being worked on and it will be my main focus until I have it done.

Last time I showed her off, this model had no textures, ears, or a tail (she has a tail!). Now the model has all of those and I've started experimenting with making a better animation rig. It's important that I do my best to make the base mesh polished early on so that I can minimize reworks later in the project (though I expect they'll still happen).

Also while I'm discussing Catgirl Care, I've decided I'll be releasing Catgirl Care Chibi early next month. Itch hasn't updated us on the adult game situation but I think it's time to put the game out nonetheless.

Custom Radial Menu

Some of you may remember the radial menu in The Blind Date Game. It was OK but I was never really happy with it. That said, I love radial menus and when I recently saw this post by a fellow Godot dev showing a radial menu that dynamically resizes to make options easier to select, I was inspired to try and create my own implementation.

The way this works is that the menu items compare their angle to the angle of the selector and move away from that point if they're far away. There's also a small inverse effect to keep them from going too far. The end effect is very smooth and can even be adjusted to reduce the movement and be customized to look nice.

The whole thing is a single Node2D using Godot's custom drawing system and custom resources for the menu items. When an option is selected, it's emitted as a signal. This means the menu is pretty lightweight and I can adapt it to future projects pretty easily.

What's Next?

My current focus is going to be on Catgirl Care. I want to get the base 3D model finished and imported into Godot so that I can start working on gameplay. I also plan to release Catgirl Care Chibi soon, so keep an eye out for that.

Also, Pam and Aziza will be getting dedicated art polls in the next couple weeks. I'm excited to draw them more!

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Anyways, thanks once again for your support! I'm lucky to be able to work on my creative projects for a living and it's all thanks to this Patreon. I have a lot of exciting things planned and I'm sure this month will be another busy month of cute and lewd art!