Want to make replacement art for Bitch Breaker? (Patreon)

It's been a long day, so this might be less coherent than I'd like. You'll have to forgive me for that. 

Every so often I'm asked why I insist on work alone on Bitch Breaker, or why I haven't found a dedicated artist yet. The answer to these questions is both very complicated and immensely simple: making games is hard.

I don't have anything against working with other people, in fact, I would absolutely love to have a full team working with me on the game. I can't tell you how many times I've dreamt of handing off a particularly onerous task to someone else. It's true that I'm an acceptable writer-and perhaps creative director-, but my code is a mess and my art is...well pretty bad. Every time I have to code a new system for the game, or create entirely new art assets, I dream of how nice it would be to simply delegate those tasks and focus on the overall story and writing for the game. I think of how much faster I could work and how much better the project would be, because there are a ton of creative advantages to working on a team, as well. Working with other people exposes an artist to other perspectives and ideas that he might not otherwise encounter. There have been times on this project that I have felt my own creative energy wearing dangerously thin. Times where it would have been wonderful to have fresh ideas and new stores of creative energy to propel the project forward. Working with a full team would be fantastic! In fact, it's my dream to one day found an actual studio and move this genre of games away from Early Access, quasi-subscription based services.

But that's largely a fantasy. Making games is hard. It's time consuming. After the initial rush of creative excitement, it becomes work. It's not something I would feel comfortable asking anyone to do for free, and unfortunately, I can't afford to pay professionals. From the outside, making a game like Bitch Breaker can look fun. It looks simple and relatively easy, but the scale of work, even on a small project like this, can quickly become a monotonous slog. At the moment there are a little over 1,400 individual art assets in the game. That means that any artist that contributes to the project would need to create 1,400 different images. Even though many of the images are relatively small, that's a lot of work. And the reality of that work is why I have worked alone so far. When it comes to creative projects, I have an obsessive personality. I approach this project as a professional, and I would expect similar conduct and work ethic from anyone I work with on the project. Which would be unfair to any volunteer, given the workload.

You might then be tempted to think that my ego prevents me from ever allowing an outside artist, or contributing coder, to deign touch the perfect, golden project that is Bitch Breaker, but you'd be wrong. My intention has always been to eventually commission a proper, professional artist to redo the art from the ground up. Waiting until the game is finished to commission the art will provide a number of clear advantages. On it's own, commissioning all of the art in one shot will allow the artist to work faster and more efficiently, ensuring that the art will have a defined, singular style. And by providing the artist with the existing art assets, the artist will have clear templates that will make the process even faster and easier. This should help lower the total cost and increase the quality of the work substantially. Yes, I'd likely make more money if I had sexy, professional art to tease you wonderful patrons with every update, but I'm more interested in making a game that will be fun to play as a full, completed project in the future, than building a disjointed sex scene selector that caters to masochistic edging connoisseurs. 

"I hear you. I've read all that and I still want to contribute!"

Okay. In that case, you have my permission to create whatever art assets you want for the game. If you're a professional and you want to really put in the effort, you even have my permission to open your own Patreon and monetize your work. All I ask is that you notify me before hand, make sure that you clearly state on your patreon that the main game does not represent your intellectual property or work, and provide a link to this Patreon. That's it. I'm not going to ask for a cut of your profits, or demand that you change anything about your art. The only reason I ask that you notify me is so I can try to keep track of alternate image packs.

In order to ensure compatibility with the base game just follow these guidelines:

1) All images must be saved as .png files.

2) Any replacement image must be named exactly the same as the image it is replacing.

3) Ren'Py places images based on the top left most pixel. For this reason, it's best if all images maintain the same size as the originals. HD packs would require additional coding.

4) Maintain image transparency. Most images in game utilize layering. If your images don't maintain transparency, they won't look right.

That's it!

If you have any questions or would like any additional input, feel free to reach out to me. I can be pretty bad about checking messages here, since my inbox is usually filled with weird fetish requests for the game, but I will get back to you eventually.