Behind the scenes #1 (Patreon)

I was supposed to post this yesterday, partially regarding to 0.6.0 and 0.7.0. Both of the updates are more "focused on showing" what Alexander's life as it would normally be, with some events moving the world forward so to say. And on Susan. Susan is the woman with the artificial leg from the title screen.

It should be apparent by now that I'm not exactly bound by any beauty standards (*cough* Qivian, Zea'na and Naelae *cough*) that anyone might have, nor I tend to do things like most of the other creators out there. Which isn't a bad thing overall.

Now this is a good moment to clarify few things, ALL of the characters are randomly generated, their name, their age, their height, body type, hair, hair color, facial hair, eye color...  everything. This includes both mental traits, sexual preferences, physical traits and flaws. This is done by set of dice and one big ass spreadsheet. Why?

I've been writing since I was 12, and it is when I met my late editor. He is partially the reason why I write as much as I do, since he pushed some of my writings to competitions that I won. By a mistake I assume. ;)

And he pointed out that I tend to gravitate towards certain type of characters subconsciously, so to force myself to write different variety of characters I created a randomization system that I still use this day, just it is about 100 times larger now. And yes, it even includes bra size calculator for the women, it is THAT detailed. 

And occasionally the result is someone like Susan, she has both physical and mental scars if you will. Or even someone like Garrett who is closer to sociopath than a normal human being as to him only lives that matter are his and Chiel's, anyone else is irrelevant, which was seen in his way of killing people just because he could and suffers no guilt over it. But back to Susan.

I'm aware that there will be people who won't like her, which is fine. I get it, she can make people uneasy. And I'm not completely sadistic bastard, who would force people to go through content that they don't like, most of the times. So sex with her is avoidable and it won't affect the relationship between Alexander and her. BUT! She isn't avoidable as character, she will be there through the journey, how she treats you and reacts to things you do depends on how you treat her.

Be a dick and she will treat you as such, like every other character. So I apologize already if she is a deal breaker for someone, but she is here to stay. And at the same time she has been on the title screen since the first version so it shouldn't be THAT big of a surprise either. ^^

That is the general writing assistance I use for character creation, namely big ass spreadsheet with attributes, now on the visuals. Here it gets interesting. The moment I have a name, and the other information I "randomized", I can see the character in my mind, quite literally actually. At that point I start creating him, or her, in Daz3D. There the final tweaks gets added, and this is the second place where the randomization helps greatly.

We all have personal preference's, and you usually tend to create things that you like. Which in other VN's tends to gravitate towards ridiculously sized body parts, to begin with I prefer figures that have realistic proportions. Chiel and Miyuki are hmm... both have curves but they aren't overtly dominant features for either, both are pleasing to the eye and look normal?

Nova and Susan, are more athletic, Nova is more muscular out of the two. Lindsey (TRS) and Hannah are more on the voluptuous side. Again it is because it fit the characters, their name and... those are the images that popped up in my mind when I named them.  Or as close as possible as morphs and my skills allows. ^^

But Chiel, Miyuki, Nova, Lindsey and Hannah are characters that could appear in any other VN or game out there easily. They are attractive characters to most people. But because my "heavy" usage of the randomization character's such as Aegis and Susan are possible and WILL happen.

I'm fairly certain that to many Aegis wasn't the favorite character visual wise, yet TRS would have been so much poorer had she been more "standard beauty". She wasn't a major part of the VN, yet she fit the narrative and is attractive as a character. And she was joy to write back then, and still is just because she deviates from the standard norm.

Same thing with Susan, I could replace her, but I won't simply because she belongs there.

Anyway, rambling a bit here. I'll occasionally make these "Behind the Scene's" posts from now on. Some are public, some are patron's only, depending on the content in it. Today there was small insight on how I create the characters.