Developer Insights #1 (Patreon)

So we've revamped some of the models and recreated their clothing sets from scratch. Each girl now has several sets: Casual, School Uniform, Bathing Suit, PJs, Skimpy PJs. Nariko is a special case and gets several casual outfits that she'll cycle through depending on her mood. As time goes on the other girls will also get new and exciting outfits based on how their stories progress.

It's important that each girl's clothing sets show off their personality and I believe we've done an excellent job on that front. Here's a few previews for just a couple of the characters:

At the end there we have Aomi, a character who only spoke 5 words in the content demo, her model has been reworked quite a bit and I'm still looking at adding a couple more touches to make her feel true to her fiery personality. But so far so good:

The other thing that's changed is the nose textures. When looking directly at a character from the front I've removed the shadowed texture and replaced it with a simple line. But as you can see from the Nariko picture, the side shots will still include the shadowed noses, as I believe they look best.

As for skin, something unique to our game will be the body skin detail maps which I've worked pretty hard on.

Here's what you'd get from a normal Koikatsu model:

Very plain looking. By generating some colored noise on the model and using the correct blending technique you can add some skin pores. Usually when people do this the model seams become very visible and distracting however. Luckily I figured out a way around that:

By adjusting the noise a little bit and changing the colors you can get a more natural look:

So each of the girls in our game will have a unique skin look that matches their lifestyle and model well. Some of the girls (like Haya) will have a bit more muscle and shine more in direct lighting, that type of thing. This really pays off for the h-scene animations, where you'll be able to see the body moving and reacting to the lighting in a natural way.

These are just a few of the dozens of outfits my teammate has created, you'll get to see many of them in the next update. The skimpy PJs you'll have to work your way up to though.

Stay tuned.