Jan Dev Focus : Sprite Rework (Patreon)

Alrighty, it's been about 24 hours, and the results are pretty clear. This month's additional focus will be to start reworking and remaking the sprites for the game!

I'm pretty excited about this, since it gives me an opportunity to do a number of things to improve the visuals of the game. I get to clean up old sprites, fix and improve outfits, and better show the girls' different proportions.

However, there is another question I would like to ask you wonderful supporters. How much effort should this rework be? There are two ways I can do this rework, one of which will take significantly more effort than the other, but does not allow as much freedom to change/improve things.

Create Completely SpritesThis means creating completely brand new sprites using no pre-existing images as a base. This gives me the most freedom to change and improve character designs. It also allows me to create a consistent set of images for current and future sizes at the same time. This however will take much more work, as I need to create every single image from scratch.

Reuse Old Sprites with Image2ImageThis means feeding the current sprites into NovelAI and using them as a base for the new sprites. This will make the new sprites far more similar to the old, but makes changes/improvements more difficult. This also will continue to lock in the old art style, so brand new sprites will need to be created with that in mind, which can make things difficult.

Personally, I would rather remake the sprites completely from scratch. I get a lot more freedom to improve what currently exists, and it will be a lot easier to create new sprites in the future. I can also change outfits around much more easily (no more shopping only at the white shirt store). This will take more time, but I think fine tuning a specific design style will be much more valuable than reusing the old images. I also will get the chance to effectively create brand new FMG sequences for all the existing growth scenes, which is pretty exciting. However, this method will take longer, and the rework will likely need to be broken up across multiple updates due to the number of sprites that need to be remade. 

I've included images in this post to illustrate the difference between the two methods. The Left image is the original sprite, the Center image uses Image2Image, and the Right is a completely new image (that still needs sizing and editing). These are in no way representative of the final sprites, they are merely examples from some testing I did.

I do understand if some people are attached to the old designs and want things to remain similar to the current style. It is my intention to make sure the characters remain identifiable regardless of which method I use.

This poll let's you pick either or both options, and is mostly to gauge general opinion on the matter. 

Let me know what you think!

 - K. Bro