Why does it look like that?! (」°ロ°)」

This is kinda a part 2 to my final thoughts on Emit Glass. Lately, the site has been getting a lot of views, though I'm not sure why! I hope you'll give the game a try~

I want to explain why the art looks the way it does. I know the art is going to deter a lot of people. I worked on Emit Glass for almost two years, and in that time, I made a lot of progress with my artistic ability lmao. I drew the sprites for the game almost as soon as I started making Emit Glass. I was still figuring out my style, learning anatomy (sorta), and I was really bad at digital art.

I barely drew digitally at the time, so when I suddenly had to draw a bunch of sprites, they ended up looking really bad. Also, I almost exclusively draw men, so my cutesy moe anime girl drawing skills are weeping. 

Here is a low effort example of what the sprites might look like if I drew them today~

Pound Cake Diary : 12

    > Sold one copy today, but I wasn't expecting much.

Here's what I learned, and all the things that went wrong while making Emit Glass. I'm going to work really hard to improve the quality of my games. There were so many Ren'Py features and tricks I was not aware of, so Emit Glass is severely lacking in the creativity. 

First, everything that went wrong.

These are mostly things that I've mentioned before. 1) I had to rewrite the outline for Rika's route three times. It was a nightmare, and even while I was writing the actual script, I kept changing things because nothing felt right. This isn't really that big of a deal. It was just annoying at the time. 

2) I tried to make a CG gallery from scratch and failed miserably. That's why a game as long as this, with as many CGs as it does, has no gallery of any kind...-_- I have already implemented a gallery in my next game, don't worry.

3) For most of development, I had to use a family computer, which limited the amount of time I could spend making the game. I also failed in getting a PC, so I moved computers three times until I bought a new laptop. 

4) The background sizes didn't match the game dimensions, so I had to make a "base" image, which makes everything look cheap and unpolished. My phone doesn't take photos in that size, and cropping them would make the characters awkwardly placed. In the future, I will not make games in 16:9 (I don't like how they look anyway)

5) I struggled a lot with the save/load slots and trying to get the new slot art to fit right.

6) Changing mp4 to webm is a nightmare.

Second, everything I'll be adding.

I'm working on an Otome game next, and it's going to be even longer and more ambitious than my last project. I might release some shorter games for a game jam while I'm developing the main game. There are so many things I'm learning about Ren'Py!

There are so many transitions to use! I only used Fade and Dissolve for most of Emit Glass, which is so boring. I wasn't aware of how many there were! I did end up using some of these near the end of Midori's route. Some of my favorites were vpunch/hpunch, which I could see being useful for fight scenes, blinds (Used a lot in Fate/Stay Night and Katawa Shoujo!), and the wipe/push transitions that could have many uses. I used these in Midori's route to mimic closing your eyes. 

I want to use a day/time calendar image, like the one used in Clannad. The timeline in Emit Glass was hard to follow. There was a lot of jumping around without keeping track of what day it was.

I didn't use any variety in sprite positions or poses. They were always the same distance from the player, and I didn't draw many poses for them. When I played Sukisho, I loved how every character had different poses, not just expressions. It was much more dynamic. 

I also hate how the Ren'Py default GUI looks, so I'll be really messing with that to make it unrecognizable. 

I was just reading this website with Ren'Py advice, and this guy seriously blew my mind. For the entirety of Emit Glass, I had been using labels like crazy. Everything had a label, and every choice used like a million labels. So, apparently, you can just do this??

No labels in sight...T_T I kinda understand how blocks work now? In some cases, I would still use labels before menu, like after a bad ending, it will bring you back to fix your choice (Similar to tiger dojo in Fate). I should know how this works by now, but I still have no clue what I'm doing. 

I didn't know how to use italics or bold text, so in Emit Glass, when I needed to use italics, I just used CAPITALS. It's as simple as putting {i}text{/i} ...wow. I can also use bold, strikethrough, and underline now. So advanced. I also learned how to change the size of a specific line/word using {size=30}text{/size}

I'm going to experiment a lot with structure too, because my past games have been really simple, and I feel like it makes them boring. With games like Kanon and Clannad, they have complex weaving story structures. I'm not sure I could pull off something like that, but even a structure like Hakuoki is interesting. In Emit Glass, there weren't many scenes or choices that made an impact on future parts of the story. Route structures were very simple. It was just, make one choice > you're on the route. 

None of this probably makes any sense to anyone, but hopefully my rambling has been entertaining.