My Thoughts on This Year's Animations, Part 2 (Patreon)

Continuing from yesterday, here's some more of my thoughts about this year's animations. It turns out that I don't really have much thoughts in regards to liking or disliking these animations, other than minor production details. Perhaps I'm so focused on finishing them that I rarely remember much about them other than "this scene took ages, and this scene took ages, and..." 

Maybe I need to keep a diary. My brain must be finally failing me  XD

Uzaki Hana: To be honest, I was surprised that Hana didn't win a poll before her mother did. It seems my audience shares my taste for older women. And I had a suspicion that someone would suggest a story featuring both Hana and her mother, which they did, and that story subsequently won the story poll, to no surprise. Note that I only allowed this "double-trouble" story to enter the poll because I had already made Tsuki, and that both of their designs were very simple. If they had been any more complicated, I would have vetoed that idea, I assure you XD (Also of note: I will be veto'ing any attempts at a "DAMN 3", so don't try)

edit: you can still suggest Hana or Tsuki for future polls btw, in case that wasn't clear. Just don't expect me to do a "DAMN 3" for them XD

I tried to make Hana "cheeky adorable" more than "cheeky annoying", which is how the source material tended to portray her (I personally found her annoying in the manga, at least early on). In contrast to her mother, Hana had an abundance of anime voice lines to choose from, and her voice actress was cute so that helped reduce her annoyingness even further. Overall, working on Hana was enjoyable, especially when making her noodle mini-game, which felt enough like a game that required some skill to complete, but not a slog to actually win, a balance which is very difficult to achieve. 

This animation project benefited a lot from all the code nonsense I learned during Rihanne's animations. In particular, the noodle game and the final sequences with both Hana and Tsuki would have been impossible without the new code know-how. So while Rihanne wasn't quite as complete as I wanted it to be, Hana's animations were a much firmer step in a better direction, animation and file construction wise. And, thankfully, were much quicker to make.

Art wise, I had tried to avoid using too much "shaded" textures in my recent animations, including Hana's first two animations and also Rihanne's Envy files. However, when it came to Hana's second Deluxe, I tired of the lack of shading and decided to go all in with that style. I don't dislike my "cel-shaded" style, but it can be extremely restrictive sometimes. At times like these, I'm really jealous of Adobe Animate's "masking" feature, which would allow for a multitude of complex shading and pattern options, features which I do not have in my software. *sigh*

While the second Deluxe ends on sizes a little big for my tastes, I am satisfied with how it came out, especially in regards to how you could expand Tsuki or Hana independently or together. Any interactive scene that works as intended makes my day. Also, I thought it funny that people believed that Tsuki's and Hana's bellies had somehow "fused" together in the final scene. They're just mushed together tight, not actually bonded at the cellular level XD I'm into some weird stuff, but not that weird...

Yor Forger: From one "flavour of the month" and right into another. My patrons tend to not vote for these kind of topical characters, but they must have gotten bored of missing out on the current trends. And it helps that Yor is cute, of course. The plentiful sexy fanart certainly improved her chances, too...

Yor is a pretty lady, but her personality and her actions don't quite make sense, although this is a problem with Spy X Family's cast at large (Loid is able to detect the slightest of peculiar sounds that give away hidden enemies, but doesn't hear any of Yor's assassin equipment rattling around in her boxes that he's helping to bring into their new home? Hmm...) That aside, even with the discrepancies in the source material, there was plenty of leeway for me to write Yor and the other characters as I saw fit. If there's any character perfectly designed for an "oblivious pregnancy", it's Yor. The Spy X Family premise is "everyone has a secret they wish to keep", and what is a better secret to keep than a pregnancy?

In regards to story potential, Yor's main problem is she doesn't have much personality besides "she is a airhead" and "gets drunk a lot". This probably explains why only a few people submitted stories for Yor, and all of them featured alcohol. I didn't think I would have to explain why pregnant women shouldn't drink alcohol, but sometimes life requires you to explain certain things you would think were obvious XD (to be fair, the other idea featured baking, and the alcohol was burned off during baking, but I digress). Also, it was during research for this project that I found out some anime OSTs can be bought from Amazon (digitally) for pretty cheap. Good to know!

Art wise and animation wise, nothing much to say, other than figuring out how to make her transparent nightie have movement was a "eureka!" moment, and useful information to know for future animations. Yor is an expressive character, and I had a lot of fun emulating her various expressions, although it did highlight how bland my own expressions are in general. Her design was much more complicated than Hana's, so I tried to get her out of that black dress as quickly as possible (I'm sure many other people would like to do that same, too *wink wink*). Also, as with Tsuki, Yor didn't have much in the way of voice lines to work with, as almost everything she says is "huh?", or lines that are smothered with music. And she's also incredibly quiet when talking in the animation, so I had to volume boost almost everything she said. Cute voice, but very hard to hear, if she does speak.

When it became apparent the winning story concept was completed by the end of Deluxe 1, and patrons (you guys) voted for a 2nd Deluxe anyway, I decided to do an assortment of things I either rarely do or don't do enough. So I ended up doing a "milk expression" scene, a rare birth scene and a breast feeding scene, all of which I feel are underrated and not often explored in my animations (because you never vote for them XD). 

Birth sequences were very complicated to construct using my old methods, and I was curious if all the coding stuff would make it any easier. In a lot of ways, the answer to that is "yes", with the payoff is that births can be much longer than before, if long and painful births are something you long for (I doubt the women would want that, though...). However, births are still complicated to make, even with the code stuff. The more things change, the more things stay the same...

Someone did comment that they were disappointed how quiet Yor was during birth. When you consider her character traits from the comic / animation, she has an insane tolerance for pain, so I figured that birth would be a struggle for her, but not so much that she audibly screamed. That said, I think the resulting "stealth birth" was interesting, and would be fun to do again if such a story topic won. The breastfeeding scene was cute, and is a nice way to cap a pregnancy to birth scenario. Having a belly swell up suddenly is one thing, but without an eventual baby, it's not much a pregnancy, is it?

Janet Peter-Smyth: My most popular and storied OC, besides perhaps Bess, Janet finally returned for a "Spooptober" special. That I didn't finish in October. Welp. Next year, we'll start voting for Halloween in advance, I promise!

As the winning story idea involved eating candy from passers-by, I decided a "game" similar to Rihanne's would be suitable for Deluxe part 1. I also hoped that I would be able to make it much quicker than Rihanne's, so this animation was somewhat of a test in doing it again, but faster. It still took a while to finish it, but nowhere near as long as with Rih's project, thank God. 

Continuing the theme of the winning story, I decided that Janet eating in a warehouse by herself would be dull, and having characters talk to themselves is somewhat limiting dialogue wise, so I needed a cameo. And no one else seemed more suitable than Mark, a character that technically predates Janet, although only by mere days. I'm sure Mark was thrilled with the decision, too.

Mark's appearance made the minigame in the 2nd Deluxe far more plausible, although it was a technical nightmare to get Janet to work when you clicked on her, but not go crazy when you clicked off of her or wiggled the mouse like crazy. I'm sure you can still get Janet stuck in some weird positions if you try hard enough, but don't blame me if you break her and lose your progress. Curiosity killed the Janet and all that. 

Also, as with Rihanne's animation, it ends with her at giantess size, and eclipsing the city. That seems to be a common theme. It's as if you folks want bigger and bigger, all the time...

Thoughts about the animations in general: This was a year of learning and changes, most of which unfortunately slowed down the speed at which I make things. Of course, I also made twenty or so animated gifs this year, each of which took at least two days to make, so that's a lot of time taken away from making the big projects. 

But these were changes that had to happen eventually, and probably should have happened sooner. Hopefully, now that I know a few extra things, all of which alleviate some of the "fiddliness" of making these projects, next year will have a few more animations than this year. I hope. 

As I mentioned in a previous update, these have all been "story" animations, which I love making, but next year it might be more fun to explore less story-driven works, and see if I can cover more bases in terms of topics / content by focusing on short scenes instead. If you're not sure what that means, you'll get a taste of it when I make Saa's animations. Building up a story correctly takes time away from the tum scenes, after all, and aren't you here for the tums? 

I think that's enough typing for now. I hope you enjoyed my messy rambling thoughts on these projects, and I did try to save you from the boring parts of it (no one really cares how I managed to make this asset do this, or make interactive parts interactive XD), but if you want me to go into detail about something I didn't cover here, leave a comment below or send a DM and I'll do my best to answer. 

Time to return to Fawn, and hopefully finish her up before the year ends. Then again, you know me and my ability to keep to deadlines... W-well, anyway, TTFN!