A small progress update for Hibiki's Birthday!

Hello all! I hope you've been having a lovely year so far! I, myself have been hard at work on A Future With You, practicing my crafts to get them to a level where I'm happy with the results and my skills suit the vision I have for the game!

So, in honour of Hibiki's birthday, April 18th, I thought I'd share some of the work I've been doing!

Character Art:

While I've made a lot of progress on my character art in the past year and a half, I still feel like I have a ways to go, specifically in posing my characters in a natural way. This will be especially helpful when I work on the CG art for the game so I can make believable and adorable scenes  to reward players for progressing through the game! I've found that Korean & Chinese dramas have fantastic reference poses that I've been using to practice. I've also been working on drawing the female figure, since I've been mostly focused on drawing the male form. I found a company called 'Oyanxi Studio' that has amazing full body fashion photos of women that I've been using as references. I've also overhauled the existing sprites in the game, such as Dr. Honozono, which you can see in the image above!

Background Art:

Currently, the background art in A Future With You... leaves much to be desired 😅 But realistically it's been over a decade since I last put any real effort into drawing backgrounds, so I've been hard at work relearning perspective, studying colour language, analyzing different rendering styles, etc. While I still haven't made it to a point where I'm happy with the results, I am very excited about my progress thus far! The image above is just some of the work I've done on upgrading my background art!

Coding:

For the last few months, I've been very focused on the art for the game so I hadn't touched the code for quite some time, and when I decided to go back to optimize things, I had a very, extremely rude awakening when I realized I'd forgotten a lot of the basics! How very rude of my brain! But after some practice, some reading and watching some tutorials, I've sort of gotten back on the horse and have started making some QOL updates to the codebase, which hopefully should result in a smoother experience for players once it's pushed live! I also have been focused on updating the mobile version of the game so that it's more in line with my vision, since I'd basically not considered it when I first coded my game, which is inexcusable, but I promise to do better in the future!

Story:

As for the story, I've been filling out the first few scenes of Hibiki's branch to have more dialogue before the player chooses whether or not they want to continue building a relationship with Hibiki, and also to hint at his romantic side more overtly, as I really haven't done too much in that area up until now. In fact, the demo will feature a CG of Hibiki & Aria in the next update of the game and it's very, very cute in my personal, perhaps biased opinion! Furthermore, I've added more details to Hibiki's storyline so that I know more of what will happen in his route in later parts of the game. These won't be available in the demo, but will help inform Hibiki's behaviour and attitude in the demo.

Well, that's all I have to share right now! I hope you'll continue to follow and support AFWY! 

Thanks for reading and/or playing the demo!

Have a lovely day & remember to be kind!

Moo 🐄