This Week in the Forest! #202 (Patreon)

YO FOLKS! hope you've all been well!

New year started off as a bit of a dramatic whirlwind for me, but when I've had time I've been drawing a lot. I spend a good amount of time doing some studies so I can get kinda "up to snuff" again before tackling new projects like the one above! LOOKS LIKE WE'LL BE SEEING SOME FEESH SOONNN

Anywho these are referenced gesture drawings that I adapt from a human frame to either my bun or Rascal. It's a great balance of sharpening your SEEING skills, but also challenging your creativity and construction drawing. Human proportions are WAY lankier obviously, so adapting their silhouettes and vibes into something much more short-stack has a lot of challenges. Super fun though!

I'll put the JPG in the attached files so you can get the full image and zoom around

Once I get dialed in, I might do some longer form studies (like the large mouth bass on the left), then hop to it! The top right is a lil quick general proportion guide for a normal fish. These will help influence how I go about designing a character, and giving me guidelines while sketching.

Anywho, let's jump back into TWITF structure:

The Forest of Love

Vixel's making amazing progress on getting the Act 4 area put together, it's almost all walkable and soon he'll be able to move onto adding the content. IT'S A LOT THO SO it'll still be a minute.

Since we're a bit far out from the act 4 build, we figured it'd be good to have a smaller update with some content. The fish will indeed have a bigger role later on, so this content will be a pre-cursor/leading up to that!

Horsin' Around Part 2

I've finally landed on how I wanna run this game. And I think it'd be funnest to run it almost like a TV show. I always mentioned how it'd be episodic, just random shenanigans. But I wanna actulaly write these out as if they'd be a script for a TV show. This will also fits our previous system specs of having bite-sized, linear experiences.

Recently I wrote the first episode, and reached out to a Voice Actor friend asking how they do things in the industry. We're gonna go about this like a legit recording which I'm pretty stoked for! I'll have a 2 hour block of studio time with them, and I'm trying to prepare TWO episode scripts for that time. Right now I have Episode 1 basically done. Once the second is there we can do that session and I'll see what we're in for!

This is all super experimental still though. My end goal is for this to be entirely voice acted. But that will be LONG term. For now, when we drop new builds, it'll just be written content. There's a ton more that goes into designing a voiced games in terms of emotion swapping, small acting bits, new systems to know when to transition between all these things, not to mention having cameras being placed properly (probably somewhat dynamically), and probably auto-turning the characters a bit too to fit a nice vibe.

IT'S A LOT.

But yeah, all good fun! Meanwhile I got the horses Look-At rig looking pretty solid. I'll need to transfer it to the other horses but the base system is there and pretty robust =)

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Anywho that's it. I'm going out of town for the week, I'll see ya guys later!