Hey crew, I thought I should check in and give an update on what I've been working on for the last few days!

Something that has bugged me (and plenty of players, based on the comments I get about it) is the inconsistent window placement for the main house in AVFH. From the upstairs hallway it's implied that the order of rooms is: MCILF,  Nerd, Firebrand, Slacker. From the backyard, however, there are only two actual windows visible, and the far left one is used as the trigger for the Nerd's events - Something's gotta be wrong there!

The answer to why is simple: On the earliest versions of the clickable maps I didn't know where the bedrooms were going to be. For the backyard ,my only concern was making sure the house had a house-vibe. Upstairs, I had intended to have the MCILF's bedroom door be behind the camera (reducing the window paradox by 1) with some 'turn around' clickable like the principal's office has. I found that to be really unintuitive, though, so her room was moved.

So I wanted to fix that. "I'll just draw some extra windows" I thought, expecting to spend 20 minutes getting this done before shifting focus to writing.

Once I got to work, though, I felt like I needed to put in a little more effort. Some of the perspective in the scene was janky (but not as bad as it is upstairs; more on that in the future), so I fixed that up. I took some extra time to make the new windows nicely modular so I could update them in the future. The cleanly drawn windows looked jarring against the rough house art, so I improved that. One by one I started redrawing (almost) everything!


New backyard art spoilers below!

In the end I think I'm very happy I took the time to get this done. The perspective drawing tools in Clip Studio were super useful for these highly geometric scenes, and the whole space feels sooooo much more polished now. There's still going to be another art quality pass in the distant future, but all of this is useable art and not a clunky placeholder asset.

Next up, I think I'm going to keep the art detour going and redraw the upstairs hallway - the perspective of that hallway is massively wrong. Until I fix that, anything I draw for that space will need to be redrawn and it won't be useful for visualizing where things go in general. That's a much less complicated area, so I don't expect to take nearly as long - hopefully I'll have an update for you in a couple of days!

Hey all, I'm back with another update on work for v0.33!

For the last few days I've been focused on clickable art, particularly the new bedroom clickables that I'm using for the upcoming night time events. Since drawing characters takes me a good chunk of time (even with the rough style I'm currently using) I decided I should improve their bed art as well, rather than have to redraw everything in the future. That involved fixing their perspective, getting the scale right, and giving them some rough shading. I also cleaned up some other clickable objects, like the Nerd's computer, while I was looking at the files for them.

I've just finished the last bit of sleeping art (the Cheerleader; who had the most pose detail AND the most awkward perspective), which means I've now got 100% of the art for v0.33 finished! I've got all of the basic triggers set up for the night time events too, so all that remains is to write the actual dialogue and narration. That always takes longer than I expect, so rather than tempt fate I'm just going to say it'll be done Soon-ish™.

Besides my direct work on AVFH I've spent some time working on art-related stuff. I've long been frustrated with the amount of time I need to spend going from a mostly-finished sketch to clean lineart that I can colour and shade. I went searching for a mechanical solution to produce clear vector lines - which would save me hours of tedious retracing time and let me polish up a lot of my practice drawings so I can share them. I actually experimented with a machine learning method first (more on that another day, when I've got more time to write and make some example images), but the approach that seems to be working actually goes back to my old favourite open source drawing program: GIMP!

The G'MIC library of plugins had some very useful filters that pretty reliably (and faithfully) converted my rough sketch into a cleaner raster image. From there I could take it into Inkscape (also open source!) and vectorize it, but I think the clean raster version will be plenty for what I need it for. Here's an eample:

The final result would still take some light cleanup, but it's much easier to work with than rough lineart from my sketch. The bits that need the most cleanup - the hair, in this example - are also the bits that are the least clear in my original sketch, which feels correct. Hopefully I'll be able to put this all to work in the near future!

Alright, that's enough writing from me, I'm going to go get started with some writing!

Hey crew, I'm here with a (shorter than I'd like) update on v0.34 progress!

First up, the stuff I've been working on! I've finished up all of the MCILF's new sleepwear and have it working in-game, and I've got all of the code in place for her new night time events to key off of. I've got a good sense of what the new events are going to be and how they'll fit in, so all that's left is... the rest of the owl.

The last two weeks have been plagued with artists block for me. I just couldn't quite bite into any of the new content I've needed to work on. Every time I've started writing or drawing something it's felt like pulling teeth, and after a little while I've become distracted with something else. This is, obviously, not particularly helpful when I'm trying to get a content update done for you all!

To help break out of this unproductive funk I decided to focus on some for-fun art. I took one of the Slacker's existing wall posters as inspiration and drew it up as a proper bit of coloured and shaded art. Getting to work on something simple has really helped with the block, so I think I'm going to get back into the routine of doing 30-ish minutes of drawing/sketching every day as a warmup. I'm also improving my sleep schedule, trying to be a little more consistent with my bedtimes. The first couple of days with better sleep have been immediately more productive, so I guess sometimes problems just have simple solutions :P

As an apology for my lack of progress, here are some beach boobs! These will be coming to a Slacker's bedroom near you soon - and probably available as a phone background as well! I've got a timelapse for it that I'll post tomorrow!

Hey everyone! these last few days I've been diving into the wonderful world of UI design, working on improving the interface experience in A Very Full House. Today I thought I'd share with you some of that work, along with my thought process and what I'm hoping to achieve here.

So, let's jump right into it! A huge chunk of AVFH involves clicking through menus, and that means how those menus feel is an important part of how the entire experience feels. Right now menu buttons are all boring grey rectangles with some text (and some requirement glyphs for things like Arousal, Corruption, etc.). That's functional, but not exactly inspiring. My first step was redesigning the actual button art.

Here's a new basic button. The transparent background makes sure any interesting art behind it can still be seen, and the outlined white text guarantees contrast on any background so it's easy to read. Hovering over the button highlights it, while a disabled button is both darkened, desaturated, and blurred. Overall, it feels pretty similar to the current system, but a little sharper.

My goal is to use these buttons to deliver more information to the player than the old versions could do with just text. To do that menu options can have "accents" given to them, which attaches some extra art to the button. Here's what a button with the "arousal" accent looks like:

I'm currently planning to have accents for: arousal, control, chores, and money. That should help players find which options complete chores, which ones you can expect to generate arousal, which ones generate control, and so on. It also means I don't have to be as explicit with some mechanics. Eg. instead of "*Tease him*" I can use something more interesting like "*Pay extra close attention to him*" and be confident that the player is still getting the same information. All of these accents will be mutually exclusive and located on the right side of the button.

On the left side of the button I'll be putting accents for mechanical effects the button will have. Right now I'm planning for that to be: change location, time advances, and day advances. Here's an example for what that will look like:

A button can have left and right accents at the same time, which I expect to come up a fair bit of the time.

There's one more element that I'm going to be taking advantage for the button art: the colour ring. The previous examples have the default grey ring, which I'll be using for most actions. For actions that lead to a corruption tag you haven't yet collected, the colour ring will be set to gold instead.

It's a subtle effect, but it should make it a lot clearer when an option leads to some type of interesting game progression. I'm also planning to use the ring to show menu options that have been selected before, perhaps with a duller grey, but I haven't implemented that functionality yet.

All of that - plus work on the text bubbles, which I'll talk about another time - leads us to this before/after comparison:

All of this UI stuff is subject to change - I've made everything as modular as possible so it's easy to change and update elements in the future. I expect I'll be tweaking things for a while until we've dialed into an optimal set of aesthetic and functional art!

Now this post has gone on long enough, and I still have some aspect art to work on, so I'll wrap this up. I'll be back in a few days with some accessory art, and maybe some polls to have you vote on what else my supporters would like to see added!