Public Poll - Artstyle
EDIT: I’m ending this poll earlier because it turned out to be very one-sided, both in terms of unweighted & weighted votes, across all platforms. There’s no need to delay things further, as the result is quite clear.
We’ll be going with the anime art style, and my character artist is already working on it as we aim to have it ready for the April tech demo.
Thank you to everyone who participated and shared feedback. I really appreciate it!
Hey lads!
I know, long time no see. I’ll be writing a detailed devlog later in April and then releasing the UiTC2:R tech demo on April 30th.
So, this one is pretty serious. We have to rework the existing art style from scratch (it was mostly placeholder anyway, more details in the upcoming devlog). While doing that, we’re considering switching the character art style to anime, since most NSFW artists specialize in manga/anime rather than a western/cartoon style, including my current graphic artist. Another reason is that it simply animates better and is easier to work with, which would result in smoother animations and faster development - easier for us and quicker updates for you.
We won’t be doing both art styles, so one will be removed. We also won’t revisit character or art style reworks in the future (it’s a lot of work), so this choice will be permanent.
Keep in mind that both faces are still unfinished, so glitches may occur, and the selected style will be improved further. Also, this is just one face variant for each style, so more faces will be added in the future with the same level of customization - you are voting for the art style direction, not the specific face.
I’m attaching 3 videos:
Facial expressions
Random generation
Step-by-step customization
https://pixeldrain.com/l/oburAW7H
Public poll with weighted votes:
Non-patrons - x1
Innocent - x3
UnAware - x5
SemiAware - x10
Aware - x15
OverAware - x25
Comments (21)
well there is only one problem my phone is android 15 and this game does not work on my mobile version have to fix it.
It's already fixed. Re-download the game.
I thought they had answered, put them both together.
Yeah, wouldn't happen even if they did, but thank god they didn't :P
Western style would be great for a fear and hunger parody
i bet more would've voted western, but that example somehow looked so creepily uncanny, but the results would've been anime even with a better western example xD
Yeah, I also tried to get Hans Zimmer on board, but it didn’t really work out... Well, as I said, the anime art style is easier, animates better, and my graphic artist specializes in it, so that’s what you get with a western style. And I'm not going to spend thousands of USD just to refine a sneakpeak face, since it's out of my budget. It's not about drawing art, but about making it all work together.
I don't know if you're reading this. But I was late with voting. Both have their positives and negatives. I think you should go with a style between them, with more detail than the anime, but less than the detailed one. The last one comes for me as slightly disturbing. The other one is a little bit to anime for my liking. However keep on going!
I (try to) read every single comment, but finding time to reply to all of them is a different story. By no means will I go for the typical over-the-top weeb tropes you see in some anime or J-games, like eyes turning into hearts, growing 5x bigger, nosebleeds, and so on. The anime style is quite broad, so we’ll also experiment with things like puffy lips, visible or minimal noses, etc., but it will lean toward an overall anime feel without heavy shading or realistic elements. Cheers!
Nice game, but money cheat would be cool.
Unrelated to the poll, but both games, the old UiTC and upcoming UiTC2:R, have money cheat in the paid version.
Western is better, but her face could be prettier.
That’s pretty much the main issue with the western style - it’s very hard to make it look good due to all the shading, detail, and face customization. We could literally use something like the Summertime Saga art style 1:1, but the moment we modify it to let players customize every single facial detail, it would stop resembling Summertime Saga at all.
"Another reason is that it simply animates better and is easier to work with, which would result in smoother animations and faster development - easier for us and quicker updates for you" guess we are going with anime.
Well, this project was never about taking the easy route :P But it’s already pretty complex, and the anime style will definitely save us all a headache. Cheers!
One big problem (in my opinion, which can be discarded, of course) that makes the art look dead is the desaturated shadow. It makes the characters look like corpses; if you saturate the darker parts of the skin, make them a little more red, it'll look much better.
I know the shaders aren’t finished yet, but they will be improved further once I decide on the character art style.
To be honest the western style is a bit scary. There is a name for this effect when you make something more realistic then it will become scary at a point. The name is "Uncanny Valley". I feel like that with the western style.
I guess it’s because of the 3D-ish effect, especially around the eyes, but I’m not sure. As mentioned, the graphic artist specializes in anime style, like most NSFW artists. Another reason is that it’s very hard to do proper face customization in a western style due to all the shading and detail. These faces aren’t static art - they’re made of multiple elements stitched together, with dozens of animations affecting each small part of the face simultaneously. The western style is simply too detailed to work well with this level of customization in a 2D game.
Please tell me this is just the basic look? If so then you need put some pretty samples or it will be obvious people with the mindset of western games with good looking girls are on the low side compared to the many Asian games.
These are base faces with default settings, so in both art styles you can move and resize facial features by the same amount. If I adjusted both to look good (in my opinion), it would be misleading, unfair and not neutral, since this is about the art style, not a specific face. More faces and details can be added and improved later, but they will still follow the same approach. So if the western style doesn’t look good to you, other variants will most likely not look good either. There’s also a video that randomizes faces, so you can see how they look with different settings.