Hello everyone!
Hope you had a great week! 😄

My week was pretty good!
The joy from the Japan journey was still lingering, so I was feeling surprisingly good at my day job 😊
Other than that, I also played the Uma Musume mobile game a bit (the English version released a while ago), which was pretty fun and gave me more insight into the characters from the anime 😀

Progress this week

I made some good progress this week, and it was really fun to work on the visual novel again after the long break 😊

The main scene I mentioned last week isn't quite finished yet, but it's coming along really well!

One of the things I worked on was a "look to the side" pose for Yuma 👀

The following image shows it:

As you can see, there was a v1 of this pose, and I wasn't too happy with it. When compared with Yuma's regular look, it just looked too different. One reason is, of course, the difference in resolution, since the regular look is rather old and the quality isn't very high 😅
But of course, I don't want to use low-res sprite poses, and I also felt that the resolution difference wasn't the relevant factor here.

So I tried to make the eyes more similar by manually removing some of the shading in the side pose, since the regular look doesn't have many shades in the eyes. And I think now it looks better! The lack of shades in the eyes gives Yuma a bit of a mature and dangerous vibe, I feel, which is also an essential part of her. This v2 still isn’t perfect either (maybe the eye color is still a bit off?), so I might make a v3 along the way.
I'll admit, I've never thought this much about Yuma's eyes before😅But I believe these kinds of details are necessary in the long run to make sure that Yuma not only looks similar across different images, but also emits the same 'feel', so to speak. I guess that's what an art director usually does 🤔
As for the regular look: I definitely want to update it to high resolution at some point 🔥But of course, that version needs to emit the same feel as the current look, since that's the most common version of Yuma that I (and you!) are used to seeing! So yeah, I'll update it at some point, but I don't want to rush it and mess up the look 👀

Well, let me know what you think of all of this, and which version of the side look you prefer! 😊

Plans for next week

Right now, I'm fine-tuning the presentation of some parts of the main scene, so I'll continue that next week. When that's done, it'll be time for the scenes that are still missing. While the overall structure for the next update has gotten a lot clearer over time, there are still some specifics that I'm not sure about, so I'll think about that as well.

Well, that's all from me for this week!
Have a great week, and see you all next Sunday! 👋😊