Java Corrupted Saviors [Release 70b] [CSDev]

[Kaitol]

My dude, do you have any idea how much halfway decent art is? Especially when you need like seven different transformations for each portrait. Basic professional quality illustrations and the rights to use them in a commercial product cost thousands of dollars per picture, and you'd have to find someone okay with their work being used in a game like this. And if you commission an amateur to save money, they might disappear off the face of the earth or stop taking commissions a month from now, so enjoy having wildly different, clashing art styles for every portrait after that.

You'd have to hire the artist full-time to avoid that, and again, that wouldn't be cheap. But if you don't believe me, go talk to a commission artist and see what they quote you to make a portrait pack for you.

 

[Qazex Saw]

A quick look says in the current portrait pack, there's 57 chosen, with 9 expression variations, and 8 variations for chosen type. Then there's the civilian and forsaken version for each type, and the male variation for everything on top of that.
Which if my math is correct, means 3,648 portraits with 9 expression variations each, or a grand total of 32,832 potential portraits to be done.
Technically less since I don't think boss chosen have type variations, but that's still just like what just ~10% off the total

So yeah we're going to have to accept that a fair few corners will have to be cut somewhere to accomplish this, because actually making every portrait needed to 'full professional' or fuck even 'decent amateur' standards will take months if not years of work and I don't even know how much money.

Frankly, it'd probably be best to condense the chosen down to like ~10 per type or something rather than having a bunch of chosen with a variation for each type, and have male chosen be specific chosen instead of a variation. That way you can drop the numbers down something like 10 chosen with 9 expression variations each, which reduces the number of portraits needed to like 2% of what the current approach asks for.

 

[dezil]

Can anyone share some AI portraits? I can't download them through "Mega" it keeps giving me an error...

 

[WulfiesFromTheMoon]

okay, guess I'll add my perspective on this whole "AI portraits" thing, why not. frankly, I don't give a fuck how many portraits there are, there's still ways to make decent-quality character art, for free, without relying on the environment-destroying art theft machine to pump out low-quality slop. picrew, kisekae, whatever, better than AI. and if there's "too many" to manually create, that is a sign that the dev needs to cut the fuck back on the amount of images in this primarily text-based game. there is no justifying the use of generative AI in the first place (unless you WANT less human-made art, at lower quality, and for the inevitable climate collapse to kill us all even sooner, in which case...well, you're not a real person, so your opinion can be safely discarded), but the defense of it here feels especially flimsy.

 

[Kaitol]

Who's defending AI? All I see is people calmly and articulately explaining why human-made art would be difficult and expensive. Which is factually true. There's a reason you don't see many games that have artwork showcasing lots of outfit choices and expressions.

Artists don't want to waste their lives drawing hundreds and hundreds of high-quality pictures for an amateur-made porn game where you torture magical girls. So they, rightfully, want the kind of money only big companies or rich people could pay.

And let's be real here, if Picrew and Kisekae were actual options, why isn't everybody using them? Because they'd make projects look like cheap copies, plus you're heavily limited by what they can do. The game would have to vastly change its scope to try to fit what those tools could accomplish. Which is, frankly, beyond a big ask.

You're the one in here coming and derailing the thread on a pirated porn forum, ranting and raving about how AI is gonna kill us all, blindly regurgitating other people's flimsy arguments without any critical thinking or self-reflection.

 

[Qazex Saw]

Regardless of how we fill the portrait pack, I do think the amount of chosen variants should be reduced.
A lot of chosen already share portraits, chosen are mostly randomly generated anyways, not to mention certain variations (which I assume are considered low priority) are just straight up empty for many chosen (and sometimes all chosen it seems like).

The dev does seem to be struggling to fill up all the portrait slots, and like, the descriptions and personality for chosen seem to be randomly generated anyways, so is there really a need to stick to the 'portrait per name' system?

Like, not to tell someone what they should do with their game they've been working on for years and are distributing for free, but reducing the amount of portraits and variations would cut down a lot of the work needed for portrait packs, which would make a potential update much easier to do, not to mention reducing workload for any fans who might want to make their own portrait packs.