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I'd like some feedback about the sprites in the game. Specifically how many of them there are. As the game has progressed and I've gotten better at creating them, I've found myself using more and more of them in the updates. I'd like to say this is a deliberate stylistic choice on my part, but actually it boils down to me having to generate a lot of images to get what I want, finding a lot of images I really like and think look really good and then wanting to use as many of them as possible. I thought it would mean more images, more content and therefore more engaging. Which it probably would be if they were all images that I had total design control over. But being that I'm partnered with AI and not human designers, I have a feeling that isn't really working out so well. I'm seeing a few downsides and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get around them all.
Those downsides are....
Firstly, it takes a lot of time to pick, fix (fixing the hands and seams where the face is corrected), removing added items I didn't ask for like rings and necklaces, sometimes correcting hair colour and makeup, sometimes painting in the eye-glow effect, extending the image to fill out cut off parts of hair, arms, legs etc, cropping the image, generating alternative emotion versions (smiling, frowning etc.), upscaling the image and then stripping out the background. Then you have to add it in to the game, set the zoom and positioning etc. It is by far the most time consuming part of the process. So if I was doing less of it, then I would be able to move the stories forward more rapidly.
Aside from that, the other issue that I can reduce, but cannot get rid of, is the consistency problem. Particularly when it comes to nude scenes. Breast size and shape, the amount, colour and shaping of pubic hair and tan-lines are all highly variable. Even with clothes, belts, cuts and accessories all vary a great deal, even with strict and rigid generation parameters. This doesn't matter so much when the sprites have changed on a scene to scene basis, but if there are 10 sprites in a scene, then there are 10x the number of opportunities for a consistency error that is presented to the reader in quick succession, making them more obvious.
I think this latest update suffers from these factors. The final sequence with Emelia for example has some big consistency errors with her breast size, that I overlooked because I thought the overall images looked great. The romance scene has some images in that looked great when generated, but I couldn't get them extended out of portrait and so they cut off within the screen space. Which does look bad, but again, I really wanted to use the image because on it's own, it was great. I've had some (fairly harsh) feedback related to this, that whilst disappointing, wasn't actually that much of a surprise to me.
So I'm thinking for future updates I need to get a grip of my desire to use all the cool images in the game and just focus on one or two for each scene (with variants) and perhaps try to utilise short animations to keep them dynamic. But regardless of how I do that, it will reduce the variety of sprites and images. I didn't want to just do it without seeing what people thought.. so here is a poll, please let me know.
I figured I wouldn't waste the cool images, I would just add them here as bonus content, but without having to adapt them to fit a specific scene, just upscaled and hand/neck fixes.
So... A small number of high quality sprites, supplemented with emotion and animation variants. Or a large number of sprites, whose quality can sometimes be a bit iffy and jarring due to consistency issues?
