I like playing animal breeding games, so I was searching for ones I hadn't played yet, and I came across this ridiculous webgame Celebrity Pedigree I played it for two full days (which I thought was astonishing for a web game) and while I was playing it I realized, I could have made every single piece of art in the game. It was vector art in a cartoony style, just like mine, and it wasn't any better quality than mine. So I had the epiphany that I actually already had all the skills I needed to make a game similar to one I had really enjoyed playing. And I even had a clear idea for what I wanted to do to make mine different - I wanted to make an adult game which presented selective breeding of humanoids in an erotic way. Ready-made audience too: the furry community. So even though I had mostly give up on game design, this project idea was sort of like a deal that was too good to pass up.
The design of an animal-breeding game is well-established, almost a solved problem, so I'll talk about this project from the art side instead. 2D breeding games in general are built around a paper doll system which shows individual creatures by assembling different body parts on different layers. From previous attempts at making a 2D anime-style MMO avatar I already knew that I didn't want to have just a generically perfect male and female body, so instead of two bases I wanted six: muscular male, skinny male, fat male, muscular female, skinny female, and fat female. The banner here features the muscular male, I am using him for all the prototyping because there are the most good anatomical references and tutorials for this body type, thus I'm the most confident in the way his lineart turned out, so it was the least worrisome for me to have to commit to the lineart so I could move ahead to coloring.
Whether making adult games of pg-13 ones, I think it's important to recognize that people don't all find the same body type attractive, and it's also important not to force players into using an avatar who looks nothing like themselves. Games where every female character looks like a playboy model and every male character looks like a gym rat really send the impression that it's unacceptable to look like anything else, and if you do in reality, too bad no one will ever be attracted to you. That's really not true, although many people don't realize it until they are halfway through college or even older. I'm a woman, but I'm not particularly interested in muscles, I like slender pretty men. I'm quite plump myself, but fortunately I often run into men who prefer fat women to 'ideal weight' ones.
But, back to the game design side of things. I'm using Inkscape because it's a free vector program that works pretty well. I haven't used either Illustrator or Flash enough to know if they would be a better choice, probably they are. But, since I don't do art anything like full time, there's no way I'd get the purchase price of the software back in saved time. The programming side of the game will probably have to be Flash, but I'm going to recruit a partner to do the programming side when I've basically completed everything I can do myself. The reason I'm doing it this way is because I totally burned myself out trying to lead game design teams and decided that unless someone is giving me a budget I don't want to lead anything unless absolutely necessary. Also, a turn-based breeding game is art-heavy and programming light, so it's going to take a lot more time to do all the art than it will to do the programming, probably. (If someone reads this and is for some reason totally inspired to to the programming for this game, drop me a PM.)
So, yeah, I developed the bases using my standard method - I collected source images, picked a pose, printed the best few references, used my light box to sketch mine while looking at the references, scanned the sketch, inked over the lineart, then deleted the sketch to just leave the clean lineart. I did this for all 6 bases, although I'm still wembling about the skinny male and muscular female ones. The other four I was happy with the lines so I decided where my light source was and stuck some highlights and shadows on them. I don't have much practice doing this kind of lighting so it probably sucks, but oh well, when I stuck them up on some forums which allow adult art (not here) people had positive things to say.
That's another important thing I've realized over the past few years - although artists tend to have really acidic things to say about each others' anatomy, lighting, etc, the average gamer is NOT an artist and non-artists are often just as happy with intermediate art as professional art. So, even though my art isn't at a professional level and will never get to that level (I don't have the eye or patience for that kind of attention to detail), it really is good enough to make a game out of. And I don't have to be terrified of posting my pieces for artists to crit either because they aren't the real audience.
(Speaking of posting art on forums for critting, this is petty, and I apologize, but I just have to crow - Bwahaha that bitch Merekat killed MegaTokyo's art forum!!! I have boycotted that forum since I got into a fight with her, after previously having been an active poster there for years. I only looked at it because I wasn't sure where else besides conceptart.org I could get the anatomy and lighting of the bases critiqued. And what I discovered was that Merekat's hardass inflexible attitude had driven not only me away, but basically all the denizens of that forum - the evidence was right there in the stickied threads. So, I felt totally vindicated in taking a stand against her attitude. Okay gloating over.)
Anyway, I made myself a checklist of all the art assets I need, and I'm making them one by one, and I have a plan for describing the gameplay so it can be programmed. Not much else to say, beyond the fact that if I keep working on it steadily for the next two months I might actually have made a playable game.
