A Night at the Office #3

or, Finding Abigail Parker Winthrop

Well before I started A Night at the Office, I had a shrewd idea of what Abigail should look like. For the purpose of our internet-based V:TM campaign, her creator, my girlfriend, based her appearance largely on Elizabeth Holmes, of Theranos notoriety. She noted that she imagined Abigail as "more angular", and more of a neat-freak with regards to the state of her hair... but that alone was quite a striking image.

I tried, several times, to draw my own interpretation of Abigail, but it never quite worked out.

My first draft was sketched on paper, but didn't quite capture how I imagined her, let alone how my girlfriend pictured her. Her hair was too messy, her neck was too long, her eyes were too big... but I ended up using that version - crudely coloured in Photoshop - in the very earliest drafts of the game, with text captions in place of actual variations in her expression. I quickly came to realise, though, that hand-drawing all the expression variations on paper, then scanning them in and editing them in Photoshop would be too laborious, and prone to scaling issues.

As a result, I later tried my hand at drawing her on my phone, then on my girlfriend's tablet... but, if my pencil-on-paper art skills have atrophied over the last decade or so, my digital art skills never really developed, and I just couldn't get the hang of it. The version here is about as far as I got.

While I was reasonably happy with it as a sketch, I just couldn't get my head around how to go about colouring it... and ended up spending months watching all kinds of YouTube tutorials in an attempt to get to grips with it. This had the rather counterproductive result of leaving me feeling absolutely unable to produce something that would live up to my own expectations, without years of practice... and, while that's a kinda obvious thing to realise, it was also rather depressing.

Around this time, one of the artists I follow on DeviantArt (the absurdly talented OasisWinds) posted an offer I couldn't refuse: a hand-painted postcard. I figured something like that could be exactly the boost I needed to help me make some progress.

The results can be seen here. I absolutely adore her style and the expressiveness of each of her characters' faces, and her take on Abigail was fantastic. I would have liked nothing more than having OasisWinds create the character sprites... but she doesn't do NSFW commissions, and ANatO was always going to feature some NSFW elements.

So... a couple of years back, I was going through the Recruitment & Services Offered thread on the LemmaSoft forum, and found an artist there whose work I liked the look of. Their rates were reasonable, they had plenty of experience in creating sprites for Ren'Py and, while certain aspects of what I was asking for were not the usual way of doing things, the artist was happy to accommodate. I provided a text description of the character in terms of both appearance and attitude, and provided photo references for her appearance and her clothing style. The artist provided an initial rough sketch, then got to work on the colouring, then the expression components, and the whole job took them a couple of months.

Abigail breaks down into 18 sets of eyes (plus a further 9 used for certain animations) and 24 mouth options. On top of this, I created 8 variations of her eyebrows, making her expression completely customisable, rather than having set expressions like 'happy', 'sad', 'angry', 'surprised', etc.

This requires quite a bit of work to manage during the course of her story - even leaving her clothing and hair on their default setting, there are three attributes making up the facial expressions in her LayeredImage sprite. I also decided to do something either very clever or very stupid: her blinking animation runs constantly, throughout the story, regardless of the expression of her eyes. I did this by first defining a variable to determine which eye 'shape' should be used, then setting up the blink animation, thus:

default eyeset = "default"
default blink_timer = renpy.random.randint(2,8)
init python:
    def blinky(trans,st,at):
        global blink_timer
        if st >= blink_timer:
            blink_timer = renpy.random.randint(2,8)
            return None
        else:
            return 0
...
image eyesblinking:
    "abigail eyes_[eyeset]"
    function blinky
    "abigail eyes_blink"
    pause 0.2
    repeat

So, all of my eye variant image files have filenames that start "abigail eyes_" and end with, for example "default", "narrow1", "wide", etc. and the 'blinky' function invoked by the 'eyesblinking' image switches to the 'blink' variant at random, every 2-8 seconds. There are other ways to accomplish this, including using 'choice x' to switch to the 'blink' variant (or not) every x seconds. In one version of my code, I ended up doing the following for a simplified version of the sprite that appears on the title screen:

image abigail_title_eyes:
    contains:
        "images/abigail/titlescreen/abigail_title_eyesopen.webp"
        choice:
            6
        choice:
            9
        choice:
            12
        "images/abigail/titlescreen/abigail_title_eyesblink.webp"

Other than that, the attributes of Abigail's LayeredImage sprite are fairly straightforward, and the only problems I had with her during development were down to me failing to set a default state for one or two of the clothing layers, such that she'd suddenly look different when shown for the first time in a new scene.

The artist I commissioned provided me with sprite components I was thoroughly happy with, and which allowed me to present a sprite that felt - without a hint of irony - exactly as 'alive' as I'd hoped my undead protagonist would be. My work on the game progressed nicely, and it was great to see Abigail finally reacting to the content of the script.

As I mentioned in my first DevLog, though, the artist let me down on the next two sprites required by the demo. I needed two versions of a tertiary character - male and female, the latter based on my girlfriend, since she created Abigail, so it seemed only fair that the former be based on me. I provided photo references, once again, for appearance and clothing, along with references - from the artist's own portfolio - for the expressions, and details of the two poses I needed each of them to have.

With payment made in advance, I contacted the artist a month later, asking for news... and heard nothing. Due to real-life circumstances, it was another month before I chased them up again. They replied with the briefest of apologies, the barest of explanations for the delay, a rough sketch of the basic poses, and an assurance that they were back on the job.

And then I didn't hear from them again for almost another two months... at which point, they presented... adjustments to the rough sketches. I confirmed that these were closer to what I was after... and then another month went by with nothing to show for it.

So I sent another email, enquiring after progress and stating a deadline, after which I'd be contacting PayPal. This got a quick response, with an apology for these two sprites "taking way longer than expected" and a coloured first draft of both. There were a couple of obvious errors, but these were corrected the very next day. To be honest, looking back, they still looked pretty low-effort. While the artist had a particular style, their faces tended to have enough variety that their portfolio didn't just look like a bunch of clones... Given that I'd provided photos of myself and my girlfriend, I'd expected to see some slight resemblance, within the bounds of the artist's style, but both looked completely generic. Still, they were tertiary characters, so not really that big a deal.

Updated drafts arrived just a day after the PayPal complaints window closed, but the artist insisted they were "pretty much done!" and that they just needed to know what expressions were required. Coming after the obvious error in the first draft, this should have been enough of a red flag, because the expressions were listed in the details I'd provided six months previously.

But I was being optimistic, because I had no real reason to doubt that the artist would complete the job.

Final drafts were sent two weeks later, and I was happy with them. I asked for an ETA on the finished sprites and their expressions and... never heard from the artist again.

And since, by that point, we were about a month after the expiry of the PayPal complaints window, I no longer had any recourse. The artist may or may not eventually provide the sprites I paid for but, at this point, I genuinely don't care.

I won't publicly name-and-shame them out of courtesy (there may be some real-life issues they're dealing with), but I certainly won't recommend them to anyone who asks. Additionally, I have to admit that I was a little nonplussed when I learned that they've joined the LemmaSoft Ren'Py forum under a new name, and have been promoting a VN of their own.

And, as mentioned, I found a new artist, and took a wholly new direction with the art style, which I'm super happy with.

So I may be out of pocket, but ANatO is in a better place than it was before I commissioned those two new sprites, and I'm hoping to be able to commission these two characters from my new artist soon. Since I've been working with them via Fiverr, I'm much more confident that the work will actually be completed promptly...

And be of a higher quality.