A Night at the Office #6

It's been a few months since my last devlog and, to be honest, I'd hoped to have the demo published by now. It's still 'almost done', but in much the same state as it was at the end of last year, due to a change in circumstances... Specifically, I started a new full-time job in January, meaning I actually have a stable income again. The bad news is that I now have less time to devote to getting the demo into a publishable state... but the good news is that I can now more easily afford to progress the full game.

So, to fill in while I figure out how best to use my decreased time and increased funding, here's some waffle about another important aspect of Visual Novel development: background images.

Because A Night at the Office was conceived as taking place largely in a single location, I never spent a great deal of time even thinking about background images. The first draft of Abigail Parker Winthrop's office was put together by my girlfriend, in using The Sims, and stuck around for the first few years of what I might generously describe as its 'development'. It was furnished according to her own imagination - albeit with certain details already fixed in the text, such as a view over Lake Michigan, Abigail's dark, lacquered wooden desk, and an old Persian rug - but mostly fit the vague picture I'd built up in my head, within the limits of the landscape and architecture of The Sims. Some minor tweaks were applied to the original screenshot, essentially just to make it look less like a screenshot from The Sims.

Around this time, the minimal customisation I'd done to the UI included a banker's lamp appearing as the character namebox, so Courtney adding a banker's lamp to Abigail's desk was quite the coincidence.

For a good, long time, the image above was the only location in the entire story. As it evolved, I found I needed some additional location images to really bring the office to life, rather than just referring to them in passing in the dialogue... Abigail's private washroom, a hallway or two, the HR office, to name but a few. When the endings of this initial story started to multiply, I added backgrounds for a couple of flashback scenes, to be seen only under certain circumstances, and a little bit of animation showing an aerial view of Abigail's car leaving the office car park, taking her to her meeting with the Potentates. Where I couldn't bodge something together in The Sims, these started off as stock images, for the sake of convenience, but the ideal - if not the conscious plan - was to have unique artwork for all of them as well.

Of course, alongside the evolution of the story, the UI and sprite artwork changed considerably, to the point where I felt that the screenshots from The Sims no longer fit the appearance of everything else. And, in the absence of the skills and patience need to design a room by hand, I ended up experimenting with AI to take the original screenshots and remix them into something closer to what I was after.

Now, by and large, I'm very much against resorting to AI for a 'finished product'. AI assets are ridiculously easy to identify, and the more one looks at them, the worse they seem. Their use as reference is somewhat limited, as one would end up describing so many changes, one might as well start with a blank canvas. For example:

Broadly speaking, this is far closer to what I envisaged, but it took an insane amount of time and tweaking to get this result. For starters, just trying to get AI to retain the nighttime setting was difficult, and the room remains lit by daylight despite the dark skies and streetlights visible outside. The desk even casts a shadow leading away from the main windows as a result of a light source that's no longer there. I wanted to the desk to be in front of the windows, not to the side, but no matter what I tried, AI refused to comply. The windows themselves are OK... but no amount of prompting could produce the required view over a lake. Then, there are doorhandles in the middle of the large windows, despite there being no balcony for them to lead out to. Furthermore, for some strange reason, there's a second desk behind the desk, that clearly has its own furnishings, and sits directly in front of one of the smaller windows.

And then there's the finer details: the monitor is deformed, the windows behind the desk don't match the larger ones, and appear to be set in much thicker walls. There are reflections of things that don't exist, while things that do exist suffer the vampires fate of casting no reflection. I think I can safely say that the only real success - qualified though it may be - was that I managed, after many attempts, to get it to set a drinks tray with glasses and decanters on one end of the desk, in place of the random junk it put there by default.

The end result is that, even with the Photoshop filters applied, the unmistakable taint of AI persists.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll end up doing for the demo I still hope to release (sometime this year?), let alone the finished VN. The AI image is acceptable for testing purposes, but I need something better eventually.