Hi, this is Stem, the person behind the character portraits and backgrounds! I'm a nonbinary person who's previous experience in games has mostly involved making key art and marketing images, my experience actually working on the games themselves has been limited to a funny little armadillo game I'm working on with my wife, and now this! To tell you the truth, the real reason why I volunteered to join as an artist when WhatNames reached out to Game Dev Galaxy for collaborators was… Well, aside from the game concept sounding like a riot, I just wanted practice drawing men! Because I never draw them! I'm so glad I volunteered because working with this group has been amazing, and I'm so proud of how all of the boys came out in the end.  

Three Brand New Character Designs With Portraits in Just One Month?  

As someone else may have mentioned previously, from the starting point to our first deadline, we only had one month of working time. The only thing we knew about any of the characters or the setting was the little tidbit that WhatNames had pitched to us-- Dating sim, trans guys at an all girls school reunion, and the basic concepts behind each guy: party planner, farming co-op runner, and evil influencer. I don't think we even knew it would be set at a vineyard yet. All of us were starting to sort out the characters and story at the same time, which meant that I had to try roughing out designs for things before we had a proper setting and before any of these characters had any kind of voice yet. The basics of all three as established in the pitch were permanent, so I at least had that to go off of, and the instant I'd read about them I already had vague thoughts in mind. The party organizer (Elias) should be fat and fashionable, the farmer (Angel) I imagined being black and dressed simply, as farmers often are, and finally the "evil twink" (Liam)… he'd probably be blonde.  

As the characters got more fleshed out, the writers started to offer a lot more help in the character design department, which was a huge boon for me. Spookybot made the fantastic suggestion Elias should be Filipino, BáiYù  and WhatNames came up with Angel's amazing tattoos and hair respectably, and Shamus practically may as well have drawn Liam himself with the amount of reference pictures of Liam Gallagher (of Oasis fame) that he came to me with! It should be no surprise that Liam was by far the quickest and easiest to finish all the portraits for, which worked out very nicely since his route was the first one to be released. Elias and Angel just barely scraped by in terms of getting them done by the first deadline, with maybe about half of their portraits being done (and thankfully not yet needed).

The Magic of Stock Photos  

But how do backgrounds fit into this? I'm only one person who struggled to even get the characters done in time, and no other artist ever volunteered to join up who could have handled those. Well, I really wanted to give them a try, but from the very beginning I knew that it wasn't going to be in the cards. As soon as our group was confirmed, we decided to stick with stock photos for all the backgrounds, and I could just do a little editing magic on any of them that needed a bit of work. The team was a fantastic help when it came to scouring the internet for the extremely specific photos we needed, too! We had a very specific limitation: the angle had to look like a person could reasonably be standing in front of it. You would not believe how hard it is to find photos that fit that one criteria.  

Editing the photos to work at multiple times of day would have been nearly impossible if someone didn't recommend the app FotoSketcher to me. It very quickly and easily turned anything I put into it into a watercolor-like filter. This obscured the images just enough that I could do some frankly horrible drawing on top of them to make the pictures fit our needs, and you wouldn't even notice it in the final product!

He's Not Pretty Enough!  

As you may have noticed, the whole game didn't get completed in one month. Angel's and Elias's routes didn't get finished in time, and for me, this was a godsend because I absolutely hated Elias's design. The problem with doing three characters at once is that someone is inevitably going to fall through the cracks, and in this instance, that person was Elias. Shortly after the first version of the game released, I came across someone's comment saying something like, "he looks like 10 Filipino guys I know, but I wish his design was more interesting". That comment has been glued to my brain, because that person was completely right. My original vision for Elias was for him to be someone classy, high fashion! He's rich and queer after all! But when I was trying to get art for all of these boys done as quick as possible, I let him slip away and put him in boring business casual.  

After the first deadline, we were blessed with one whole other month to get things polished up for the other jam we wanted to submit to. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't take this chance to right my wrongs, so I announced my intentions to the group and sat down to completely redesign Elias. I got to looking up suits and tried to dress him up the best I could and asked the team for opinions and consultation on how to keep him still looking fantastically Filipino. Once the look was confirmed, I redrew every one of his sprites to keep things fresh and consistent, and I'm so much happier with his new look, as is the rest of the team.

As of now, this new and improved design is in the game, along with Angel's route and a ton of little differences and improvements to the story. You should give it a download to see it yourself!

P.S.-- A little bug that popped up as part of said improvements.