one of the biggest challenges of my whole project has been learning to draw this guy. he's so fuckin specific, and he's made up of so many things that were difficult for me for a long time. i always lacked confidence drawing more masculine characters. pretty girls and bishounen are my comfort zone, and i'm better at drawing big fun goofy expressions than serious or subtle ones. so. Sykes is this very serious little guy, who is certainly not 100% manbeef but definitely way further to the masculine end of the scale. and he has short hair. which was a challenge for me for a looooong time bc i could never figure out the shape of the head with short hair, i wasn't good at placing the hairline correctly, etc. thank you 3D models for my fucking LIFE learning to get better at this over the past few years lol. and also the habit i've developed of taking 50234908302 screenshots a week of whatever anime i'm watching and setting aside anything that makes me go "oh THAT'S how the pros would handle that kind of shape at that angle" etc.

if you dig in his Toyhouse Gallery, you can see some struggle in how i've learned to depict him (and all of them, lol). drawing your own characters is so hard because there's no reference material of them!! you have to forge the reference material yourself, and you have to keep melting it down and re-forging it until you're happy with it. a lot of the work with Sykes in particular has just been finding other characters in media that remind me of him somehow and staring really hard at them.

some major design influences:

• Superman-- that little stray hair in the front is something i've been putting on Sykes forever because. it's cute and fun. i imprinted on the Fleischer Superman cartoons as a child and when i think of a Heroic Man he's gotta have a little Superman curl ok!! his recent cute anime depiction in My Adventures With Superman also happens to have a similar hairline and i watched the show half because it was cute and half to take screenshots and see how they draw him at weirder angles.
• Guts from Berserk, in all forms, but especially when he is a Young Lad. those eyebrows taught me so much about... eyebrows. the ones i draw don't do as many fun tricks as his do, they're more simplified, but i did like. mainline a bunch of '97 Berserk right before i drew the sprite. just to watch his beautiful eyebrows.
• Scar from Fullmetal Alchemist, both his Brotherhood beef-form and his 2003 bishounen form. his expressions and his general vibe are close to what i wanted to channel into Sykes. Scar is actually consistently glare-ier though LMAO. he's more energetic and less burnt-out.
• Zuko (Avatar: The Last Airbender) is also just. very similar vibes in a lot of ways and had a big influence on how i wrote Sykes as a character when i was just starting out on things in like 2015-16. things have come a long way since then, but Zuko was still like, a strong example of a Little Guy Who's Mad and Doing His Best.
• Touya (Cardcaptor Sakura)'s cool and reserved manner and more toned-down comedy expressions gave me a lot of ideas.

i dreaded making this sprite and it is some of the most fun i have had

it's very important to me that Iron Company has very expressive, flexible sprites. i'm always impressed with VNs that get a lot done with relatively few character expressions, but i can't live like that on my own time; this is my personal brainworms talking and this is what i am probably going to allow myself to be the most bonkers about.

i've tried to make sprites a few times in the past, as i've been through different phases of working on this project. what making Potion Stand Story inadvertently taught me was to find a character's emotional baseline and build the sprites off that, rather than just start with what seems "neutral" in general. Elly is a vroid, and her default resting face is this:


so whenever i made a new expression for her, i was starting from there.


Sykes is very reserved. when i think about how he emotes, i think about how i emote when i've hit that neurodivergent post-social-activity-or-busy-grocery-store burnout. his baseline emotion is exhaustion layered over smoldering rage, and we just kinda work from there. the direction he's looking, eyebrows, and Squint Level do most of the work.

he has two angles so far-- i might make a third head angle, more tilted forward, for scenes with combat/where he needs to be Angry and Snarly, because both of these angles are a little too relaxed for that.

his jacket is removable and so is his scar, so i can use his face for pre-scar-having flashbacks. he's uh, still missing a few parts though--


i would also like to yell briefly about a tool i found last night. Feniksdev makes all sorts of indispensible tutorials and tools for Ren'py, most of them free! i bought one of the paid ones, though, and holy fucking shit this is a literal game-changer. it live-updates all these sprites as you pick parts. this will make it SO much easier for me to use layered images (which i'm gonna have to do... a lot). last night i put together a fresh separate ren'py project for sprite-building so i can have it open on a separate monitor while i add expressions to lines of dialogue. i can't believe i changed my whole damn life for five dollars.


god this part of making a VN is fun. i knew i was doomed(positive) when i started working on those emoji a while ago. i'm still quietly really anxious about it-- i tend to get embarrassed about my drawings once they reach a certain age, they like. expire on me. but the feedback on these has been really good, people really seem to like them, and since they're layered it'll be easy(ish) (relative to static sprites) for me to make any changes i want/need to in the future for my own sanity.

i've finally started work on putting some visuals into my alleged visual novel. for now, everything you see here is placeholders, not anywhere near final art-- i'm trying to work fast, just slap down sketches, and suppress the urge to refine things, because i'm going to have to redraw it all anyway. my personal goal is to not spend more than 20 minutes on any one placeholder image. i'm basically like. storyboarding or thumbnailing here. i dunno what they call it for VNs.

please note none of these are actually in the available demo yet-- i want to get some more stuff done and squash some bugs before i pack it all up for another update. gimme a couple of weeks.

here's the first minute-ish, where we meet our protagonists:


i'm so excited to be making this. i've had all this rolling around in my head for so long