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[BeautifulGlitch]

KICKSTARTER IS LIVE!







Visit our website: http://monsterprom.pizza

MONSTER PROM: SHORT PITCH
There are only 3 days left until prom! Go through all kinds of absurd and funny situations to seduce one of your classmates. Beautiful art, witty dialogues and hard choices are the main ingredients of this competitive/cooperative (1-4 players) dating sim.
Do you know how to conquer a monster’s heart?

INDEX

• SHORT PITCH
• LONG PITCH
• HOW THIS STARTED
• FLOW
• REFERENCES (GIFS)
• TONE STYLE AND REFERENCES
• FLOW: "FIRST CHOICE"

• FIRST SKETCHES
• SECOND SKETCHES
• FIRST COLOR TEST
• PLAYABLE CHARS: 1st ITERATION
• ICONS
• "GREEN"&"YELLOW" LAST ITERATIONS
• "RED"&"BLUE" LAST ITERATIONS
• EVENT ILLUSTRATIONS: CLASS
• EVENT ILLUSTRATIONS: AUDITORIUM
• EVENT ILLUSTRATIONS: BATHROOMS
• EVENT ILLUSTRATIONS: GYM

Hi, guys!

We just started with a project called "Monster Prom".
It's a game meant to be played from 1 to 4 players that mixes "choose-your-own-adventure" and "dating sim" mechanics.

You will have a limited number of turns to explore a highschool full of weird and amazing events that will let you meet your six classmates. Each event will let you raise or lose your stats and improve or mess with your relationship with the NPCs. In the end you will ask one of the NPCs to go to prom with you.

Similar to The Yawhg (Awesome game, check it out!)

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What's going on right now?

• GAME DESIGN: GDD done! Now we need just to revisit some specific points to check they're 100% OK!
• ART: Playable chars 100%, NPCs 100%, events 25%, logo 50%, working on expressions and UI
• NARRATIVE: 20% done!

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STRENGHTS OF THE GAME
> Cool art
> Funny situations and dialogues
> A Multiplayer game to play with friends and laugh w/ the situations. A funny experience to share!

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LAST UPDATES ON ART: NEW ARTIST!
























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LAST UPDATE ON NARRATIVE DESIGN

Also, I add an example of interactive dialogue.
Each dialogue presents two options to the player. Either can be right or wrong. Each one has a success and a failure outcome that depends on stats. Like this:

Royal Girl dialogue (at the cafetería) – dialogue is divided in the same way it would be shown at the game.

ROYAL GIRL: “Hey, you, what’s your name, with the jeans. Can you help me?”
ROYAL GIRL: “I’m confused here. They have served me this meal but I can only find one fork, one knife and one spoon.”
ROYAL GIRL: “Where are the other seventeen classic silverware pieces?”
ROYAL GIRL:  “You know: the knife to exclusively cut foie gras, the small fork with no real use but making the regular fork feels manlier, and the other ones.”
ROYAL GIRL:  I need to know: how do you, the commoners, manage to eat with just these 3 plastic thingies? It’s so weird… yet fascinating.”

YOU:
   OPTION 1: “this surprises you? Oh, girl, let me tell you about a thing called spork. It will blow your mind…”
   OPTION 2: “I’m as surprised as you! As a matter of fact I’m also part of the nobility. I’m Sir Edward… uhm… Fork…ington III … heir of the dukedom of… Napkin…shire!”  





OPTION 1 – SUCCESS:
NARRATOR: And then, you spent one hour telling her all you know about sporks. Not sure if there’s actually that much about them
ROYAL GIRL: “Oh, sporks, what a dumb yet marvelous invention!”
ROYAL GIRL: “It’s admirable how you, the poor people, have managed to survive in such dire situations. Life gives you no silverware, and you reply with the spork.”
ROYAL GIRL: “I will rather stick to my basic 17 silverware pieces, but now I’m intrigued. Not sure if I’ll regret this: but could you show me more of your non-royal world? I think we go to the same chemistry class…”
(last bit is an example on how an event with continuity can throw a tip on where to find the same NPC)

OPTION 1 – FAILURE:
ROYAL GIRL: “Now you’re just inventing words. ‘SPOOOORK’… you can’t just start to mix words and expect people to believe you.”
ROYAL GIRL: “I know I have no idea about your silverware-less customs, but that’s not a reason to mock at me.”
ROYAL GIRL: “You sure have no cutlery variety, yet you seem to yield a special fork to spear on people’s feelings…”

OPTION 2 – SUCCESS:
ROYAL GIRL: “Really? A true Forkington from Napkinshire! I’ve heard about you. What a honorable lineage, indeed. Your family sure knows the subtleties of refined cutlery customs”
ROYAL GIRL: “You know what? As a matter of fact, I was attending the yearly silverware fair!”
ROYAL GIRL: “And truth to be told: is hard to find people who enjoy the elevated pleasure of eating in an overcomplicated manner… so maybe you can join me.”
ROYAL GIRL: “oh, look at me! It’s talking about silverware and I get excited!  Let’s do this: if you want to come with me, meet me at the swimming pool. We can go from there.”




OPTION 2 – FAILURE:
ROYAL GIRL: “Sir Edward Forkington III from Napkinshire? You won’t fool me with such a cheap trick!”
ROYAL GIRL: “I used to spend my summers in Napkinshire. My family and the Forkington family are close friends and I personally know little Edward.”
ROYAL GIRL: “I must say your gimmicks impress me less than your weird cutlery, little boy”

[Rafa]

Hey! This looks promising! Wanna see how it evolves

[BeautifulGlitch]

Thanks, Rafa!

We will share some digital art as soon as we get some! (:
But now is all about nailing a look for each one of the chars!

Here we have the first sketches:

ROUGH SKETCHES:

NPC - Bad Boy (demon)


Playable Character - Red character (efreet)


NPC - Party Girl (Ghost)


NPC - Mean Girl (Gorgon --> She will have legs)


NPC - Hipster (Vampire)


NPC - Jock (Werewolf)


Playable Character - Blue Character (Frankestein's Wife)



What do you think?

[gimymblert]

cool pictures

[BeautifulGlitch]

JIMYM GIMBERT: thanks! We're excited about deciding a style so we can go all digital over them! (:

[gimymblert]

As long you keep the fluidity of the sketch  , many "inked" drawing lose that in their final form and became static by making all parts too equal in weight. Keep that and you will have a killer style.

[Jasmine]

*whistles*

I'm diggin' those sketches, yessiree bob.

The writing seems fine, though there are a few grammar errors about:

"I will would rather stick to my..."

"... but that's not a reason to mock at me."

"...but making the regular fork feels manlier..."

I noticed a few more, but you get the gist. Pretty interesting concept. Makes me think of the recent Monster Tindr dating sim.

[BeautifulGlitch]

JIMYM GIMBERT: I know what you mean. We already have an inked character just to check the style about ink+color+line. Soon I will upload it so you can see how it is. Now I'm looking for meeting your expectations :D

M4UESVIECR: Yay! Nice. Soon: more sketches!
Yeah, I'm Spanish, so English is not my greatest strength. But don't worry! For the narrative design + dialogue writing we're teaming with a College Humor contributor. He's American and he surely has that distinctive cool humor from College Humor!
What do you think about the dialogue style? I tried to make it funny. Sometimes clever-ish, sometimes a bit absurd. The Yawhg is great because -among other stuff- when you read the texts out loud with your friends you have a really good time. I want to achieve that! (:


Soon: more sketches and an inked test.
Also, more on the game design and narrative design.

[BeautifulGlitch]

Here you can see ink, line and color!

What do you think?

[gimymblert]

By any decent standard it's absolutely great and competent!

But if we are referring to what I was talking above it's not meeting my expectation (although it turn out to be what I was expected if you follow lol).

But that's not necessary to uphold to such a high standard lol.
- Making game is hard and intensive, you meet already a high bar
- budget and deadline are not infinitely extensive to follow stupid standard
- Nobody else will notice either, best is the enemy of good

But if you are interested to push a bit further, I'll try to point at the difference in a way where it's easily reproducible don't destroy workflow.

- when you draw a sketch, and you are confident enough in drawing, you don't think much about the shape and more of the idea and a feeling (for example a pretty mysterious girl) you want to convey with them. Ie you encode those informations in selecting and adjusting the shape.

- because those information are encoded in the shape, they can resist loss of signal, because they are now tangible sign. When you are inking you no longer thinking about idea and feeling, you are thinking about the shapes.

- The thing is because the form didn't exist first at shape time and only reveal itself by he process of drawing, there is a lot of unconscious choice that happen in the line, some stroke get emphasized, some form get push, at that time it's an ongoing process to figures out the "impression" this information is still there in the sketch, solid part are straighter, smooth part are smoother, it's all about the impression.

- you can still look at how it's necessarily obvious which line get emphasized, look at the shoulder in the sketch vs the face, compare male face to female face, compare clothes vs skins. Now look at the ink version, how all line have mostly the same weight, look at the curve at the shoulder, look at the straightness of the "floating" skirt.

- now this style of inking has actual historical root, when working with a team of people, each having different drawing and line style, art guide emphasize straight line to homogenize all the sensibility and enforcing consistency, it pushed the shapes to be simplified and exaggerated, especially in animation, giving birth to the modern cartoon style. It's efficient and good enough but since then the reason get forgotten and the style simply accepted as facts.

- the difference being that sketching involve breath too. I notice "breath" when I start noticing that all my lines took overall the same time irrelevant of length as my hand was subtly moving "point to point" (I like to make the longest line without lifting the pen at all), long line where made of "inflection" and not all of them where similarly expressed. Sometimes when looking for a line I was unconsciously blowing air by my mouth on the drawing trying to "get" a curve. I notice that my breath synced with the gesture and that when drawing exciting stuff I tended to hold more my breath than when drawing soft stuff where I gently blow air with the mouth. And I notice other artist doing it too!

- also because when you draw for a long time, you don't look at the drawing space the same time, you have an unconscious holistic view, you visualize what you want to draw on the blank as a kind of motion field that modulate the line, so each element falls relative to each other correctly. This lead to a personal order in drawing stuff, some people draw eyes first, some draws nose first, some draw the overall face shape first. This field get modified by each line drawn and is condition by how you project your emotion onto it, the resulting shape is the sketch.

- When inking this aspect is no more as you are focusing on the existing shape and no more onto the "impression", resulting on a loss of sensibility. Also because it's focus more on shape and remove on the initial impression, line start to have weird break and flows, look at the curve of the inked shoulder, it's weirdly flatten, the left elbow have a weird bump, when you know where to look you start to see weird line flows, it subtly add up to he general impression. People react to good flows unconsciously but average flow don't detract from the enjoyment unless truly abysmal. Not sure it's a standard worth pursuing as what you have is good enough. However by trying to port those difference eye dropping from the sketch can help by subtly pushing and varying some line according to the initial sketch.

[BeautifulGlitch]

woah! That's a long answer!
We will read it carefully tomorrow (4:07am now!)

But note that, actually, the digitalized/coloured illustration was done BEFORE the sketches! :O

[gimymblert]

I'm too nerdy beware most time I hold up but you open the pandora 

[BeautifulGlitch]

So I read the whole thing!

It's hard to comment on it. It seems more like general advice than an actual feedback on any of the sketches or illustration. So, because of that, it's hard for me to comment about it.

The general idea is one that you convey perfectly: "best is the enemy of good".
As I always say: "better done than perfect".

We're pretty aware of that and we're doing our best to not become obsessive about style!

Anyway, I'm sharing your insights with our artist

[BeautifulGlitch]

New sketches!

Soon: first tests with color!


BAD BOY (head's a bit big)



Playable Character: Darkness



Playable Character: Efreet


Playable Character: Frankenstein's Monster's Wife



NPCs: Party Girl, Mean Girl, Jock



Mean Girl (now with legs!)



Hipster



Royal Girl


What do you think? (:

[gimymblert]

that's good as usual!

[Rafa]

This is lookin' pretty cool so far!
Let's see these chars with some color!

[BeautifulGlitch]

Thanks!

We're happy with how this is progressing. Some of the NPCs weren't enough defined, style-wise, and now we're starting to figure it out. It's the case of the Mean Girl or the Hipster (the look of the left).

The Jock was clearly easier. The Bad Boy is almost there. We need to try adding the hoodie.

And the Party Girl and the Royal Girl are maybe the ones that are being trickiest.

With the Royal Girl we are not even sure about the monster: mermaid, queen bee or mummy?

[BeautifulGlitch]

Here you have some tests on color on the playable chars


Yellow Character - Darkness


Red Character - Efreet


Blue Character - Frankenstein's Monster's Wife


Green Character - Zombie


They're far to be final!

[TammiDev]

I really like the sketches. I think it's been said before but it would be great if you could really translate their fluidity and detail to the digital paintings. The digital versions look more bland and kiddy unfortunately I like the third design on Darkness and the concept of monster/human dating. I wish I had constructive criticism on the art but I'm just a programmer and not an artist unfortunately, sorry Pls don't get demotivated by negative obstacles in the beginning, it mostly shows people care ^^

[Canned Turkey]

I love the visual design of the characters, that said, I don't get the hip thing the females have going on. I think you meant it to look provocative? I don't know what it's supposed to suggest, but to me it just looks like they have scoliosis.