Harem Protagonist is a very good game about making human connections with your fellow students and sharing an experience

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

I refuse to believe that you play a lightgun game at the arcade on the regular and have never seen anyone do this before

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

She ain't wrong, buddy

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Uh oh, she's turning into David Sirlin

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Well that's almost sweet

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Look at how shy this nerdy girl is

Doesn't that make you want to fuck her

[West Filly]

At least they didn't turn that gun technique into a creepy visual metaphor.

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

[Sheik]

Road Brawler 5, your favorite!!

[West Filly]

DOOT DOOT DOOT - DOOT - DOOTDOOT
DOOT DOOT DOOT - DOOT - DOOTDOOT
DOOT DOOT DOOT - DOOT - DOOTDOOT
MURDER KARNAGE
DOOTDOOT DOOTDOOT DOOTDOOT DOOTDOOT DOOTDOOTDOOT

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

lol if you think street fighter 5 has anything to do with street fighter basics

Also I'd like to point out that SF5 and Mortal Kombat both do not have arcade releases.

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

They won't because SF5 is a game with stubby hitboxes and bad frame data and no defensive options

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

For example, none of Ryu's normals reach anywhere anymore. Nor do Ken's. Or anyone else, for that matter.

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Wait what

Focus attacks were in SF4, not SF5

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

NO GIRLSPLAINING

[West Filly]

I've been to arcades where they have consoles mounted to steel frames for this stuff.

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Daksh?

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

You have a fireball, dummy. In another game you could also dragon punch the extended limbs, but this is SF5 and that probably doesn't work because SF5 does everything within its power to be bad.

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

mai waifu is too strong

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Practicing single player doesn't actually make you any better at fighting games

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Cue the guy not knowing what any of this means in 3... 2... 1...

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Oh that's pretty much the end of the scene

[West Filly]

I really like her hair

[West Filly]

Like I've seen so many anime characters with crazy impossible shiny styles. It's cool to see someone who just let it grow out and didn't cut the shaggy ends.

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Okay I'm calling it for tonight, I messed around some more but I can't figure out how to get the blonde girl to show up, so tomorrow we're gonna do stalker girl's and sporty girl's events I guess

[Weird Autumn]

when are we going to get to the bottom of the mystery of the nerd who doesn't know how clothes work

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

I might have made the whole thing up

[Logicgate]

perhaps the real Harem Protagonist is the friend we laid on the way

[West Filly]

At this point no one has moved into his house, so harem isn't really where this is going.

My headcanon is that Ayano and Ava form a akward nerd friendship wherein Ayano puts a lot of time and effort into debunking Ava's theories and Ava spirals deeper and deeper into madness until there's a slight development in both. They find common ground in electronics, as Ayano is puzzled by Ava's ability to understand how electronic circuits work and how to make them, without actually understanding the mathematics themselves. It turns out Ava's ability to feel out abstract and lofty concepts like spirituality has transferred to allow her a sense of concepts like inductance and capacitance.

They build HAM radios and have a good time talking to strangers. Ayano eventually learns to appreciate harmless beliefs as important to other peoples lives and Ava learns just a tiny degree of critical thinking.

[West Filly]

How about we throw out the whole dating sim vibe and make this a manga about a high school electronic project club featuring Ava, Ayano and some other nerds.

[Perrydotto]

the problem is that your idea is cool so this game can't do it

[Orange Fluffy Sheep]

Ava's the only one for whom the live 2d really works, imo, because they focused every millisecond of effort with it to making her express with her head movements. everyone else tilts slightly, Izumi looks down at you, sure, but Ava, like, moves for every minor shift in her tone

it's like they were so close to making one good character here

[Orange Fluffy Sheep]

speaking of body language, why do so many of these girls have their arms straight down and behind them? It communicates being unguarded, which makes sense for Ava, since she's completely unembarrassed and very chatty about her interests, but at the same time they don't communicate any sort of action with it despite how forward she is. But Kiyoko, Ayano, and Satomi do it too. Ayano is supposed to be reserved and Satomi (the blonde one we haven't seen yet) ostensibly is a shy girl, but they have the same pose. That's what having arms in front is for, for reservation, discomfort, shyness, trying to physically shrink, a subconscious and instinctual self-protective maneuver, you know?

Kiyoko, as the secret obsessive, should have something to communicate that - nervousness when interacting with the object of her desire, difficulty maintaining compsure when he's so close, you know, something. Anything.

Izumi and Hotaru (the pantshave) have the same pose, one hand on a hip, other hanging down, despite how different they are in personality. It fits Izumi, since she's cold with a huge attitude, but Hotaru should be doing something with her other arm at least.

Sakaguchi's hands-on-hips pose is okay, if a little simple. Leagues better than 4 different cast members just letting their arms just hang behind them.

[West Filly]

Drawing hands sucks.

[Orange Fluffy Sheep]

gonna go back to tokimeki memorial 1 here, because it accidentally spawned this game, but also because it did a lot of things right that its progeny sometimes miss, like body language:



Shiori is polite, friendly, formal, and mild-mannered. She's the literal girl-next-door, if the girl next door were the Nietzschean superman with preference for Bach and Beethoven. Her poses reference this, these two have this gentle leans that sort of invite you in. Relaxed and friendly, you know. Her speech patterns are properly Japanese, a lot of may I's and stuff, or so I've read.



Yuina,to contrast, is very harsh, self-assured, and rude. In her mind, she's smarter than you, better than you, and destined for greater things than you, and is only spending time with you because it amuses her. She's got a smirk on her face and stands as if to say hey, I'm in charge. Yuina's speech is very commanding, almost always telling you what you're doing. It's in fact a sign she's falling for you if she isn't barking orders.

Hell, Megumi.



Megumi is shy but smitten with you before you even meet, using mutual friend Shiori to get to know you. She is almost always doing something with her hands, from clasping them in front of her (which is implied in the first one) to holding them to her own face, and a bunch of stuff in between, it communicates her nervousness better than ellipses can.

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Do you honestly expect nerds so lost in the anime tiddy vortex that they produce these Nth generation xerox games to have any ability to interpret body language

[Fartlord Dunktronix]

Anyways I need to go make dinner, I'll come back to this when everything's simmering in the pot

[West Filly]

I have a theory on why the body language isn't as it should be.

You search online for art commissions and you'd think that price increases with quality. While that's a general rule, you might find that there are artists whose work looks reasonably good but whose commissions are dirt cheap compared to someone else with just as much detail. That usually indicates that there's a shortcut the artist can take, something the artist is doing to make those good looking pictures but at a high output. After all, if the picture's going cheap and the artist is living off the money, that means they have to put them out quickly to make enough to eat. For pictures of figures, it's usually that the artist will have a limited repertoire of poses which the commissioner can choose from. The artist already has most of the work done for those poses and just needs to add the character specific details. This is something I've seen from watching someone who sells furry sticker packs for telegram chats as they are drawing. They already have the expressions and poses committed to their muscle memory, and can carry out the exact moves required to complete the lineart like it's a procedure - that line first, then this line, then this line... ...but they can only do it for a pose they've spent time mastering.

Now I'm going to make the assumption that if you're making a game like this, you're looking to keep the costs down. That means you're going to look around for an artist, and what you'll find is artists who look reasonably good, but one of them will be super expensive and the other will be dirt cheap. That's because the expensive one will be willing to create a new pose from scratch and go to lengths to do exactly what you want, where the dirt cheap one will show you a bunch of pictures saying "here are the available poses, select from these".

That creates an issue if you're looking to be picky about a character's body language while keeping production costs down. If an artist is going to need hours to find reference for a character's pose and get some studies in before executing the final piece, you're going to need to pay for hours of an artist's time each time you want a new character in a new pose.

Or to look at it backwards, if the body language seems off it's probably because the pose wasn't designed for the game specifically.

TL;DR: the poses strike me as prêt-à-porter and not true haute couture

[West Filly]

Just to be clear, I'm not criticising artists for doing this. If commissioners are happy with their commissioned art using off-the-shelf poses then why not make them like that? It has its advantages. I'm just pointing out that it's not necessarily the case that the makers of this game had control over the poses, because they probably want to keep as much of that $75k as they can.

[West Filly]

I'm starting to look into this now. Who is their artist?

[Orange Fluffy Sheep]

it seems they had the models before the kickstarter, since they're in the pitch as the animated gifs.



this would've been done *before* they got their money, and it would've been done with these animated puppets instead of regular images. More pressures than usual.

This just sounds like more reason to have regular images to me.