Happy New Year + Update!

Happy New Year, everyone! I deeply apologize for the radio silence regarding Operation: Future Domination. Schoolwork and other responsibilities began to pile up, and I had to get them out of the way before making some progress on the game. And I have indeed made progress, which I hope to update you on. Here’s the TLDR version: the script writing for the extended demo is more than halfway complete, and OFD will have new character sprites! Read below for my very long elaboration if you want.



I’ve made steady progress on the writing on the game, even rewriting some parts of the previously released demo, because I wanted a greater focus on player choice for establishing the main character’s personality and actions. I’ve recently been inspired by dialogue-heavy RPGs, so I wanted to bring some of that into the game. So, in the extended demo, I wanted to present much more player choices, both significant and insignificant, but nevertheless, serve to establish the MC’s personality and move forward the plot.



In regards to the character art, as some of you have brought up, some aspects of my character sprites look very similar to Suou’s art in Black Apple Wars, and I confess; I did trace the face shape of some of the characters and some minor facial/upper features. In the early stages of game planning, I had trouble deciding on an art style, so I was trying out various things. Suou’s sleek but simplistic art style caught my eye, so I decided to try out how the art style would look against some of the backgrounds I had ready. I traced some of the facial aspects in order to quickly get started on the character design and sprites. I originally intended to do this just so I can establish how each character would generally look; mostly anything other than the general facial structure of the sprites is my own work. I meant to use these initial batch of sprites just as character design references for the subsequent sprites I’ll draw without relying on tracing. But as I finished the character sprites and incorporated in the demo to see how the art looks as a whole, I wasn’t sure if the character art and the background art clashed, so I became anxious and eager to get outside feedback as soon as possible. I jumped the gun and decided to use the first sprites with tracing in the demo before I could have the subsequent sprites ready, because I thought any more work would go to waste if people did not like how the art looked together. When people began to express how they liked the character art, I thought it would be okay not to mention my use of tracing. This was incredibly dishonest of me, and indeed, if no one had pointed out the tracing, I might have passed the character sprites off as completely my own. What started out as tracing only for character design ended up as a kind of plagiarism, because of my laziness and insecurities as a new game developer. From now on, I will try to be much more transparent and open with anything I’m not sure or worried about.



I offer my apologies to the fanbase; I must have disappointed some of you. To right my wrongs, I will replace all of the character sprites that do have any tracing in the upcoming demo with new sprites that are free from any tracing. Since this art style is not my usual one, I’ve spent the past few weeks studying Suou’s art and some others to get a better feel for the structure of the face and head. I’ve also taken in account some of the feedback I got on the character, in particular that they looked too young for their age, so I tried my best to make the character look more fitting of their age (ages 17-20, depending on the character). I think the bright side to this blunder was that I got to better hone my art skills and incorporate our input into the extended demo. Here is the new, updated sprite for Ryan. Feel free to let me know what you think. I haven’t finished the others, but I’ll be sure to update when I do!

Finally, I would like to say that the current OFD demo will be pulled down from Itch.io, until the extended demo is ready for release. I think the extended demo will much better represent the game in its finished state, so please look forward to that! Thanks for reading thus far, and I hope this year will be a great one!

