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First of all, I inform you all that I'm not an artist. My background is in programming. Regardless I decided to come up with my very first sketch of all 4 characters.



My first attempt was bad. You may notice that I spent a lot of time on Ferra and Sabina. At first, I want Ferra to be pretty, innocent, and adventurous. And I wanted Sabina to be sexy and alluring. I just threw a bunch of things for Kota (originally named Dom). Kota was designed to be dominant and muscular. And I just made Nestor (originally named Nathan) a normal character. I didn't put any thought into him that much. 

I wanted to make them more legit. So I searched and found an amazing by the name of dea_anchora on his/her discord. I asked the artist to revise the design and told the artist about their personalities. This is what we ended up with. 

This is my first commission and I learned from this mistake. 
First of all, be sure to specify the angle. Otherwise, you will end up with inconsistent designs. As you can see, both Ferra and Nestor are facing the camera, while the other two look to their right. This makes the designs unusable for dialogue. At least for me, I believe it will be easier if all characters were facing the front because you don't have to switch sides or mirror the image, which doesn't work if you have asymmetric facial features. 

Secondly, ask for transparent background. The grey background was chosen by the artist and I thought it was cool not knowing that it would be somewhat painful to crop  and overlay the characters on existing canvas. 

I like the overall design but I don't like the art style. However, the artist insists that this particular shading and style is more popular than the flat 2d. I should've gone with my instinct because I ended up revising the entire party member.

I know that commissioning multiple sex scenes from artists can break my wallet. My approach is to have multiple low-quality sex scenes and let the game mechanics give the scenes more context.  I also commission a skillful artist/musician by the name "Meisla". These are what I got from the artist. 

These are just 2 of many sketches that the artists delivered. I'm highly satisfied with the commission. However, I was still unsatisfied with the high-quality version of the party. I picked up my Ipad and used the best of my artistic ability to come up with the following revision.

A lot has changed !! One major change was Kota's personality and design. He was no longer a dominant and muscular man. Instead, Kota was a goofy friend of Nestor. I made him as competent as Nestor instead of a highly attractive and muscular guy. I also made everyone less mature because they were just about to graduate from an academy. I was really happy with the result although I didn't have an art background.

At that time, I came up with my unique game engine written using pygame. This involves having dialogue scenes similar to renpy. The nightmare reveals itself after I tried to create scenes during their dialogues. Based on the above sketch, Sabina can only face one direction.  So instead of using the sketch during the dialogue, I thought I should draw the entire scene out but I'm pretty bad at drawing. I commissioned Meisla to draw me some scenes in the epilogue, and here is what we have.

The key idea of the sketch is to be a guideline that I can continue to work on. It turns out that drawing human characters are extremely difficult for me and the project reached its first hiatus. 

Many weeks later, the first version of " Netoraria" was released and it gave me hope. I really like the art style. And the 2d grid-based game engine seems to offer what I need for the first game prototype. I decided to hire another artist from reddit. I won't say his/her name because he doesn't want to associate with NSFW project. And we finally got the latest version of each member.
       
This is the best ever. I really like the style. It's been an expensive journey, but I learned a lot and I finally have the characters that I want. That's it for the character design. Stay tuned !