Usk Productions Blog

I spent this week participating in NSFW MiniJam #18. The primary theme was "Dress Up", with optional themes "Survive", "Rough", and "Maid".

My submission was Maid Cafe Fashion Disaster. It's a follow up to Underdressed at the RenFest where you play as Melody. She's gotten a job at a local maid cafe, and is disappointed that Sharon isn't very impressed by the uniforms. She resolves to convince the rest of the staff to change the dress code. She'll make it as revealing as she possibly can.

The gameplay consists of watching maids travel back and forth across the screen, and clicking on any that are violating the uniform. Then, you have to call out which pieces are in violation. Between shifts, you can make minor modifications to the dress code. As you earn points, you can lower the staff's inhibition and make more drastic changes. There are cutscenes that play out at certain progress thresholds. It takes about half an hour to get through the story mode in my test plays.

I had a ton of fun making this one, and there were basically no hiccups in the process. I kept my motivation up throughout the jam window and I don't think I took a single day off.

I prototyped each of the systems in isolation, and then cobbled them together at the end. This worked pretty well, although I had to refactor and consolidate a lot of the progression tracking stuff. It would be pretty easy to go back and add more cutscenes, more outfit pieces, and so on, although I doubt I will since the story's complete.

I guess this makes Melody and Sharon recurring characters, huh? I didn't really plan for it when I made the RenFest game, but I'm glad I was able to bring them back. When I drew the first piece of concept art for the maid character, I unintentionally made her look like Melody (but with less ridiculous proportions). That made me realize that Melody would be a perfect fit for the game: she could be working at a maid cafe, and Sharon could be the uniform consultant!

But I didn't want to scale down Melody's proportions to match the concept, and I also didn't want every single maid to be as ludicrously stacked as Melody. And there was no way I'd have time to draw all the possible clothing options for multiple body types, so the plan would have to change. Instead, Melody would be in charge of the uniforms, which is why she wouldn't be on the floor running around, and Sharon would just be a customer who came in to visit now and then.

This worked pretty well overall. However, I still couldn't draw cutscenes featuring the other maids in their work clothes, since they'd vary from day to day. Instead, any discussions between Melody and her coworkers would happen in their street clothes after the shift ended. And whenever Melody appeared in uniform she would always be wearing the traditional full outfit, since the cafe wouldn't be able to afford replacing her custom-tailored stuff every day.

It was a bit of a hack, but it got the job done. If I had had more than 9 days to complete the project, I might have been able to get a little more variety in there. But all in all, I'm satisfied.

What's next?

Now that the jam is over, I can finally focus on other projects again. As always, the vore visual novel looms over my head. I'm still torn on whether I want to finish rewriting all of the other endings, or just publish the "true ending" as a linear story. I'm very intimidated by the amount of art I'm going to have to do for it.

I also want to keep working on doing captioned drawings. I was in the middle of a series based on Love in the Age of Flight when the jam started, and I'm looking forward to getting back to it.