Greetings and salutations, cozy coven! 🔮
We often get asked for more behind-the-scenes and creative process content. SO, for this blog post, we’re giving you a peek behind the curtain of how we made our newest update, Violet’s Boutique! 🛍🌸
Clothing for Tara was one of our most highly requested features for Wylde Flowers, and it was a joy to make it a reality, bringing beloved Violet’s dream to life in the process!
We’ve been wanting to add Violet’s Boutique for some time, since before the game reached players hands. The reality is, creating Tara's wardrobe was a months-long process that involved work and feedback across all the different teams in our studio - from designers, to writers, artists, animators, QA and marketing. When we say teams, our team sizes are small - about 1-3 people each! 💖
In this blog post you’ll hear from members of our team who were involved in creating this update, how they contributed, and what challenges they faced along the way.
And if you’re short on time, here’s the tl;dr!
- The knew clothing was a feature we wanted to eventually add even before the game launched
- We ran into some bumps along the way - including having to paint parts of Tara that had been covered by her original clothing and animating the dresses completely by hand!
- Because the content starts in year one, our QA team had to go in and test everything to make sure it all played nicely together
- The writing team, along with writing the new dialogue and quests, also had the important jobs of naming all of the outfits and working with cultural consultants on Thomas and Sophia’s wedding.
- See below for a handy dandy calendar we put together of the basic timeline of making the update! 📅
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✨Amanda Schofield- Creative Director
Role: Head Honcho, All The Things
Audrey: How did you come to the decision to add clothing to the game?
Amanda: Before we even launched the game we began planning for updates based on playtester feedback and our own gut-feelings on what we'd like to see. Once we launched, we added player feedback to our notes and picked the things we felt we could do justice in a reasonable timeframe that satisfied the most players. Endless Seasons and Romance followed by Violet's Boutique were clear winners.
Audrey: When did you first start conceptualizing the update, and how long did you spend designing the systems before Iona started concept work?
Amanda: We first started talking about a clothing update years ago when we were in production. We knew that to do it right, we needed a bunch more time than we had before the launch. I know when people see just how much clothing we've added and how much work goes into it, they'll see why we needed all that time!
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✨Desiree Cifre, Nyasha Bryant, Jhenne Tyler - Writing Team
Role: Writing the overarching narrative of the update, new quests, new dialogue, and little bits like outfit names
Audrey: What did the collaboration look like between you and Amanda and Alex when working on the design and narrative of VB?
Desiree: Alex and Amanda had a clear idea of what they wanted to add to the game in terms of design and new features, so it was my job to make these new additions work in the story and to give the player fun new quests that would incorporate the ability to make special new materials and clothing. We also knew we wanted to continue the love story of Thomas and Sophia with their wedding after their engagement in the Endless Seasons update, and quests like Sophia's wedding dress were a natural fit.
Audrey: What is one of your favourite pieces of writing you did for VB?
Jhenne: My involvement came at the tail end- naming outfits and photo filters.
I was given prompts from Alex/Amanda that I was able to run with; photo references from the art team for name inspiration, the occasional bit of filler text in need of reimagining, and free range to see what came to mind from there.
Naming the looks was fun and has unofficially become one of my duties, which is great because it's me, a thesaurus, some poetic devices, and the desire to hit that sweet spot between "dessert menu", "perfume brand aesthetic", and "magical girl attack". My favorite outfit title would probably be one of the rompers or dresses, since those were the first ones I came up with. Maybe the "Guavocado" romper or "Cosmic Carmine" frilly dress.
Audrey: Can you tell me a little bit about the process of working with the cultural consultants for Thomas and Sophia’s wedding?
Desiree: We were lucky because we were far enough in the process that we were able to show the cultural consultants everything we had, like the art for the chuppah for the ceremony, Sophia's dress, all the dialogue for the quests and the cutscene of the wedding itself. Because Sophia and Thomas are in an interfaith relationship, we wanted to make sure that nothing in the quests for the wedding or the ceremony would be problematic for either culture. We decided to give them two ceremonies, a civil/Jewish ceremony in Fairhaven with their friends and Sophia's daughter, and an off-island traditional ceremony with Thomas's tribe and family that happens off-screen. The reason for this was scope - realistically, Thomas and Sophia likely would have had a blended ceremony that included all of their family and different customs, but we simply couldn't create that many new characters for one cutscene (which is also why Angus and Francis's families, and Tara's families never attend their weddings on the island, either).
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✨Iona Vorster: Concept Artist
Role: Designing and coloring all of the outfits
Audrey: How did you go about deciding what kinds of pieces to design?
Iona: Deciding what pieces to design was the hardest part! As with everything, I did a lot of research first to just gather broad ideas and get a feel for all the different directions we could explore. Then the fun part — lots and lots of sketching! Once I had lots of options, I decided which outfits to include based on what I felt Tara might wear but also (and importantly!) what I thought players would love to wear. We want players to be able to express their individuality through Tara so my aim was to include a broad range of outfits choices. Hopefully everyone has their favourite!
Audrey: What surprised you about the process of adding outfits?
Iona: A few things, actually! It was surprising how much variety we ended up with through the use of colour. It’s also just a surprise seeing Tara in different clothes. At first it was a bit weird seeing her in different outfits, but I feel like they add so much personality to Tara, and the game as a whole! It’s now a delight seeing Tara in different clothes whenever someone in the team shares a screenshot. And, like always, I was surprised at just how amazing the outfits look once they were made in 3D (this happens every time and I shouldn’t be surprised anymore — Our 3D artists are magic!)
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✨Ben O'Reilly and Riley Hanlin: 3D Artists
Role:Taking Iona’s concepts and turning them into the 3D versions we see in the game
Audrey: What outfit did you have the most fun bringing to life?
Ben: Probably the Jacket Jeans, there were some fun little details like zips and knee rips I always enjoy painting. Leather is also a fun challenge as it requires a lot of thought about how shading works on a glossy surface vs cloth, which is usually pretty flat shaded.
Audrey: What was your biggest challenge?
Ben: Doing so many outfits back to back! It requires a lot of attention to detail and a big focus on consistency. With my previous experience doing clothing on The Sims, I am pretty well versed in the kinds of methods that allow for creating a lot of different colored clothing quickly so I was somewhat prepared for the challenge. Something else interesting is that Tara was originally made wearing her default outfit. Because we were doing clothing options I more or less had to repaint her entire body. She had no tummy, back, and no upper arms, legs, feet, so I completely painted her entire body and then used it to place clothes on like a mannequin. Somewhat similar to how a tailor or seamstress would.
Audrey: Can you give me an idea of how long a model would take for one outfit?
Riley: I think the longest an outfit took me was 10 days, you need to get the 3D model perfect before you can start thinking about texturing so there's a lot of feedback involved. Texturing the model takes up the most time though, you need to get the base shading right before you can start doing the colour variations. Thankfully we had Iona's amazing concepts and she made all the tileable patterns for us to use on the outfits which kept them consistent and saved us loads of time
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✨Mike Taylor: Animator
Role:Animating the outfits, creating the photo mode poses and clothing transitions, creating the trailers for the update
Audrey: Outside the outfits, what other kinds of things did you animate for this update?
Mike: In addition to the dress animation, I also had to create animations for all of the photo poses, plus reactions to changing outfits and jewellery. There were also a number of narrative-driven animations needed for things like Sophia and Thomas' wedding and the Sister's Scroll quest.
Audrey: What was your biggest challenge?
Mike: Animating the dress outfits was, by far, the biggest challenge. Since we couldn’t use a lot of our automated systems that we typically use for animation (they didn’t look just right), the decision animate all of dresses completely by hand. That meant going through all 200-plus animations to hand animate the dress movement.
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✨Alexandra Lu and Laura Hoelscher - Quality Assurance
Role:Testing everything to find bugs and make sure it works well!
Audrey: Tell us a little bit about what QA does and what your role in customer support looks like!
Laura: As QA, my role was to make sure that overall, the new content was functional and as bug free as possible. This is done primarily by playing through the new content many times and looking out for different things like dialogue, visual bugs, gameplay progression blockers, and so much more. We also played through the game from the beginning all the way through the new content to make sure the game still flowed and functioned as a whole. It’s definitely a big undertaking, as this process is such an important step to ensuring that our players get the highest quality content possible
As customer support, I also tried to anticipate what players may find confusing or unclear, and provided feedback to the QA team based on that as well.
Audrey: What was your favourite / funniest bug?
Laura: I think the funniest bug was when Feedy, the whirligig who helps feed your farm animals as well as pick up their by-products (such as chicken eggs), just went rogue and straight up started stealing everything off the farm including gardens beds and literal trees from the ground!
Audrey: What was your biggest challenge?
Alexandra: Since Violet’s Boutique is an update that can kick in during year one, we’ll have players encountering this new content from all different parts of the game. Some might be experiencing Wylde Flowers for the very first time – welcome! – while others have finished the main story and are now enjoying endless mode – nice to see you again . So when it comes to testing the update, it’s not just a matter of looking at extra quests added onto the end, but revisiting the entire game across the board to determine how this might impact previous parts gameplay and making sure that everything is going to still be working as intended
Audrey: How long did all of the QA work take?
Alexandra: Months! We start testing updates long before all of the update content is in-game. When we began testing quest progression, most of the outfits weren’t in yet. Trying to change Tara’s clothes sometimes turned her invisible. Violet’s shop icon was a stick figure drawing. Photo mode didn’t even exist! It might seem strange to start that early, but that extra time is crucial to help ensure that the rest of the team can make corrections without being rushed. Icon doesn’t match the outfit? Have to send that to the art team and add it to their list of tasks. Pose not working with a specific outfit? Off to our animator! Need to edit text for a quest description? That edit has to be translated into thirteen other languages too. The first bugs I had logged for this update were around October, so I’d say QA started working on this update sometime around then, in conjunction with the Endless Seasons update
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I truly hope you enjoyed hearing from our team what it’s like to create a content update. This is the typical process we undergo for any of our updates (and we JUST might be in the middle of it right now! 👀)
Be sure to keep an eye out here or on our socials for more content and announcements - and let us know in the comments if you enjoyed this longer sort of blog post, and what other kind of topics related to our game you would like to learn more about! ✨
Stay magical,
🔮 Audrey and the Studio Drydock Team
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