barachodabloom-blog

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very very happy to share this year's trailer, made by our beloved xiri of HITME. get the bundle here

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Build 0.5.2 and the Queer Games Bundle

Hello everyone! I have here a new build for you all! This doesn't add any new content to the game but there are a bunch of changes made to the game. Here is the full list of changes:

When Rex enters the frat house on the first day of Kamil's route, the music now transitions a lot more naturally.

Modified a line that happens near the end of Day 4 if you have encountered a certain scene variation from Brendan's Day 2.

Broke up a line from Brendan's Day 1 into two due to how it originally went offscreen.

Changed the background near the end of Brendan's Day 1 to save a little file space.

There's now a new CG in the game on both Days 1 and 2 of Brendan's route with its own set of expressions.

There are now fourteen new custom-made songs in the game. Three of these songs are ringtones. Five of these songs were composed by Haoran.

Brendan's sprites now indicate if he's having a boner or not. Previous scenes have retroactively been modified to accommodate this. Yes, you needed to know about this.

Very slightly modified a scene during Brendan's Day 2 near the end.

A few scenes have been modified to include some of Brendan's new expressions.

Kamil, Tucker, Liam, and Reggie now have new outfits for Day 1. Tucker and Reggie both have new outfits only in Kamil's Route.

Replaced the placeholder icon for the composer, Emma, with the new art he provided me.

Modified the lustful variation of the scene you have during Brendan's Day 2 to contain less blur and to make the transitions smoother.

A new image appears while Rex is in his room at the end of Day 1.

The common variety n*pon in Brendan's office background has now been replaced with a tiger plushie to avoid copyright issues.

Also, the Queer Games Bundle is now live! All the money spent on this bundle goes to all the queer game devs who participated in the bundle. Some of these devs include myself, Nemo, Keo (Dawn Chorus), Roddo (Nerus), Cobalt Studio (Strokkur, Anamnesis), pastrygames (This Halloween? We're Exploring the Haunted Brothel!) and Bokedaidu (Where the Demon Lurks). There's also a special version of By Your Hands included in the bundle that contains the following:

The latest build of the game will be updated until the bundle ends. This means that currently it includes Day 5 for Brendan's Route and it will be updated to include Day 6 in July.

PSDs of the game's art.

An erotic art pack of Tappei Midoriya from Morenatsu.

Commentary on the game that has been previously only available to Blooming patrons.

A link to a Dropbox that includes WIP art for future builds that I will be updating until the bundle ends.

And finally, several sketches of Owen, Brendan, and Kamil that you can only see by buying this bundle.

You also get the full version of Capturin' The Booty that includes sex scenes when you buy the bundle. You can purchase it over here. I highly encourage you to buy it as it helps so many developers out. Last year they raised over $200000. Let's try to surpass that number this year!

Anyways, whether or not you buy the bundle, I hope you enjoy the new build regardless. Have a good day and see you later!

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Build 0.4.1 is now out for the public and Build 0.5.0 is now out for patrons! Also I might be taking a break, Queer Games Bundle, and Hentai Expo! Read more in detail in the devlog below!

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By Your Hands and the Art of Subversion

Hello everyone! It's been commonplace for people to talk about "subversive narratives" and how their favorite shows subvert tropes often considered dated and tired. But what does that mean? Why are people obsessed with "subversive media"? The TV Tropes definition of a "subversion" is when the story sets up a well-known trope the audience would expect in that work's genre and then goes in a different direction, going against the audience's assumptions of what would happen. At least that's the intention. Subversion has been used in many different ways from Doki Doki Literature Club pretending to be a romance novel before revealing itself to being a horror VN to the tutorial in Undertale turning out to try to kill you. And it's been used as a storytelling tool since Shakespeare. Used effectively, subversion can be used to make a good story more enthralling and exciting. But subversion can also fall apart. It depends a lot on the context surrounding the time the work was released in, so if you don't know the context, it becomes meaningless. For example, it was shocking to see Samus Aran from the original Metroid turn out to be a sexy woman if you beat the game fast enough since female protagonists were a rare sight in 80s video games. But if the game was released today, the reaction wouldn't be nearly as strong because it wouldn't be unusual for a modern audience.

So where does By Your Hands come in? I touched on this in my "The Making of By Your Hands" but BYH was created as a response to other FVNs. It takes the audience's expectations of certain FVNs and their tropes and subverts them to (hopefully) create something unique. This game was created with the intention that the audience is well-versed with FVNs beforehand. Now unfortunately I can't tell you the full extent of how the game uses subversion because that would spoil things that aren't in the game. I'll just talk about the non-spoiler stuff. By Your Hands is specifically a subversion of the contemporary college-setting furry dating sim that's seen in VNs like Extracurricular Activities and After Class. It also takes some cues from Psychological Horror FVNs that could be read as a response to those tropes, although in a very subtle manner that won't be apparent until we reach the end of the game. It was envisioned so that the intended audience of the game (avid FVN readers) would be caught off guard by how the plot and characters played with the tropes that were made standard in other FVNs of its genre.

To go in-depth, you'd expect Tucker to be this dumb, himbo-y character who likes sports a lot based on other tiger characters from these types of FVNs. I mean the two tiger FVN characters I think of first are Torahiko from Morenatsu and Lin Hu from Nekojishi, both of them are these nice, muscular, kinda ditzy, childhood sweethearts to the MC. Then he starts to speak. And it becomes obvious that he's not your typical FVN tiger character. The protagonist doesn't have preferences or hobbies because he's always been in a controlled environment before he goes to college. The childhood friend confesses that he's in love with you as soon as he can and gets rejected if you aren't on his route. The athletic best friend is more submissive and doesn't go head-first into every situation. The hot teacher constantly reminds you of the boundaries that a teacher and student should maintain and he's also a History teacher instead of an English teacher. The dark, brooding love interest isn't a muscular, macho dude in a tank top but a goth twunk who loves drag. And the characters who are a tiger, wolf, and lion respectively do not have their own routes. In fact, the tiger dies at the game's inciting incident. And so on and so forth. The game uses subversion of common FVN tropes in order to make a setting that's wholly unique.

Now initially I was hesitant about making this game a "subversion" of these slice-of-life dating sims. The first is that I didn't want to create a "slice of life game for people who don't like slice of life" and have people think that I hate slice of life. Indeed, By Your Hands is mostly a Mystery but it's also slice of life as well. I didn't want to gain an audience who'd diss slice of life and not consider it a worthwhile genre. It's one reason why there's a group of people who really hate DDLC, because it uses the dating sim aspect as a framing device for the actual plot rather than as a way to do interesting things with the genre and that's not at all what I wanted to do. A more ideal work that subverts genre expectations would be Invincible. It subverts superhero tropes and archetypes but it never outright disrespects the genre and it manages to take the genre to places it wouldn't have if it stuck with all the genre conventions. So even though BYH does subvert and commentate on tropes common to furry slice of life dating sims, it doesn't say that they're stupid and you're an idiot for liking them. I love slice of life and I wouldn't mind seeing more of them. It just showcases what a slice-of-life FVN would be like if that story beats and characters went a little differently.

I also didn't want to call it a subversion because when people see a work call themselves a "subversive story", they think they don't know what they're talking about and that they're only using those words because it makes the work sound really cool. Marketing-wise, having your hook be "A subversion of the slice of life FVN" sounds really stupid, so I'm not doing that. However, I think calling BYH a "subversion" in devlogs, discord servers, and basically anything that's not trying to market the game would be fine. My audience knows I believe that's what BYH is and if they disagree, it's no big deal. And I didn't want to show a lack of understanding of the genre by subverting a trope…that's not common in any FVN, slice of life or not.

But why a subversion of this specific genre? What prompted this idea? Well, when you have a community of people who are making and reading a particular thing, tropes and archetypes start to form. Soon people in the community will get attached to using those same tropes and archetypes and that's when things start to stagnate. When this happens, you can do two things. You can create something completely new with the genre, but then you risk of alienating the existing audience, going back to the "slice of life for those who don't like slice of life" concept I mentioned and most people aren't awesome enough to achieve that. The other thing you can do is make a response to those tropes and the works that helped cement them in the form of a story. You can use those same cliches but spin them around to explore something new. That's how we got works like Watchmen, Neon Genesis Evangelion, South Park, and Nier: Automata (as well as the rest of the Drakenguard series). I'm not saying that By Your Hands is as good as those works in general but what I'm saying is that I feel we need FVNs that are responses to the conventions of the genre they're in. We're seeing responses to Echo with VNs like Burrows going out of their way to give the player more agency in what they're doing, unlike the VN that came before it. With By Your Hands, the goal here is to show the flaws of a typical slice-of-life furry dating sim and see how the genre can do better in regard to character arcs and the setting. I'd like for the general FVN community to make better and more refreshing VNs. It would kinda suck if this scene stagnated to death. You can still enjoy your standard fare of FVNs but it's overall better if individual genres were able to expand their horizons. That's why By Your Hands and other VNs use subversion in their narrative, so they can push the limits of the genre and see its full potential.

I hope you enjoyed reading this. Have a good day and see you later!

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Build 0.3.1 of By Your Hands now available to the public.

You can read the changelog here: https://chellaytiger.itch.io/by-your-hands/devlog/496997/build-031-now-available

Download the new build here:

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The Making of Barachoda Bloom

Hello everyone! You might be surprised to see another devlog from Barachoda Bloom almost two months after I announced that BB would become a side project and By Your Hands would be my main project, as well as implying but forgetting to mention that I'd be putting BB on hiatus. Now you might think that it's a bad idea to make a devlog about BB while it's on hiatus and to that, I say: well you got a point. However, I might as well post this devlog now because there probably won't be a new build for BB for at least three months. I at least want BB fans to enjoy something if they're going to wait for that long.

First of all, if you're from BYH and you have no idea what the fuck a barachoda is, which is likely considering how most of the traction BB gets nowadays is from BYH, then welcome! BB is a slice-of-life contemporary gay erotic dating sim about a horny and socially awkward Bengali guy who stays in Bangladesh for a year and gets to know a bunch of hot guys. Yeah, that's basically about it. I suspect most of the BYH folk don't care about this game because no furry. But hey shout outs for reading this devlog anyways.

Anyways, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a friend and I remembered asking him if Rahmir (the protagonist) looks Bengali. He told me that his face is ethnically ambiguous enough that while it doesn't specifically look Bengali it wouldn't be that much of a stretch for a Bengali guy to have that face. He says it's because of the animesque art style. So I wanted to really look at his sprite to see how much I agreed with him so I went to the itch.io page and looked at a screenshot that contained his sprite and there were two things I noticed. The first was that there was a fucking typo on the screenshot, which is really annoying. Curse you indicators that a language other than English is being spoken. But the second one was that I was thinking about how I wanted to explain why Rahmir has this type of face and not a more obviously Bengali face and I realized I never really talked about the game and my intentions from making it. I made a devlog about the creation of All in Love and War and made a follow-up post to that almost a year later. I made a devlog about the creation and intentions behind By Your Hands and I'm making an entire commentary on the whole VN. I even made a devlog about my experience working on Dwarven Destiny. But there hasn't been any devlog chronicling the background and how this game came to be until now. This is strange because, if you have read my devlog about All in Love, you'd know that this was the dream project I had in mind for years alongside another game project I also wanted to do. So yeah, now I'm making a devlog talking in-depth about this game. Specifically, I want to talk about how I came up with this game, why I liked this game idea, the actual development of the game, and what I want to do with this game now that it's on the back burner.

Going out of order a little, I want to clarify something that most people seemed to have not missed from my earlier devlog. In the devlog where I announced my switch my focus from BB to BYH, I specifically stated that I wanted to put BB on hold right now for more reasons than "I like money". But apparently, that wasn't clear enough for people. Let me repeat myself. I wanted to take a break on BB because I desired a good reason to take my time and work on the game later. I'll explain more about this later, but in essence, it was a big project that I plunged myself into without fully knowing what I was getting into. It was a relief being able to work on something else and be able to prepare myself more before going back to BB.

Now let's start from the beginning, sort of. When I was a teenager, I really wanted to make an RPG, as many of my favorite games were RPGs. I realized that an RPG was too ambitious for me, so I wanted to start with something smaller. I was fond of dating sims as a genre and I also wanted to make my own. In 2019 or so, I started coming up with the characters, their personalities, and their appearances. The characters were all guys I wanted to see in a relationship with a guy. Hunky guys with facial hair, old guys, and guys with children, essentially guys I don't usually see as gay men in fiction. Some were based on fictional characters while others were based on people I knew in real life. The protagonist was somewhat also someone I wanted to see in fiction as well. A horny and flirty gay guy who goes for the DILFs but is also relatable. The appeal of the project was obviously the guys but it was also a chance to have a gay story that was tailored specifically to me and didn't compromise on its vision. I decided to make the art style resemble 80s anime, after watching the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its film adaptation. I just find the aesthetic to be gorgeous. I initially wanted to go harder with the retro style but I didn't want to distract the visuals too much. Story-wise, if BYH was a subversion of FVNs, BB is a successor to the traditional Japanese dating sim mixed in with elements from gay erotic VNs. I had envisioned a gay erotic dating sim that used mechanics from 90s dating sims and used tropes common to anime, all with bara guys. Finally, for the setting, I chose Bangladesh because it was the country my parents grew up in and I never saw any story take place there (There's Extraction but I don't really watch action films) and I think the culture there can make for an interesting story.

However, I didn't actually start becoming serious about the project until 2021, which was the year I initially thought would be the launch of the first build. I explained more about this in my devlog about All In Love, but I realized that I should try making a small VN before working on BB. So I made All In Love for BaraJam 2021, which took longer than I expected, and once I was done I finally started to actually work on BB for the first time. This was it. I was really going to show my dream project to the world and start a following of people who want to see my vision. Well… things didn't work out like that. While the release of the first build had a good reception, it didn't meet my expectations as this hit game I always imagined it would be, especially since All In Love performed generally better than BB. Hell, All in Love is still doing better than BB in terms of downloads per day. There are a couple of factors for this, the stand-out reason being that All In Love is a Jam game and those tend to do better on itch.io, I was still disappointed. Subsequent builds had even smaller responses, despite my working hard on those. Then the first build of BYH came out and we all know how that went. There was no comparison, BYH was the game people wanted to see from me. I couldn't ignore it.

So what went wrong? I don't like asking this question because it implies that BB failed and if you compare the ratings of BB to the ratings of other non-furry gay VNs, it's been pretty good for itself. And I am proud of several things about BB. But then why did I put the game on the back burner in order to make BYH my main focus? Barachoda was my dream game while By Your Hands was just meant to be a side thing, by all means, I should have continued working on Barachoda no matter what. However, I can't deny that there's something wrong with BB that made me want to take a break from it. I can't really give an exact answer why, but I'll try to explain myself as best as I could.

The first and most obvious reason was that BYH was more popular. Now, this isn't the only reason but it is a contributing reason. Let's face it, an FVN is much more likely to get successful than a non-furry VN. There's an established FVN community that is constantly looking out for new good FVNs whereas the non-furry gay VN community (especially if you exclude BL or yaoi VNs) is much more disconnected and more likely to attach to specific titles rather than all gay VNs. There are also a few more contributing factors such as the fact that it was a jam game, that it was in a more engaging genre (murder mystery), that it had more erotic content earlier, that MinoAnon actually shared the game, and that it wasn't as "ethnic". All of these things contributed to By Your Hands's greater success. Being more popular means that people are more likely to talk about the game, there's more engagement and excitement surrounding it, and there's more incentive to work on the game. It just feels better to work on a game that people really want to see.

Now being more popular is great and all, but surely there are other reasons as well? But of course! The other reason is that the scope of the game was too much for me to handle. Here's the thing. BYH is ambitious, considering I have at least five routes planned for the game and each of them is fairly long as well as including multiple endings for each of them. Now imagine how big BYH's scope is, and multiply it tenfold. That's the scope I have for Barachoda Bloom. There's just so much I have planned for BB that it's going to be a massive undertaking to even get half of it done. Not only do I have to do the writing and art, but I also want to get voice acting, custom music, special GUI, and even more stuff. Like, when someone told me that I should add sex scenes to get more attention, I told them that it's way too early to add sex scenes now. And then I realized that it was going to take a long time before I'm going to include sex scenes and it was daunting. Also, while BYH is a big project, I'm not working on it alone. While I wrote a general outline, Nemo's the one doing the writing for the script. Meanwhile, I'm doing all the writing, coding, and artwork for BB. It would be like choosing between building the entirety of ancient Crete with Heracles versus building the entirety of the Roman Empire by yourself. The choice is pretty obvious.

Another reason was that I was losing interest in the project. A lot of the stuff in the VN was created years ago and since then I've lost a little interest in them. For example, I wanted Ahmed to be in the military because I had a fascination with soldiers and found them to be an interesting subject. However, I'm not as interested in them as I used to be. It's not even because of political reasons, it's just, they're kind of eh to me nowadays. It's telling when I had to rewrite the outline at least three times. Plus, the genre isn't exactly the most exciting. I'm more interested in fantasy or adventure-type stories. Slice of life can be enjoyable, but it has to be written well. I'll talk more about this later. Working continuously on something that you just simply like for months can take a toll on you. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed writing all of the scenes in BB, but I feel like they can be improved a lot. Not to mention when I have to write something that concerns some of the elements I'm more neutral on, it's harder for me to get through it. And this makes the scope thing I mentioned even worse because then I'd feel like I have to finish this long-ass project before I can do more fun short projects. When I think about BB, I think that the guys are hot but that's about it. When I think about BYH, however, I think a lot about how their stories will unfold and how certain scenes will look.

One more reason was that I wasn't working on the game at the pace I wanted to work on. Originally I was making builds each month that included a certain amount of new content for each build. I was doing that because that's what FVN creators did. Just recently, I was in a discord voice chat with a few acquaintances and one of them talked about that whole thing. He basically explained that no one in the community has ever declared that this is how things should be and that it's the standard every FVN should follow in order to be successful. There are several FVNs I can name that don't follow that model. The reason why FVN creators do this in the first place is that the first few FVN creators decided that they needed an incentive for patrons to become patrons. Then those people got popular and other FVN creators decided to mimic what they were doing and that's how it almost became the norm. Thing is, if you look from outside the furry space, this is not normal. A video game that adds about 30-45 minutes of new content every month is insane. Yet that's what FVN creators do and why we get so many hiatuses and unexpected writer's block in this community. When you're doing this for the first month, it's easy because you're still young and pretty and you've got a lot of passion to make a new build for the game. As the months go on, it starts to drain on you and suddenly you decide to take a break from the game to write a short story about the pains of being alone and desperate and how you need a furry boyfriend to solve all your troubles. Basically, I was trying to do this model for BB and it just didn't work. The worst part about this was that literally no one was asking me to do this. It wasn't an FVN so it's not like the FVN community was expecting me to make monthly builds for it. I just used a model that didn't work for me and that FVN creators used for arbitrary reasons for a non-furry VN just because that's what I thought I had to do. Now you might be reading this and wondering why BYH has monthly builds. As I said before, Nemo's the one who's writing the script so the effort I have to make in order to make the monthly builds is far less than the effort I have to put in to make monthly builds for BB. I'm almost finished working on the game's art assets so after that's done, all I have to do is implement the script Nemo gives me into the code and maybe draw a CG. Everything else can always be implemented in a later build. Also, if you're an FVN creator that uses this model, it's perfectly fine to take multiple breaks in a year. 

The final reason is that my skills as an artist are too lacking in order for me to make the game I truly want to make. When I first started working on BB, I focused mostly on writing a script and drawing art assets and I didn't really consider if they were good or not. While I reread my scripts at least once, I didn't really edit that much and I didn't ask myself if an art asset was necessary or not. I just made builds because I wanted to get progress done on it. But it wasn't good for me to do all that. I rushed myself when developing the VN and I didn't stop to look at what I was doing. Now I realize it's more important to take my time to make sure the product is good and not just get it out to get it out. I want to focus on improving my skills and making sure the VN's good before putting out more builds. Like, when I read Tennis Ace, I was like "Holy shit, I didn't know Slice Of Life can be this good!" I now have a decent idea of how I want to write BB moving forward.

So what does the future look like with Barachoda Bloom? Currently, it's on hiatus, and there's a short VN I want to work on before I go back to working on BB. I think it would be a good opportunity to test my skills and see what I need to improve on. I then want to finish up the assets and code in By Your Hands that's currently a WIP, so I can have an easier time with creating future builds. After that's settled, I want to finish the art assets and coding in Barachoda and really polish the current build as much as possible before I can add more content. I want to edit some of the game's script and try to improve some of the game's weaker parts as well as revisit the sprites and CGs and try to make them look closer to my vision of the game. I'll also adjust some of the characterizations for the love interests in order to make them more engaging. After all, that's done, I'll go back to writing more for BB at a pace that I'm comfortable with. I hope this post was insightful for most of you and I hope that if you weren't interested in the VN initially that you're willing to at least give the game a chance someday. This has been something I wanted to deal with so I'm glad I got it out of the way. Thanks for reading all of this.

Have a good day and see you later!

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New devlog about the artistic curiosity survey I conducted a month ago.

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Happy Valentine's from Xenoblade Chronicles 3's Triton! He really wanted to get some booty for you on this special day. Wanted to draw a headcanon of him after the end of the game. It was hard coming up with what clothes he would wear in Bionis but I made do.

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By Your Hands Patreon Benefits

I have made a condensed version of the commentary for the first build available for free. You can read it over here: https://chellaytiger.itch.io/by-your-hands/devlog/489746/byh-build-01x-commentary-condensed-version. Also, I have made a comprehensive guide to what benefits you get when becoming a patron. If you are even the slightest bit interested in becoming a patron, or you're already a patron considering to bump up to a higher tier, please read it over here: https://chellaytiger.itch.io/by-your-hands/devlog/489841/benefits-of-becoming-a-patron.

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Builds 0.2.0 and 0.3.0 are now available! Build 0.2.0 is available to the public while 0.3.0 is available to just patrons. You can read more about the new builds in the link above.

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Happy Lunar New Year everyone! We moved past the year of the tiger to the year of the bunny!

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PAID CASTING CALL: Of Sense and Soul

Casting & Submission Information at: ofsenseandsoul.com/voicesforosas

We're looking for voice actors to cast for 10M/2F roles in Of Sense and Soul, our Queer Victorian Romance Visual Novel!

There will be a $20USD minimum payment, and PGM/LGBTQ+ actors are strongly encouraged to apply!

Send your audition in by 11:59PM January 31st, AOT to be considered!

We look forward to hearing from you all! ❤️

For more Of Sense and Soul, check out the following... Patreon | Itch.io | Steam | Discord | Newsletter | Linktr.ee

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New Devlog! This one talks about the results of the NSFW Survey as well as a small update on the next build.

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New survey about the game's art direction. Please consider taking it so the game looks awesome. Take it here: https://forms.gle/pqrsGz7FSMPCJtyb8

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Merry Christmas everyone! Whatever you do today, may you have a great day! Here's a special gift featuring Ahmed from Barachoda Bloom!

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The Characters of By Your Hands

Hello everyone! Today, I'm here to talk about the characters of By Your Hands, mostly the character designs because there's a lot to unpack here. There are several things that make By Your Hands unique and the character designs are one of them. From the offset, this VN was made to represent less appreciated species in the furry fandom. While the species that are represented in the game aren't all lacking exposure to other furry VNs, I made sure the typical felines and canines would remain as side characters at most. I also made sure to vary up the body types compared to Barachoda Bloom and to draw them slightly differently than how a typical furry artist would (Hopefully that didn't sound pretentious as there are plenty of furry artists who are great). With that in mind, let's take a look at the characters.

The first is Rex, the protagonist. I decided that the protagonist should be a dinosaur because it would be interesting for a pre-historic animal to exist in a modern setting. When I was reading the script, I was concerned that people would find him too boring or lacking in character. The most important character in a story would probably be the protagonist, so I didn't want an unlikable protagonist for the VN. I'm glad to see most people's reactions toward Rex are positive. You'll definitely see more of his character in future builds. Being a dinosaur and stuck in a case study environment also means he's not too familiar with our world, which means he's learning about the world at the same rate we're learning it. He was originally a Tyrannosaurus Rex, hence his default name being Rex. I changed him to be an Allosaurus because I wanted to use a slightly lesser-known dinosaur. One thing I'll mention is that his size is basically the same as the other animals despite allosaurus being a rather large animal according to research. I don't have an exact explanation for this, but I do have a few explanations. One explanation would be that allosaurus vary in size by quite a bit and he turns out to be one of the smaller ones. This reasoning has a few issues so I'll leave it alone for now. The last thing I'll mention is that his body type is muscular. There's no particular reason why he has this body type other than that I wanted to have some fun drawing him during sex scenes. That said, he does have a little soft belly. I don't know why but I usually avoid drawing abs.

Next is Connor. Connor was a character I made in direct response to the world I made for the game. A character born in a world where his own kind gets turned into fast food after they die. How would a character deal with that? I chose a chicken specifically because I feel like there are interesting designs you can do with a chicken. Like I like the little mohawk they have. Choosing a chicken led to a lot of jokes though. He also used to wear a jacket, but I wanted to make him look more friendly looking so I instead gave him a T-Shirt with funny text on it. It was fun drawing him, to say the least, since chickens have that red part that can be used as a substitute for hair, eyebrows, and beards, and they have a bunch of colors to pick from. I did have a dilemma about his arms and whether to give him talons or not. Thing is, if you compare the skeletons of birds to the skeletons of humans, you'd see that wings are equivalent to human arms. And our hands aren't our feet. They both have five digits and nails and that's about where the similarities end. So no talons, but I did attempt to make his arms look like wings a little. For his body type, I just gave him a muscular body for no other reason other than it's fun to draw.

Next is Tucker. For Tucker, Liam, and Wyatt, the idea was that the popular students in the college would be species that are popular in the furry fandom, so they're all felines and canines. For Tucker, he's a tiger. Tigers were a species I didn't know was popular until a year ago, but they're almost everywhere in both the furry fandom and furry visual novels. If they're not a love interest, it's almost guaranteed that they'll show up as side characters as long as the VN isn't focusing on a particular species. This is in stark contrast to mainstream furry media, where besides Tiggers, Hobbes, and Tony the Tiger, they're almost always villains or pretty irrelevant. I can't tell you why tigers are popular in the furry fandom and not really anywhere else, but I guess their stripes and colors make them pretty unique compared to other big cats. For Tucker, his main inspiration was Lin Hu from Nekojishi as he's the first tiger I thought of when I thought of a "popular tiger furry character". That's where his body type came from. I was considering basing him off Torahiko from Morenatsu, but his design doesn't really look like a real-world tiger, and I wanted the characters to look like the animals they're supposed to be, and he's not that muscular compared to your typical bara furry (this was Samoji before his prime hit). Funny thing about Lin Hu is that his favorite food is fried chicken which makes Tucker's interactions with Connor interesting, to say the least (real-life tigers also eat fowl so it makes sense for both of these characters). Now when you draw a tiger, you realize that they're actually kind of cute when they're not showing their huge teeth. They're like cats! Except…bigger. And when you stylize a drawing of a tiger, you're inevitably going to make them look cuter. So there was an effort to make him look intimidating so that his personality is quite apparent. He's also almost always showing his teeth at all times. Of course, from a certain perspective, I failed to make him look threatening because I saw people call him cute anyways. But it doesn't matter since his introduction scene makes it obvious what kind of character he is. Him being tall and muscular also makes him intimidating, albeit in a way that makes him desirable, which was intentional. His letterman jacket being red indicates that this guy's not only different from the other members of the football team, but someone you shouldn't mess with (you know, unless he's dead). I also made the whites of his eyes…not white. They're yellow. The same goes for Liam and Wyatt. Tigers, wolves, and lions probably don't have yellow sclera, but they typically have yellow eyes. This is mostly artistic license on my part, but it's also inspired by how nanoff colored the eyes of his characters in BMZ. Finally, I made sure that he looks like an actual tiger, which means that I made the stripes more organic looking instead of the cute markings some furries give their OCs, not naming any names.

Next is Wyatt. He was supposed to be a leopard cat, then a jaguar because I wanted him, Tucker, and Liam to form a trio of big cats. It would be like Nekojishi except they're all assholes. Thing is, neither leopard cats nor jaguars are as popular as lions or tigers and that would go against the point of these characters if the species isn't all that popular. So I changed him into a wolf since that's arguably the most popular species in the furry fandom (Why do you think Blaidd got literally hundreds of erotic fanart shortly after Elden Ring came out?) and the three of them would still revolve around a theme as they're all apex predators. Continuing the trend of basing characters off popular characters in the furry fandom, he's based on Amicus from Adastra alongside a few elements of Leo from Echo. For some reason, a lot of wolves tend to be portrayed as domestic dogs but cooler. Now initially he was like this dumb himbo character who'd be jolly and cute. This was because I thought that the popular archetype in the furry fandom was "himbo wolf" because of Amicus. But then I read the first draft as it was being written and he doesn't really act like a himbo. he acts like an asshole. Then I realized that the popular archetype isn't "himbo wolf" but "dominant wolf". Wyatt is pretty dumb, but he doesn't fit the other qualifications in being a himbo (namely being nice). As someone who likes to take control and finds comfort in more submissive characters, I find it hard to see such a character appealing, but some people still do like him. I made him too hot is the problem, but if he was ugly then it wouldn't make sense why he's hanging out with a guy like Tucker. I like winter wolves so I was more than willing to give him that sort of coloration. His face is of a cute dog, but he's got huge tits that his muscle shirt leaves little to the imagination, making it obvious that he was supposed to be a himbo, and he's got a confident pose to strike. Someone complained I made the tits look too round looking but I think they look good. Also, unlike Amicus and Leo, he's got defined abs. I think the toned abs fit his huge pecs more than a tummy, so that's why I gave him that. I made his nose too big, so that will definitely be something I'll change in the future. Drawing his expressions was hard because I'm not good at drawing teeth and his faces prominently feature them. The final thing I'll note is that the one thing both Amicus and Leo have in common, other than being dominant wolves with a tummy, is that they have blue jeans and a belt and Wyatt has neither of those things.

Onto Liam, lions are essentially the opposite of tigers. They're all over mainstream media (Lion King, Thundercats, The Madgascar films, The Wizard of Oz…) but are more downplayed within the furry fandom. They're common in furry art and OCs, but I've seen that they're not as common as wolves or tigers, and whenever they appear in furry visual novels they're often overshadowed by a canine or tiger character (unless the VN is Socially Awkward but that VN is on hiatus). This is unfortunate because I actually think lions are beautiful looking and they're pretty appealing as anthros. Because of this, Liam was intentionally designed to look plainer than either Tucker or Wyatt. His body type is muscular, but his body is nothing special compared to the other muscular characters in the game. He's attractive but not in an intriguing way. I actually really like his design, which is why I'm a little sad that he's just a side character. But I told myself that there would be no feline or canine love interest in this game. Hopefully one day I'll make a game where a lion character gets to shine, but not this game. One last thing to note is that I originally planned to make his eyebrows the same color as his face. I thought it looked weird, however, so I made his eyebrows the color of his mane, and canonically he dyed his eyebrows that way. I'd also like to mention that the Reddit post introducing him got a good amount fewer upvotes than most of the other By Your Hands characters, which is fitting for his character I'd say.

Moving back to the actual love interests, we have Kamil. Kamil was a character I felt was too similar to another one of my characters whose face hogs the cover image, that being Ahmed from Barachoda Bloom. After reading the script for his first day and writing the outline for his route, however, I can see that he is different from Ahmed in several ways to the point where I think his existence helps me make Ahmed a better character. I hope that sentence made sense. But anyways, he was intended to be a character palatable to the tastes of most of the target audience, being a friendly and attractive childhood friend. His route is intended to be the first one the player picks. I chose a Karkadann because I wanted a mythical creature that's not commonly represented in media. I was considering an Al-Mi'raj before deciding on a karkadann since I found rhinos to be attractive. I also considered making him into a panda, a boar, or a komodo dragon. Initially, his design was based on the Pokemon Rhydon, but I scrapped that when I based the design more on descriptions of the karkadann. I decided that mythical characters had human-esque elements like body hair, human eyebrows, head hair, and human facial hair. This gave me a lot of freedom with his design as I wasn't limited to the appearance of one animal. Essentially he's a combination of an Indian rhino and a unicorn (Does this mean he's attracted to virgins? Lucky Rex). I gave him a really exaggerated body because I let myself be indulgent with his body. Huge and hairy tits, arms, and ass were things I wanted to see the most in a male character design, and I didn't let myself hold back on drawing those things. In contrast, his clothes aren't very revealing, with the only exposure of skin we get being the top of his pecs and his letterman jacket hiding the silhouette of his torso. Both his huge body and his concealing outfit will be given explanations later in his route. Someone you'd love to see just bare it all yet holds a certain distance from you. Other than that, I had some difficulty drawing his horn and making sure it didn't block any features of his face and I was going to add a cowlick (rhinolick? karkadannlick?) to his hair but I decided that it would just make his head cluttered. He's overall kind of intimidating, but his eyes let you know that he's a friendly guy.

Next is Mr. Baker. I'll be honest with you guys, I did not expect him to be so popular. Like I knew that he was attractive and I knew that the audience liked older guys, but I didn't expect so much thirst towards him. To give you guys an idea of how popular he is, currently, 67% of respondents for the NSFW survey picked him as a character that wanted to see NSFW content for. I can't exactly tell you why he's so popular, but I have a feeling he'll get less popular as more builds come out and we learn more about the characters. But anyways, for his design, I picked a bison because I believed they would make into some attractive furries but I didn't see much of them. I liked bovines, so I didn't mind drawing someone like him. I think bison have a lot of unique features that they can make for some interesting character designs. For instance, their faces are a good mix of ugly animal features (for lack of a better word) and human-like features which give you several options to work with. Now if you have played Barachoda Bloom, you'd know that I'm quite attracted to older men, so I had to include a datable character that was middle-aged. I wanted to include a middle-aged character where the relationship he has with the protagonist is played more realistically than most age-gap/power-gap relationships. There's still a fantasy with the relationship, but I wanted the fantasy of it to be founded by something more grounded. Originally Brendan's personality was a bit wooden. He was the basic older teacher mentor archetype with the added twist that he likes to jerk off in his office during office hours. I found that a little boring, especially considering that he has an entire route dedicated to him. I decided to make his personality a little more dorky and clumsy, someone who enjoys watching shows from the 80s on loop while recalling how actors started their careers in films during that time. Ultimately, his route received the most changes from me and I really enjoy how his character and his route came out to be. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that a lot of people didn't get to see the part of him that I enjoy the most. Either way, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more content of him. Going back to his design, the parts of Bison made it really easy to indicate that this character was older (eyes that look baggy, disheveled fur, and chin fur that resembles a beard). Because of my fondness for bovines and older men, I was really indulgent when it came to his body type. It might not be apparent to you, but I love muscle chubs and I can't get enough of them. For both Kamil and Mr. Baker, I based their body types on the work of ZoroJ and Dsharp, as I believed that the bodies they drew were both attractive while still being exaggerated. I drew him with a body that would turn me on the instant I looked at him and all I could think of is having sex with him. At least initially. Nowadays I'm just kind of used to it. His outfit used to be more formal, similar to what Mr. Parker from After Class wears. I changed his outfit to something that would emphasize his body more, if only so that he wouldn't be compared to Mr. Parker. His appearance is contradictory in a way. His neat hair and dress shirt would have you believe that he's a well-spoken and polite person. But his open shirt, non-friendly face, open shirt, messily put-on tie, and tight clothes suggest that he's more disorganized and hectic than you'd expect at first glance. Coloring him was kind of a pain, as I couldn't have his body just be one color but bison have odd colorations. Hopefully, his color palette doesn't look too odd.

Coming near the end is Owen. Owen is a bit of a cathartic character for me. This was a character I was uncomfortable writing, but wanted to make a project featuring such a character. I'm really excited to see this character be realized. Anyways, he's easily the hardest character to design as there weren't a lot of references on drawing orca anthros and I wasn't used to drawing non-muscular chubs. His color palette is all neutral colors, which is supposed to indicate that he's someone to be ignored. I also had some artistic license with where his back fin was supposed to be. In real-world orca whales, it's supposed to be lower on their bodies, but he looks a little weird without the fin appearing from behind his back, so I moved it up. I gave him a hoodie because hoodies are nice, it's hard to look bad in a hoodie. But it's also a good way to indicate that he's closed off (why is he wearing a hoodie in daylight?). His posture is also intentionally awkward. Most characters stand up straight, but he doesn't. Once again it's to show how awkward he is. It was easy to figure out what pose he'd do considering I wasn't concerned with him looking cool. I like his body type, it's very guy next door to me, but there's a bunch of people who seem to disagree with me. Finally, one thing to note is that he's usually looking away. He only looks directly at Rex during certain moments. This will be important later.

And finally, there's Vlad. Vlad was another character type I wanted to include in one of my projects but I didn't feel like putting him in my projects until now due to how unorthodox he is. Right now he's the least popular character from the main cast, but I still like his character a lot. As a black vulture, his design was sure to turn a few heads. The head of a black vulture is actually very ugly when looked at up close, so I had to make sure I drew his head appealing while still being close to a black vulture. The rest of his design I really enjoy. He dresses like Rahmir if Rahmir wasn't a horny top. Both of his outfits use black as the dominant color, and he wears a necklace that marks him as an outsider. His drag outfit was something I really enjoyed drawing. I love drawing bara men, but sometimes I just want to draw feminine clothes. I based his outfit on Elvira and the Wicked Witch from Wicked. I really enjoy the dynamic of this guy he's closed off during college becoming his wild witch at the club.

And that's every character worth mentioning. There are some characters I missed, but they can be summed up as characters I had fun drawing, especially Mama Belle. By Your Hands is a game that heavily revolves around its characters, so I and Nemo make sure that they're strong characters. Glad to see many of you guys enjoyed these characters and put in a lot of hard work of making them the way they are now.

Thank you for reading all of this. If you want to read more of my stuff, please consider reading my blog over here. So far it only has the stuff I posted on itch.io, but eventually, it will have its own stuff. Also if you enjoy reading about the behind-the-scenes of By Your Hands, please consider becoming a patron. When you become a patron, you get access to the commentary of the script, which reveals extra bits of information about the stuff that went into making the VN. Here's a little preview of what it's like:

You can become a patron here.

Anyways, thank you guys for your time. I hope you all have a good day. See you later!