I started mocking up the comic-style cutout frame I wanted to use for a bunch of the interactions in
A Very Full House, and I may have liked the idea so much that I went ahead and drew, rigged, and animated the entire thing. Here's a mockup of how I imagine it being used in-game (not currently in-engine; I haven't finished the display code yet):
Of course the cutout frame needs to support all of the outfit options the main display does, so I drew all of those too. Adding physics and some animation to the whole thing was the quick part of it. Here's a .gif of the results!
Notably this frame took, from initial concept to drawing to ready-for-Ren'py completion, about 10 hours of work. That's
way less time than I would have spent doing an entire from-behind character drawing. Most of that comes from not having to redraw all of the shirts/shoes/bras that aren't actually important to what the frame needs to convey.
This style also lets me over-emphasis elements that are suppose to be the focus of the frame in a way I couldn't do with a full character drawing. Her skirt probably shouldn't emphasis her butt as much as it does, for example, but I know I'll only be using it in scenes where her butt being the focus is the
whole point, and so it looks a lot more natural.
I've rigged this up so it will inherit all of the outfit parameters the main character display is using. Frames can also share animated parameters, so things like bouncing boobs and butts can be sync'd across the main character display and all of the frames. I expect that will be very handy when I start adding actual sex animations and I want all of the jiggling to match.
I still need to add some code in Ren'py to make it easy to call/hide these frames on demand, but I should have that done relatively soon. I think I'll get that working, add some more outfit related gameplay, and then push out another playable version of the game!