Janey Hair Wins

Last week I ran an informal poll to try and decide what hairstyle to use on my next dating sim character. Well the winner of the poll was “The Karla“, but at least a couple of people pointed out that it would be best to take personality into consideration.

Which is why I went with the second place “The Janey” instead. I didn’t say anything about her personality in the poll, partly because I haven’t nailed it down completely myself. But to put her in one word would be “scrapper”, which would sum up the personality and career of the character. Resourceful, pragmatic, and practical, and a high maintenance hairstyle like “Karla” or “Michael” does not fit. Voting generally favored the non symmetrical hair, so Janey was either in first or second place with most people.

The other problem with the Karla style is that it seems to be everywhere. Since its introduction in 2021, the Karla style appears in lots of Daz games and product promos.

The biggest weakness of the Janey Hair is the store front on Daz where Janey is sold.

Yes, that is the same character model and hair that I am using in my character. I just reshaped the face to make her more natural, less “Disney”. I’m surprised this character model doesn’t show up in many games. I went over screen shots of most of the popular Daz based adult visual novels and I didn’t see anybody using it. With Daz based games numbering in the thousands, I assume the face is used somewhere, but it is actually an expensive custom HD model that uses another expensive custom HD model as a base, which cuts down its popularity.

But because of this, not only do I use a reshaped version of the model face, I dyed the bangs rasberry red with a bluish tint while leaving the roots and the rest of the hair black. This is a hair color not available anywhere, and it fits the character.

Name: Relay Switch

With the “Scrapper” personality figured out, the next step was to figure out a name for her. Scrapper also happens to be an elite profession in Guild Wars 2, and I have an Asuran scrapper with the silly name “Relay Switch” I’ve been playing for a decade. Decided to give the new character the same name. It’s a nickname of course, and I already figured out a cute reason for it, but I’ll save it for later.

While the character model pictures are made in Daz, this one is made in Poser. She is wearing future generation AR-VR headset like the Apple Vision Pro recently introduced to the world. I already included the technology in Hopepunk City which is more or less the same futuristic setting of this next game. I also decided to give her a different trait I haven’t used in a character before: She is hearing impaired and wears hearing aids. My games often explore different sexualities, thought I’d try different abilities for a change. The fun part is that involves new research about life for the hearing impaired and learning some ASL so I can animate it properly.

Besides a DAZ and Poser version of the character, I created a Character Creator 4 version. CC4 characters are standard gaming character models that can be animated easily and ported to popular 3D gaming engines like Unity, Unreal, or Blender.

The purpose of all these version is to give me numerous tools to “up my game” and try some different things. They are obviously not identical to each other, but they can “pass” for each other like stunt characters so I can use the best tools for the jobs I’ll need as I write and illustrate the story.

If you want to follow me as I make this new futuristic dating sim, I am restarting my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/dateariane starting today!