Stories from the archive

This edition of Naughty List News was sponsored by Paradise Lust, the erotic dating sim about a stranded pleasure yacht full of beauty pageant contestants looking for a way home.

Dear reader,

I’m still on a much-needed break this week. Please enjoy this collection of stories from the archives during my absence.

Regular programming will resume on April 17th, 2022!

With love,

-Mr. Hands

Romancing NPCs on Twitter ❤

This story originally appeared in Naughty List News #18, published February 28th, 2021

If you’ve been on Twitter in the past week, you’ve probably seen the trend of posting your “final boss" image. This is where you take an existing photo from your phone and post it as if you were the final boss in a video game.

I was okay with the first few that showed up in my timeline, but it’s basically just another excuse for hot people to post selfies.

Luckily, a variation has popped up! One that is much more to my liking. Show off what you would look like as a romanceable NPC:

Jenn Ravenna Tran @JennRavenna

Post an image of yourself as a romanceable NPC without downloading new pics

Liam O'Brien @VoiceOfOBrien

Post an image of yourself as a romanceable NPC without downloading new pics. https://t.co/U1mFO3PYku

Laura Bailey @LauraBaileyVO

Post an image of yourself as a romanceable NPC without downloading new pics https://t.co/jH0wRPZO1W https://t.co/8lVAomOY3b

Jumbo Himbo @Foxinuptheplace

Without taking new pictures, post three: 1. You as romanceable NPC, 2. quest giver, 3. and final boss (All 3 can be persuaded to join your team)

brother stone @saul_mondriaan

Without taking any new pictures, post three: 1. You as a romanceable PC 2. You as the quest-giver 3. You as the final boss spoilers: they're all the same character, just on different discs https://t.co/OnSM4DMfHR https://t.co/ih23cZiWUX

These poses are all quite striking! They should make for excellent reference material on my next game. 😁

AI-generated wizardry 🧙‍♀️

This story originally appeared in Naughty List News #20, published March 14, 2021

Liz England is not content with “just” procedurally generating a city of people in Watch Dogs: Legion. She has now turned her attention to creating AI-generated facial animations as well.

Specifically, she’s found that you can use Artbreeder to generate a face and the Deep Nostalgia tool from MyHeritage to animate it:

Liz England @lizardengland

An AI generated drawing of a face (through artbreeder) now using AI generated animation (through myheritage's deep nostalgia tool) and... there's no copyright on this, I can use it commercially if I wanted to.

What’s really remarkable about this technique is that you can use it for commercial purposes! Liz notes that the face generated by Artbreeder does not have any copyright, while the video from MyHeritage transfers the copyright to you.

Liz England @lizardengland

Here's what this would look like in game (which I already got working???)

A few days later, she has also figured out a way to use an open-source tool to animate characters using input from her webcam:

Liz England @lizardengland

Ok so... I guess I can animate characters now with my webcam.

Suffice to say that this opens up very interesting opportunities for visual novels! ✨

This could be a great way to animate the characters in your game in a cost-effective way. I’m excited to learn how far other people are able to take this!