How many facial expressions needed, and how to tag them?

[nyaatrap]

I'm in the middle of drawing facial expressions of my characters. It's fun to draw, but while they're becoming more than 10, I wonder I could use them all or not.
So, I'd like to to ask you how many expressions your game needed/used, and how to tag them (or name files) for easy scripting.
Thanks in advance

[Anna]

I would recommend writing the script first and then looking at how many sprites you need for it. That's the way I do it, because then I won't be drawing anything unnecessary ;)!

As for names/tags, I'm not sure what you mean exactly or how ren'py does it... but I always name the files something like "[name] [mood]". So, for an angry looking character named Michel, it would be "Michel angry". Convenient and short, but I think anything you want should work as well.

[nyaatrap]

Thanks for the reply The problem is, a game I'm making is a system without stories yet, and it requires images for debugging and development of the system. Therefore, I just need images which will be used in most possible situations.

[Deji]

The usual basic expressions are:

• neutral
• happy
• sad/complicated/worried
• annoyed/angry
• surprised

then you can add different variations of those, or extra "funny" faces or specific faces, like:

• very happy
• embarrassed
• shy
• unamused
• scared
• crying
  etc...

What I normally do is to draw many eyes, many eyebrows and many mouthes and then just combine them as I need (:

[Gavrilo]

Thanks for the reply The problem is, a game I'm making is a system without stories yet, and it requires images for debugging and development of the system. Therefore, I just need images which will be used in most possible situations.

Couldn't you prototype it? I mean rough sketches and/or dummy images, simply for convenience purposes. It's easy to create them as you go, being easily replaced later, saving time and avoiding wasted effort. Deji's suggestion is nice, though.

[nyaatrap]

The usual basic expressions are:

• neutral
• happy
• sad/complicated/worried
• annoyed/angry
• surprised

then you can add different variations of those, or extra "funny" faces or specific faces, like:

• very happy
• embarrassed
• shy
• unamused
• scared
• crying
  etc...

What I normally do is to draw many eyes, many eyebrows and many mouthes and then just combine them as I need (:

Thank Deji it helps much. I've also drawn each parts separately, but I had no clue have many files I should export. because the combination is almost infinity.

[Gambit74]

Since Deji covered the expressions parts pretty well, I'll talk about the tagging.

I find it easy to do something like creating a list of expressions that are used and then assigning them a number.

Example:

1 = Normal
2 = Happy
3 = Sad
4 = Mad
5 = Sigh

Then you create a folder for each character and naming them by using the first 2-3 letters of each character's name or something. Then when you finish drawing a character's expression, just give the image name the proper number for their expression and save it in whichever character the image belongs to's folder.