Game with only CG art and no character sprites?

[Mammon]

What I meant is, having so many options equals having to program every time a character lifts a freaking eyebrow. It's not the same as having just a few separated expressions, If I wanted to have someone angry I literally had to look for the eyes, mouth and eyebrows to create an angry expression. While that sort of creates many combinations, it's a pain in the ass to work and constantly be looking for the correct expression.

Sometimes the solution is so obvious that we don't even consider it.


(And I can tell you from experience that you'll memorise what the expressions are like and which one fits where in no time.)

[Draziya]

When I originally saw this thread it seemed you were pretty fixed on your CGs and let you be. Now seeing how discussion had led you to decide to experiment with more dynamic sprites, I'm quite excited to see how it all works out.

With dynamic poses not attached to the background I can see your prologue being quite thrilling and captivating. For instance. If you paired sprites with simple transforms, you could have the man leap from one side of the screen at the girl, who's just standing there calmly. With that rain animation you have no less! And if they're simple side on images they'd be very reusable too.

If the sprites are big enough you could zoom in on one part and zoom out to show both of the faces a few moments later, as well.

Of course these examples might be too programming heavy for your liking, but it might be more fun that changing a character expression on a standard sprite.

I hope doing the prologue with these sprites go smoothly!

[frylander]

Mammon, I'm not quite sure what you mean since I don't have a dropbox account and I can't see that image, but by the name of it I will assume it has some relation to organizing the sprites.

That wasn't a problem I had my sprites named like so:

PartOfTheBody_Angle_Expression

For instance, for a whole character I had to have:

Mouth_Frontal_Talking
Eyebrows_Frontal_Raised
Eyes_Frontal_Neutral
Head_Frontal
Body_Frontal
Arms_Frontal_Neutral

This means it was easy for me to look for a specific part of the body, then a specific angle and then an expression, but it was still a pain to do that for almost every sentence. Especially if I had lots of arms/eyes/mouths like I had.

Instead I will try to discard the arms/head, and have only a base body with full expressions instead of separated eyes/mouths/eyebrows, that should be enough and easier for me to implement in the game.

And Draziya, yes I was fixated in CG's but I opened this thread for a reason! I wanted to get ideas from others so I could decide. And yes, my original idea for the prologue was to have the man appear with the dagger out to stab the girl, but the poses I had before were very stiff and it just didn't work out.

Yesterday I tried that same idea with dynamic poses and it was great, that's why I'm liking it now. I have a few more ideas with the sprites that could add more dynamism, and one of them I want to try it out in the prologue, it should make the characters feel more alive.

And I did think about zooming in on the sprites but they would lose a lot of quality and look pixelated. I could solve this by doing them on a very high quality but that would greatly increase the size of the images and could prove troublesome on the programming. Instead for that I will still use the characters in the CG's as if they were sprites, moving them around as much as possible while looking at their expressions from up-close. It means doing extra drawings, but those moments are too special to not have drawings of their own anyways.

I will try to have it done tonight even if it's with simple sketches for the sake of seeing how it plays out, I still have to add a feature on the programming side of things for what I want to do. Thanks for the feedback! And I'm glad you are excited about the prologue with sprites! I am too! I believe this approach could convey what I wanted.

Have a nice day, I will post the sprite version of the prologue as soon as I make it!

EDIT:

Had to stay a bit late tonight too, but I managed to make and upload a test made with sprites, and I believe it's so much better!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1DDStN ... e=youtu.be



This is what I originally intended to do with sprites, but with the way I was making them it was just impossible, for obvious reasons. They were too stiff and limited to do such poses.

This however means that I won't be doing more facial expressions than needed, since I will have many more poses than before, so having all of them with expressions makes no sense. I will only add expressions on the go as I feel the need to as to not draw them and then not use them.

Note that this is a test and some parts still need work, obviously the art needs to be done properly since right now it's just a placeholder, but also the timing on some "animated" parts like when they are "dancing in the moonligth" which right now looks silly. But with some work on the timing and sprites it should look cool.

I also made some tests with sprites that go below and above the screen, had to implement some code to do that but it was worth the trouble.

Overall I'm very satisfied with the outcome, and it didn't take me too long to program it, I drew and put it in the game in like 3 hours, and the more sprites I draw the more I can reuse in the future, which means less work the further I get into development.

What are your opinions? Do you like it? Do you prefer the CG version? Anything you would change or do differently?