Lemma Soft Forums

I hope this is the right place to post this. I'm making my very first visual novel and I have 2 questions about what I should send to my programmer.

1. My character sprites are PNG and I want them to have moving lips. What would be the most efficient way to do this? (seperate sprite for each mouth movement, one sprite but separate lips, etc;)
2. I would like one of my backgrounds to have animated falling snow. What's the best file format to use for something like this?

Sorry if these questions are too basic, I'm new at this lol. Thanks for the help!

Hi there! Welcome to lemmasoft, and also welcome to the wonderful world of making visual novels! I hope that this new adventure is an exciting challenge, but also a fun learning experience!

I'm not sure what your programmer will be using to make the game, but I'm guessing Ren'Py? A good place for asking Ren'Py-specific questions is in the Ren'Py Questions and Announcements subforum, for future reference. For a more general discussions about VN development, I recommend the Creator Discussion subforum. Also the Ren'Py Cookbook is really handy and has tons of explanations, tutorials, and code examples for anyone to use.

As for your questions, let me see if I can try to help out.

1. PNG format for sprites is a great start. With static sprites some projects can get away with one image per expression. Now, for simple animations, there are a few options.
There's a simple method of having a sprite with the various sprite parts separated out, for example:

• character body/pose
• character clothes (if separate from body)
• character eyes
• character mouth

And then programming in the various poses and expressions. You can reference the documentation for more detail.

If your programmer is willing to do something more complex but ultimately better for the game, check out LayeredImages for sprites, which you can learn about in this great tutorial.

2. As for the snow, you're in luck! You can make a snowflake image as a png and use ATL programming to make it fall. Here is an older page about it. It may be out of date now. I recommend you look up SnowBlossom, as I think that's what I used for some games I've worked on.

Hope this helps! If you have any questions feel free to ask around the forums or message me any time.

Thanks a ton for the advice, I really appreciate it!