Phoenix Wright and animation counts

[mrsulu]

I've been playing a lot of Phoenix Wright and it's storytelling really impressed me. It really ratchets up the tension and then backs down and really follows good storytelling conventions even as it is totally wacky. It's not a romance (even with several lovely ladies in the cast), but it *is* a really good visual novel/adventure that gets about 6+ hours of fun out of a very small cast. It's definitely worth checking out.

For game makers, it got me wondering why I felt so strongly about how alive these characters were vs. how not-so-alive I sometimes feel about other VN games. I started counting expressions during one long cross-examination scene. Here are the expressions:

Judge (the ringmaster):

• Angry/Stern
  Nodding
  Normal straight talking
  Surprise

Butz (a witness):

• Yeah!
  Scratch head
  Cock head
  Thinking (with cocked head)
  Angry
  Clown Fanboy Face
  Crying
  Flirty (waving arm)

Phoenix Wright (our hero):

• Guhhhhhh (drooling)
  Pound Desk
  Hold desk pound
  Straight up
  Tapping paper
  Pointing
  Scratch chin
  Embarrassed
  Surprise

Von Karma (the evil prosecutor):

• Head down, scratching arm
  Looking up
  Straight talking
  Snap!
  Wag finger

All of these characters have animated eyes and/or other body parts (like Butz's arm wave or Von Karma's arm scratch). Sometimes the closed/opening eyes act as their own expression---the judge sometimes shuts his eyes while he thinks things through, for example, and they time the eye openings to coincide with the beginning and ends of lines.

The game also uses a ton of screen jiggle and switches music frequently during scenes to emphasize surprise, tension, or other emotions. The background fades out once in a blue moon, too, to indicate someone lost in thought. Even the text speed varies wildly based on what characters are saying, so the nonstop chatter from one witness zooms by in a blur, while reluctant speakers get slower text. Basically, with all of these tricks (screen jiggle * background fadeouts * eyes open/closed * 3 courtroom music themes * text speed), you get a LOT of variety with, oh, on the order of a few dozen frames of art.

It's really neat how much character they get out of so few expressions. Von Karma, even though he's a major player, gets by with 5 simple ones, but you KNOW who he is and what he's feeling with each one. For a simple one-chapter RenAi game, that would be plenty.

[Dre]

I know what your saying. Good word usage and variety of animated tricks can really make a character come alive. From what I know, almost all of what you mention can be done in Ren'py. All it really takes is a good writer and good artist(with determination of steel) or someone who can do both.

[Akimaru]

I have been experimenting with changing character faces for my game..
I'm really satisfied with the outcome.
The character starts out with an empty face and a small transparent face picture is displayed above that.
Making the character change his/her face each line is a bit time/consuming, but it really makes your character feel emotion in an easier way than drawing a whole new picture.

[Dre]

Nice, do you have a certain amount of expressions being used or do they vary from person to person? In my last game I didn't even show characters. lol This time around you'll see them and they'll have different expressions, possibly blinking and so forth.

But zoom sure would be nice...

[PyTom]

Hm... I tried a sample implementation of zoom. It can give me about 20 frames per second on my computer, and that's without the overhead of the rest of Ren'Py. Do you want me to try to integrate the code with Ren'Py proper, to see how fast it performs?

[Watercolorheart]

Hm... I tried a sample implementation of zoom. It can give me about 20 frames per second on my computer, and that's without the overhead of the rest of Ren'Py. Do you want me to try to integrate the code with Ren'Py proper, to see how fast it performs?

YES.

[Quin]

The character starts out with an empty face and a small transparent face picture is displayed above that.
Making the character change his/her face each line is a bit time/consuming, but it really makes your character feel emotion in an easier way than drawing a whole new picture.

That's exactly the method I've been planning to use. Each character/wardrobe combination is its own graphic with a blank face, and for each character, I'm creating a number of facial expressions to overlay on the blank face.

One benefit comes from file size; each expression will be a small file (maybe 3-4 KB), which is much smaller than a full character graphic. Also, since I plan on using the same basic pose for each character regardless of their wardrobe, I can reuse the same expression for any wardrobe.

One negative aspect to the way I'm doing this is that my characters will have the same body pose regardless of expression. Since I'm doing my own artwork and I'm not an accomplished artist, that's a sacrifice I've decided I need to make. (I do still remember fondly how each expression in Chronoluminaire's When I Rule the World had its own completely new full-body drawing for each different expression... but I just don't have that kind of skill/talent/energy/work ethic.)

[Akimaru]

^Good Idea making the clothes a seperate image too.
I started drawing a girl with her clothes on, so it was kinda hard overlaying a different piece of clothing without seeing the original clothes.

I have different sets of eyes and poses for each character, drawing all those took me quite some time but i guess a single pose would be good enough.
btw wouldn't that program Alice by tompy help you?

[PyTom]

I'm not sure if alice would really help. If you can make an alice doll, then you basically have all the skills you need to do overlays in Ren'Py, and in that case why bother creating the doll? People create alice dolls to share them, to allow completely unskilled people to make games. (It's just one more excuse we can cross of peoples lists.)

BTW, Akimari, are you using Ren'Py for your game, or making your own engine?

[mikey]

(It's just one more excuse we can cross of peoples lists.)

It's only the Time Free-Up Tool that's missing now. ... tompy ^_^

I have to say I've finally seen Phoenix Wright in action (this topic helped in getting the motivation to visit a friend), and it's really well put together, even though the frequent screen shaking is really almost health-threatening, if you recall the kids who had seizures while watching Pokemon... I felt like that was going to happen to me ^_^. But it's a nice effect if you don't overuse it.

[PyTom]

It's only the Time Free-Up Tool that's missing now. ... tompy ^_^

Why yes... for that, all we need to do is to slow the rotation on the earths axis. And that's easy to do, by building some space elevators and using them to move large chunks of the planet's mass out into geostationary orbits.

It's almost _too_ easy. (STR)

-- TomPy, the evil twin of PyTom

[Akimaru]

I'm not sure if alice would really help. If you can make an alice doll, then you basically have all the skills you need to do overlays in Ren'Py, and in that case why bother creating the doll? People create alice dolls to share them, to allow completely unskilled people to make games. (It's just one more excuse we can cross of peoples lists.)

BTW, Akimari, are you using Ren'Py for your game, or making your own engine?

oh i don't know much about alice, Quin said he didn't have much time, energy or skill to draw,
but if he could use the sprites for clothing and dolls from alice,
he wouldn't have to draw his own clothes and dolls...he could then directly implement them in his overlay system.

I made my own engine, I haven't tried Ren'Py yet, sorry

[Quin]

^Good Idea making the clothes a seperate image too.

Just to clarify (and in hopes someone might find this useful), I'm doing the clothes as a separate layer in the paint program over an unclothed body. The same unclothed body will be used for each of a character's outfits... but each character will have their own unclothed body in its own pose.

So I'll have a body for the character Amarena, overlay her Tuesday outfit in the paint program, and have AmarenaTuesday.png. I'll use that same body with her Wednesday outfit to create AmarenaWednesday.png.

I'll also have the various expressions in files -- AmarenaHappy.png, AmarenaBlushing.png, etc. So if Amarena blushes on Wednesday, I'll just overlay AmarenaBlushing.png over AmarenaWednesday.png within Ren'Py.

I started drawing a girl with her clothes on, so it was kinda hard overlaying a different piece of clothing without seeing the original clothes.

In the future, I'd recommend starting without the clothes. You don't have to draw the character naked, and you certainly don't have to go into detail even if you do. (If you've ever seen paper dolls, you'll notice they're usually wearing modest underclothes.) It makes it easier to draw the fabric hanging off the body when you're certain where the outline of the body is.

I have different sets of eyes and poses for each character, drawing all those took me quite some time but i guess a single pose would be good enough.

I'm using a single pose for each character only as a labor-saving device. If I was simply recoloring clothing to change wardrobe, I might be ambitious enough to do different poses. But I don't want to end up drawing eight characters, each in five outfits, each in four poses -- that's 160 drawings!

btw wouldn't that program Alice by tompy help you?

As PyTom suggested, ALICE won't help me. If I was using someone else's templates, it might, but I intend to create my own art from scratch. And since I can work with layers in my paint program, I can do anything there that I could do in ALICE.

Of course, once I've done all the work, it would be simple for me to release a set of ALICE dolls of my characters. But I'm not an exceptional artist, so I'll leave the ALICE creations to those with the skill and dedication.

Quin said he didn't have much time, energy or skill to draw, but if he could use the sprites for clothing and dolls from alice, he wouldn't have to draw his own clothes and dolls...he could then directly implement them in his overlay system.

I could, but I don't want to. I don't have a lot of time, energy or skill to crank out hundreds of beautiful images, but I do have enough to create my own artwork. I appreciate the work the ALICE artists have done, but they haven't drawn my characters... the ones in my head.

I've set my own limits because I know my own limits. I can't draw 160 pieces of character art... but I can do 40. I can't do beautiful, realistic shading... but I can do cel shading. I can't make a six-week-long epic as my first game... but I can handle five days. I know I can't make the next Tokimeki Memorial... but I can create a game that I can feel proud of and that will bring happiness to people. And that's more important to me than anything else.

[Akimaru]

^ok got it

I prefer drawing my own images too, well maybe also programming and composing the music by myself.. i guess i'm a control freak.

btw I have been drawing my characters for convenience nude first now...Only my first character and some characters who only wear one piece of clothing, don't need too.

[PyTom]

Honestly, I'm not sure if varying the characters clothes everyday is a good use of time. In fact, it may be counterproductive. People are quite willing to forgive not having characters change clothes, and clothing + hair is how people identify anime characters. In fact, changing clothing or hair too frequently might lead to some confusion over who is who. (Mitigated, I'm sure, by names being on screen when they are speaking.)

It's one thing to change clothes when it's meant to convey something, like a school uniform or spacesuit. But changing clothes everyday is one of those areas where people are willing to suspend disbelief. How many cartoon characters only have the single outfit?

(A compromise may be to have characters change between a pair of outfits. Heck, for a 5-day game, 3 outfits is plausable... they just did laundry in the middle.)

Again, it's a case of balancing resources versus game quality, and trying to find the point of diminishing returns.