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[breakfastbat]

Thank you! I have a makeover coming this weekend. Going to be moving into posting a lot more often, too. Planning is over, finally going hard on production!

[breakfastbat]

Back into the swing of things finally!

Going to be posting a lot more now, talking more about the things I'm working on, looking for feedback, etc.

Today I started working on a new December sprite! It's not animated yet, but it will be soon! I've been thinking about doing a flip animation when you change directions like in Paper Mario.

[Stricle]

An update! Yay!
I didn't know how much paper mario influenced people until recently.
I remember the flipping animation to be very satisfying.
December looks great and big.
Can't wait to see more!

[breakfastbat]

I actually didn't even think about Paper Mario when I went for the paper theme! But as I got deeper into development I started looking at it for visual inspiration, as they've already solved some complex visual problems in a cool way.

I do take a big chunk of influence from the Mario RPGs though - Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, and the Mario & Luigi series. I will be using more alternative themes and a slightly different approach to character writing and dialogue though. I aim to be much closer to Undertale in terms of character development, dialogue, and sense of humor. I'm currently doing my environment like a simplified FF9. There will be two perspectives, angled top-down (3/4 view), and ground-level (sidescrolling-ish but potentially with depth as well). I'll be getting into environment posts over the course of this week.

[Stricle]

I can't wait to see your characters and dialogues. I have the feeling they will be even better than Undertale's.

[breakfastbat]

I can't wait to see your characters and dialogues. I have the feeling they will be even better than Undertale's.

Dialogue is coming soon! Unfortunately TIGSource doesn't offer spoiler tags so I won't be posting dialogue here until the demo is a bit further along. If you want some sneak peeks of the dialogue I can send it to you privately.

Today I started working on some animation. I decided to do idle animations again, rather than just a triple almost-exact tracing technique like before.

Currently deciding between a semi-smooth animation style, a ticking keyframe animation style, no idle animation at all, and programmed animation.

Semi-smooth:



Keyframes:



No idle (pictured in my previous post)

Programmed (it would be uh, very slight movement but also very smooth, only one drawing).

I'm going to have to sleep on this one but I'll take feedback / ideas in the meantime. Might have to get an environment together in order to make a final decision.

EDIT: I'll probably just go with the old method but update the sprite

Old method:



EDIT 2:

Was looking at Paper Mario TTYD and they actually only have 2 directional movement sprites (plus a flip animation). I might actually go with that. So if you're walking down, down and right, or right, you get the "downright" animations, likewise for the other four quadrants, and "downleft" is just "downright" flipped, likewise for upright and upleft. That way I can work more quality into the animations that I do for everyone, and I really only need 2 drawings (plus animation) rather than 4 or 8.

[Stricle]

The first two animations might be a little too "intense", but I think we can only know comparing it with the surroundings.
I think the best thing to do now would be test different settings with an environment.

[breakfastbat]

Yeah I'm not happy with them but that's okay. I'm getting the assets together for the first time and it's gonna take some experimenting.

I'm currently strongly considering animating my characters like Mr Game & Watch in Smash. Only keyframes, slower animation, but smooth movement. Also flipping for when you change direction like in Paper Mario.

[Kryptot7]

The new sprites look great and I like how simplified and bold the lines are! Though, it's a bit unclear whether the V shape on her face is supposed to be her nose or mouth, because I can see it as either one. Personally, the "mouth" looks better to me, giving her a chibi look. If that's the intention, you might need to scoot the eyes up a bit to separate it from the mouth.

[breakfastbat]

The new sprites look great and I like how simplified and bold the lines are! Though, it's a bit unclear whether the V shape on her face is supposed to be her nose or mouth, because I can see it as either one. Personally, the "mouth" looks better to me, giving her a chibi look. If that's the intention, you might need to scoot the eyes up a bit to separate it from the mouth.

It's her nose, but I'm in the process of redoing it over the next few days in a new perspective which should make that more clear. Still trying to nail the animation direction. In all of her sprites so far the tiny v under her chin (but above the v-neck shirt collar) is her signature single fang. I don't really expect anyone to catch that on first glance though. I'll give her a portrait in-game somewhere (like the menu) that should make it more clear.

[Stricle]

I always saw it as a nose. But now I can see it as a mouth as well. (it's harder though)
It makes me remember those pokemons that have two ways of seeing them.

(I can only "see" the fang in the old picture. I mean, I see the triangle in the other two, but not as a fang.)

[breakfastbat]

(I can only "see" the fang in the old picture. I mean, I see the triangle in the other two, but not as a fang.)

That's weird, I think it's much more clear in the newer art. She's looking down so much in the old art it doesn't even make sense to be able to see the fang! I'm about 90% certain at this point that I'm going to go with a Game & Watch animation style for the characters in the game. Really excited about it the more I think about it tbh.

[breakfastbat]

Alright I've arrived at a final art direction! Characters will be drawn in 3/4 view and flipped when they change direction. This means I only have to draw two-directional idle and movement (down-right, up-right) - the rest will be programmed.



Here's a prototype of what the directional flip may look like:

[Stricle]

This means I only have to draw two-directional idle and movement (down-right, up-right) - the rest will be programmed.

Nice choice! You're gonna save some time. Besides, I personally think 3/4 views are much more interesting both to draw and to see.

[breakfastbat]

She finally turned around! I knew if I just waited long enough something would happen.

[breakfastbat]

You'll have to forgive me, development has been a bit slow this week. Here's a recap of stuff going on right now:

I'm currently in the process of a complete refactor of my code. This will hopefully be the last time I have to do a major restructuring. Let me tell you, it's been totally worth it so far. I've cut a huge amount of unnecessary code out, fixed some major bugs, got the game working in a new resolution, and restructured a few things that would have caused me some major headaches down the line.

So it's a rather large change but I've decided to move the game to a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, and I've scaled the natural resolution all the way up from 1200x900 to 3200x1800. That means that larger monitors will get to see the artwork with much higher fidelity than the previous build of my game. Storybook Dragon will now feature borderless fullscreen on monitors that use these resolutions: 1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080, 2560x1440, and 3840x2160. Other monitor resolutions will have black borders in fullscreen to account for aspect ratio differences, and - at least for now - automatically scale to one size smaller than your native resolution for windowed mode (my 1920x1080 resolution gets a 1600x900 window). I had to do a bunch of backend stuff to get all that working but I think I can set it off to the side for now (and hopefully for good).

I'm also still in the process of handling a bunch of new equipment I bought last week. It took an entire day to unbox everything, collect garbage, clean my apartment, move stuff around, etc. I also installed a blackout curtain on my window and I had to measure and drill holes and whatnot to get the curtain rod up. It all took a lot more work than I anticipated. I'm almost ready to start photographing my artwork with my new dslr camera but I'm still waiting on a couple pieces of lighting equipment. Just playing around with it I can already tell it's going to be great though. SO much better than my old dinky little camera with no tripod or anything lol.

Today I made a slightly more advanced prototype than manually flipping my image in Photoshop as in my previous post. It's actually programmed and working, though it's hard-coded for December (and still missing some functionality) so I will need to go back and make it modular to be able to handle any given character plus some additional cases.



Sorry its so small, I'm currently limited in my ability to "zoom in." I might make a sort of debug mode that brings the camera in so I can record close-ups in higher resolution. Anyway - and this is extremely picky but - getting this prototyped made me realize I'll probably end up changing the sprite when she's facing the other way. The perspective is a little weird, her hair is too detailed, and her tail accentuates her butt and makes it look more sexual than I intended it to be. I want to get other things done though so I'm going to leave it this way temporarily. I'm also going to leave off walking animation for now so I can focus on developing content other than drawing December over and over.

I also have some real life job stuff going on that's weighing on my mind and may or may not slow down development. We'll have to see.

That's all for now. I've still got some code to catch up on so I'm gonna be working on that. No promises on any new content this week. I've got a lot going on and I've still got code left to refactor so I'm not sure if there will be anything new on the art side of things this week. I will say though I've been working on menu / dialog box design recently so that might be coming up soon-ish.

[Stricle]

I personally think the perspective is all right. I can see her hair being more detailed in the back (but only because you said it).

and her tail accentuates her butt and makes it look more sexual than I intended it to be

I always think about it when designing my female characters! It's fun to see I'm not the only one.