February Roundup: Portraits & Shadows
So far this month we have already smoothed out dozens of gameplay features and cleaned up several bugs. This includes visual things like small tweaks to sprite animation problems (animations not playing properly) and proper placement/size of 2D shadows. Both of these have made gameplay look a lot better.
Below we can see how the shadow takes on an appropriate size at all times. Even when a unit’s movement type change to hover and then reverts back to normal. This is also used when a unit jumps across a gap. Since we lack a real third dimension, we have to fake a lot of stuff that requires depth, so little things like this really are very important to get right.
In the tactical role-playing game / SRPG genre, you’re going to have a lot of characters. This includes main characters, side characters, enemies, and even one and done NPCs. All of these require both sprites (obviously, haha), and larger portrait art to be used in both dialog cutscenes and on the in-game UI. As of 2/24 we have a complete set of main character portraits, side character portraits, and five (5) generic job portraits (one for each gender, making 10 total!). For now, our goal is to have proper portrait art for everything included in the demo, which is a lot.
The 40+ scenes in the demo include gameplay and dialog that will most likely change in the actual release version. For now, we’re trying to see what works, and set up a proper pipeline to create scenes and display them in a nice looking user interface. There’s so much that goes into little things like where a text box should show up or when to pan the camera that it’s important to get these fundamentals down pat before creating the entire game.
The screenshots below are from the end of the 3rd scene where our main characters, Belavosi Grandoff and Miranda Donovan meet the talented purple haired Scribe, Relena Farrow. This is just one of many variations of our dialog/scene layout that we have tested. It’s possible that for smaller scenes like this where just a few units are speaking to one another, we’ll use a 2x zoom in. It’s also possible we’ll change up the size and location of the textbox.
Currently we’re just using faces (neck up) for dialog portraits, but since we have 3/4 body portraits to work with, we can try out different sizes (busts are used below). No matter the size, the portraits will all feature a range of different emotions (see Relena in panel 1 & 3).
These are the fine work of our official portrait artist, Pzxl. While I don’t want to spoil everything, they just finished up some of the generic portraits, which are done a bit different than the main character portraits.
For generic units, i.e. units you may recruit or that will join you and have no real distinction other than their Job and gender, we have a paper-doll style system to give you a variety of different looks for similar units. Generic portraits are solely based on the Job, i.e. Warrior, Scribe, etc. There are two variants (usually), one for each gender. On top of that, we have several variation in terms of hair style, hair color, facial features, etc. So even two units with the same Job and gender will have some variety.
