I had a week off from work back in August, so I spent some of that time working on mini-projects. Once of those projects being an animated Eventure scene in a game engine. I haven't finished it yet, but I'll start by showing where I'm at so far, then I'll dive into my process for how I made it:
This project started because I was playing some games that had really inspiring art and story, like Meg's Monster and Deltarune. I've been keeping a folder of inspirational screenshots, so I spent some time updating that and just looking through it for inspiration. Through playing these games, there's often a lot of polishing features that make them stand out. That may be the art, but also subtle things like animations in the background or character-specific poses. These are often things that I don't have time to implement for my shorter game projects due to time constraints. So I wanted to make a project where I really focus on the visuals.
So I started out by thinking about locations in The Nays and scenes that I might want to use. I read through some Eventures and came up with a list of backgrounds I'd like to draw and what scenes would be associated with those. I really wanted to find a location that had either a forest or water, because those are locations that stood out to me in some of my inspirations. So I drew some thumbnail sketches of a few different scenes.
The ones that I liked the most were the PS World forest with Scott and his friends in the Death Eventure, Frosty Falls with Pubby and Pearl in the Searching for Home Eventure, and the Bobolo River with Scott and Pidgebeetle in the Bobolo River Eventure. All three of these also could make use of lights because they all take place at night.
Then I played around with some fonts to try and find one that would be fitting. I really wanted to have simple text boxes that are just text bubbles that pop up above the characters' heads. So I typed out some quotes and looked at a few options I already had downloaded to try and decide which to use. I was leaning towards the one at the bottom.
I decided to go with the Bobolo Eventure scene. So I made a new sketch to update the sizing and make sure the text bubble fit well. I looked at a lot of my inspirations for size references of character sprites and text bubbles because I had previously made everything a bit bigger than it needed to be. I also expanded the canvas so I could have a bit more space to work with outside of what's directly on the screen.
Then I started to set up the basic project file and find if there were any plugins I wanted to use. I found some cool particle effects plugins that'll help add the atmosphere I'm going for, so I did some tests to get some timing with some placeholder assets.
Then I added some base colors to my sketch to try and figure out the general color palette. I was trying to keep a fairly limited palette and something that would look good with a darker atmosphere at night.
I started to figure out what plugins I wanted to use for the text box. VisuStella Message Core and Galv Message Style never play nice together, but I at least found someone that had a tip for making them work to the extent that it doesn't crash! I decided Galv's plugin used more of what I was looking for with those text boxes above their heads, so I went with that for the time being. Because this isn't planned to have a lot of text, I may not even really need the word wrapping and might just type text straight in RPG Maker without Ink to keep it simple. I also want to make this playable in the browser, which rules out the Ink plugin anyway since that doesn't work with browser exports. I kept the text box very simple to just black and white for now with a minimal border and text indicator. I also added black bars that animate from the top and bottom to indicate it's the start of a cutscene.
Then I started to concept sketches for the animations for Pidgebeetle and Scott. I maybe drew more sprites than I'll have in the final version and they're still super rough, but I wanted to get something in there to work off of.
I decided to try out Aseprite because animating on multiple layers in Photoshop can sometimes be a bit harder to keep track of and immediately see results for. I had to get used to it at first (especially the tools being on the right side and unable to be moved to the left side), but overall I think it helped for animating. The tagging system helped too so I could look at my animation and know which parts related to which part at a glance.
I started with final art for Pidgebeetle's idle animation. I saved it out as a spritesheet and imported it into the engine with the speed I want him to move at. I also drew some head turns for him that I'll use for later parts of the scene.
From there, I continued to finalize all of the animations for Pidgebeetle. I dedicated time to just finishing the lineart and color for all of his animations before even exporting them as spritesheets or moving on to any of the other characters, because I really wanted to work that muscle memory of drawing him all in a row.
Then I imported the spritesheets into RPG Maker and set up all of the animations with some basic timing in the engine. I still plan to time it out more with the rest of the dialogue, but got something working in there for now. I was having some issues with the animation frames displaying in the proper order though, because of some of the weirdness with how the Set Movement Routes work in RPG Maker though, so I had to do some troubleshooting on that.
It took me a lot of time to troubleshoot the animation issue. I posted on the forums to ask for help with it, and from there, was directed to a plugin. I ended up going the plugin route and downloading multiple until I found the right combination of 2 plugin creators that finally resolved my issue. It involved manually hard coding the frames, using a plugin that allowed for more than 3 frames, and holding a few of the frames to account for any delays/errors that could randomly happen. It's not perfect, but I at least got it looking close to what I wanted from all of this.
I ended up adjusting the explosion animation a bit to delete a few frames so it would look more integrated overall and I changed the smoke to show pictures instead of character spritesheets.
And that's where I'm at so far! I took a break from working on this, but documented all of this, so I figured I would share where I'm at right now and then come back to revisit it later.
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