Lighting & Layers
Added 2020-11-01 17:01:04 +0000 UTCOn top of the amount of time it takes to render an image, I also have the task of figuring out the lighting for all my scenes. Now a lot of modern Visual Novel games will give you simple images for each scene, the creator having rendered out each scene as a single image or animation. Traditional hand-drawn VN's on the other hand often used separate backgrounds, and then sprites for their characters.
Ren'Py has built-in layers for displaying these character sprites and backgrounds, allowing the creator to mix and match locations and characters, allowing for a larger variety of scenes with the need for fewer images.
Being a game with transformations, I opted for the traditional sprite-based method for my game. Having multiple characters, who each have multiple transformation options, just makes for too many variants if I was to render full images. I've instead opted to make composite scenes inside of Ren'Py.
(Composite image of 4 separate renders, pieced together in GIMP)
The issue with that ultimately comes down to lighting. Having each character and background rendered separately can create some issues with lighting if planning is not taken beforehand.
Right now I'm doing a lot of trial and error solutions, that once I find ones that work the best, I hope to set them up as a standard part of my workflow going forward.
While I'm not a stranger to creating this sort of composite image in GIMP, the goal is to create a solution that leads to a consistent level of quality throughout the game.
