Thyrian Defenders - 9

After scrapping several concepts, I think I've finally figured out how to present the cutscenes. As you can see in the above image, I'm breaking the scenes into cells to create a comic book style presentation. Each cell will appear one at a time and include some animated elements. For example, in the first cell a reflective sheen casts across the crystal as the kraken drifts up and out of the cell. The second cell appears and the kraken drifts past the foreground, revealing behind it the Star Hulk and Royal Space fleet, which will slowly be moving across the screen. The last cell is focused on the hangar bay, which will open, revealing the Titan. The following sequences will show the titan launching and taking down a few baddies, and that's about it. This is the intro that plays at boot up so I just want it to set the stage and show a bit of action to hype the player. For the sake of localization I'd like to avoid using dialogue at all in the cutscenes, but we'll see. Of course, there will be a rocking soundtrack to go with it.

I hope to at least have these frames all animated by next week so you can get a better feel for the presentation. It's still WIP and missing several details but I think it's going to work out. At least, it's been working so far.

Like I said, I had several different ideas of how to present the story before taking this comic book cell approach. At first, I wanted all scenes to be full screen, but after spending a whole day to draw a few rough asteroids I realized it could take me months just to create the first scene. Even if I were to come up with a very economized cartoony style I don't think it would fit the aesthetic. After pulling some inspiration from 16-bit titles like Phantasy Star 4, I formed a vision for the comic book style. Now it feels like I might actually be able to pull this off.

Here is the rough concept of the first scene in full screen, which would pan up through an asteroid field and reveal the Royal Space fleet. This alone could have taken me months to complete, and honestly the charm of the pixels starts to get lost with such a large canvas. Fortunately, I can reuse some of assets started here. 

Of course, all sequences are planned out before dropping any pixels on the canvas. Even this handmade draft has been revised several times and it still ends up changing a bit in final execution. I'm still proving the concept to myself with this first scene. So far so good, and it's feeling like the execution will meet my vision. More to come!