Next Funding Goal: What Will "Limited Animated Effects" Entail?

This week, instead of sharing the latest Campbell Homestead backgrounds we've finished (booooring!), I thought you guys might like a quick behind the scenes look at some recent Changeling Tale R&D.

While we are still a ways away from hitting our next funding goal, "Limited Animated Effects," I invested some time over the past few weeks to get a sense in advance of the workflow involved with animating assets in the game.  This included building a sprite from the ground up and learning to animate it in Live2D (video link above), as well as becoming more familiar with the animation functions built into Ren'Py itself (gif below).

Here's what I learned:

• Fully articulated sprites can look really good, and are surprisingly straightforward to make, if labor intensive!  Unfortunately, sprites have to be constructed in a very specific manner to be able to manipulate them effectively in 2D animation programs like Live2D, Dragonbone and Spine.  That basically means we would have to redraw all our existing sprites from the ground up, which would be prohibitively difficult for Changeling Tale.  It's definitely feasible for the next game, though, if we go into it with the goal of fully articulated sprites in mind!
• The engine we are using, Ren'Py, also currently isn't 100% compatible with the outputs from 2D animation programs.  However, visual novels made with Ren'Py don't have to look static; the engine has lots of great functions that enable movement and timed cycles.  It's a bit more rudimentary than full articulation, but it can still be used to good effect, like with the pulsing star flare and distant shell bursts above.  This can bring backgrounds alive and be extended to sprites with blinking animations, etc.

So, in summary, "Limited Animated Effects" in Changeling Tale would not involve full sprite animation, but it would include simple animations like blinking and more extensive motion and cyclical effects in the background.  If and when we get closer to hitting that goal we can start exploring our options in depth, but for now I will use what I learned to make sure upcoming assets are constructed in a way that facilitates their future animation.

(And I'll leave that animated background, above, in the next build of Changeling Tale as a taste of the game's animation potential!)

Thanks for reading - I hope this was insightful!  Let us know what you think, and if there's anything else in the Changeling Tale pipeline that you'd like to know more about!