Dev Log #8 | Sprites again...

First of all, a warm welcome to the new patrons, I am happy that you decided to support my work.

Now on to the pressing topic. It is sprites again. A bit annoying to be honest, as this is the third time I have to do them over, but I am very sure this will be the last major "redoing".

Here is the problem:

My current sprites consist of different emotions, paired with a breathing animation. That animation is relatively smooth. I say relatively, because I had to decrease the frames so much, that it now isn't really smooth anymore. Which brings me to one of the biggest problems, performance.

It does sound funny that a meager looping 15 frames would give the performance trouble, but Ren'py is simply not made for animations like that. It is optimized for short, 2D animations with less frames. So the game is sometimes a bit laggy, if you have an old pc or maybe even a notebook or tablet, that can become a real problem. On top of that I am limited in the use of the sprites because of that and can't use any transforms with them. It is very annoying.

But there is another problem. I am also not happy from an artistic point of view. While the sprites convey basic emotions, they don't have any character. It is just one pose and one animation with different faces. Compare that to a game like Ace Attorney, where the sprites are filled with character and attitude and they are animated and even talk when the text is read.

Now this is my solution:

I am making new sprites, all with a unique pose that fits the expression and a unique animation to fit the pose. On top of that I will also do the integration of blinking and talking animations. I am basically turning them into "real" 2D sprites. Now that solution loses the breathing, which is a bit sad. But that is the point of it, because that breathing just kills the performance. So they are still animated in the end, but in a way that is much more ressource friendly and won't lead to lags, even on  old systems.

I already began with this process, but the expressions, poses and animations are not necessarily final and can still change before the release of v.0.1.2. You can check out how they would look in the gif. But keep in mind that the timings are randomized in the game and not a constant annoying loop. And the obvious on top. The gif doesn't show the mouth flaps.