Dev Log #5 | Agony, or about Sprites and Sounds

This weeks Dev Log is late, sorry. I was a bit busy and kept pushing it back. Part of it is the pure agony I went through. I am exaggerating a bit. And this post is a bit longer then usual. The Gif is also not perfect, it looks better in game.

But on to the important stuff. This weeks post is about sound and the misery of finding good ones, aswell as countless iterations of sprites.

Sprites, they are moving

What you can see above is a movie sprite. It is a moving sprite. Who would have thought. Making those was really important for me, as I want to tap into the power that Blender gives me. Making good use of 3D so to say.

And I did that, as you can see in form of this little gif I made. And not only that. While I used 4 different expressions in A Tale of Eden, I upgraded her to 9. She can be angry, cheeky, embarrassed, happy, neutral, scared, skeptical, surprised and of course horny! And that isn't all! embarrassed even looks like sad, so I am using it for both, how smart. What you can see right now is her neutral state. But making this sprite wasn't easy... kind of. I'll explain.

First I had to decide on whether I want a moving sprite or not. I already told you the answer, but there is a price. If I ever want to give the sprite an alternative outfit, I am gonna have to render every single expression again. That is because of the way Ren'py displays movies. A topic that is boring and not really important, so I won't get into it here. The result is a less flexible sprite. But it looks good. And I can save a bit of time with After effects and masking.

After deciding that, I had to make the animations in Blender. Not that difficult tbh. The new model I use has a way better rig and good face controls. But it was still time consuming to render all of them out and import them into After effects. So half a day later it was all well and done. I may have eaten something in between so the time isn't completely accurate but who cares. I rendered them all out, put them into the game folder and wrote the little bit of code to implement them. 

Aaaaand... they were too big. A problem I didn't even consider. so they were actually lagging a bit and that at 25fps for a 2 second loop. So 50 frames. But what can you do. I downsized them to 30 frames, meaning 15 fps. It sounds low, but you don't even notice it in a sprite. But now that I reduced the frames either way, I also ditched the movie idea. They can be a bit difficut in Ren'Py. So I made the animation directly in the code and put them in frame by frame. Now they look good, run smoothly and don't trouble me.

Writing this actually makes it sound quite easy, but trust me, I tried out lots of things to get to this point...

Sounds and music

My nemesis. Seriously. I think a good sound design is extremely important in these games. It  is a big part of what makes a game feel alive and it also tremendously upgrades any animation. But where to get them? They need to be royalty free, I am not rich and they need to sound good. And they are ideally in mp3, as that is the format Ren'Py can handle. Too bad that most sites use WVA because it has a better sound.

So I began to google. Not this week, but months ago. The obvious site is freesound and it is really great. But I don't know anything about sounds and googling "long deep wooosh" isn't the most accurate search. So I needed a site that made it simple to find their sounds with zero knowledge. And I found it. Zapsplat.com. I don't know why I didn't notice the site before, but now I have it and it is great. It gives me everything I need and is very transparent with their licensing. That and Adobe Audition helped me really up my game and I am now including many unique and interesting sounds to tell you what is happening apart from the text.

But sounds are well and good, music is equally as important. And this was a real struggle (like everything in this post, sorry.). Kevin Macleod. I like his music but damn. Everyone uses it. It honestly didn't bother me before but now I can't not hear it. it is so annoying. So I needed something else. Chilled, subtle ambient tracks. Royalty free of course and from a lesser known source. This search took forever and ever.

It was just impossible. I wanted music that wasn't too aggressive, not too generic, it should loop, be relatively unknown, of high quality and free. For some random reason I actually found it. Productioncrate.com. You can only download 5 files a day, but that is more then enough. The music meets all my criteria and is easy to manage.

So a big thank you to those two sites.

And that was it. A long one but these things had to be said.