In February, we kept working on Crimson Spires, but we also went on a detour to work on our first game in UE4, Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation. A lot of big changes will appear in the next patch of the game, hopefully next week! Meanwhile, here are the high lights from last month’s development. Check out our Patreon to see updates like these every week!
AVOIDING BURNOUT AT A JAM
In case you don’t already know, we participated in the 2019 Global Game Jam! Overall, it was a blast. But during that weekend, we had to keep a close eye on our burnout levels.
To clarify: we LOVE working on video games. But considering the fact we spend most of our days already working on games, it’s hard for us to get excited about a game jam. We try to spend our weekends doing OTHER things, like going out, socializing, or even just PLAYING games instead of making them! A lot of our good friends were planning to jam, and we wanted to join in on the fun. But we worried it would lead to creative burnout if we spent our whole weekend working on another video game.
All of this changed when we started joking about making a Bandersnatch parody. I’m sure most of you heard of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive movie on Netflix with a lot of hype around its release. We enjoyed Bandersnatch, but all the hype around it annoyed us, considering that interactive stories–and even Full-Motion-Video games–have been around for AWHILE. We also had some issues with the story, which we already ranted about on our blog here. We also heard it praised as a technical marvel for having no loading times, and we were like, “We could do that in Unreal Engine 4. No biggy.”
SO WE DECIDED TO GO FOR IT.
The best part about making an FMV game (for us) was that it would be a huge diversion from normal development. Instead of staring at code all weekend, we’d be FILMING! Mind you, there was still some coding involved, but we survived. Most of the weekend, we got to goof around and make a movie with our friends. And we had a blast!
Malcolm played the main character, Sam. A lot of us on the team took turns playing “Cornelius,” a ghost who lives in Sam’s house. Meanwhile Sarah Wahoff, a talented musician, was the only one who could play the ghost while jamming on a violin:
We’re trying to get an HTML5 version of the game working, but until then you can download and play the game from our GGJ page!
WALK SPEEDS – REALISM IS A DRAG!
Along with getting our fast travel system working, we’ve had to reconsider and tweak Erika’s walk speed many times over. At first, we had her moving at a standard human walk speed–a little over 3 mph. But we found that while playing, this felt excruciatingly slow. We have fast travel now, but we want to encourage exploration and we were afraid the slow walk speed would discourage it instead.
We effectively doubled the walk speed, meaning that in actuality Erika is intensely jogging everywhere. Fortunately, video games aren’t reality and “feel” is more important than realism. We believe with her current speed, she gets around town a lot better without feeling like a hurried sprint (even if, technically, that’s what she’s doing if we apply real life measurements to the game).
RE-DRAWING A CHARACTER I’VE KNOWN FOR YEARS
One of the challenges we faced when revisiting The Immolation involved touching up animations for Sofya. In our new and improved VN Framework, it is crucial that every frame of animated blinks and mouth movement have the same pixel dimensions (more on that below). In order to accomplish this, we would have to redo every single character’s animations. But how could we stop there? Once Jenny started redrawing Sofya’s mouth and eyes, she kept going. She made a lot of small adjustments to Sofya’s face.
As you can see, Jenny simplified the line art quite a bit. She also sharpened the shading. (The only reason her scar and eyes are different, of course, is because The Immolation occurs before her transformation.)
The challenge with redrawing Sofya is that we’ve looked at her existing design for years. We’re so accustomed to it that it’s very difficult to accept any change. But since creating The Immolation, Jenny’s style and process has changed and improved in a lot of ways. She really wanted to bring some of those improvements to Sofya’s design, especially in the hopes of using the changes for an eventual Episode 3.
We’re still getting used to the new version of Sofya, but we hope that the new design will make for a better introduction to Sofya in The Immolation.
ANIMATED SPRITES ARE THE SOURCE OF MUCH STRIFE
Here’s a little more detail on why we have to redo all the blink and mouth animations for the Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation update!
For all our Echoes of the Fey games so far, the blinks and mouths have looked something like this:
If you look at the pixels around each sprite, you’ll notice they’re fuzzy, smudged, and inconsistent. The dimensions of each sprite are different, as well. The second blink is taller than the first. Some of the mouth animations are taller than others, because the entire jaw moves up and down.
Now that we have experience making so many games, we have realized why designing sprite animations in this way is such a horrible idea. When separating the various layers into sprite sheets, it becomes a mathematical nightmare to keep every frame of each sprite in the right place on the character. The tiniest inconsistency causes a blink not to fully cover the eye, or makes the jaw look slightly unhinged.
With Crimson Spires, we finally learned from our past mistakes enough to create a new method for designing animation layers. In the new method, each frame of each sprite layer always has the exact same dimensions. Shadows are sharper to reduce the need for blurred edges around sprites. Mouth animations are smaller, no longer moving the jaw, and causing a smoother look in the finished product. Blink layers contain a half-ring of pixels around the eyes that always stays in the same position with the head.
While moving Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation to our new VN Framework system, we knew we’d need to redo all the animations. So Jenny figured that while she was at it, she would go ahead and fix up the original drawings, too. And that’s why we’re redrawing so much to make The Immolation update as good as possible!