It’s time for another game development update! Over the last couple of months, we added a lot of exciting features to Crimson Spires and found ways to make our development process more efficient. You can view these changes in action by playing our free demo, available on itch.
COMIC BOOK PANELS
As we began to block out an exciting action sequence in the story, we came upon an all-too-common challenge. How do we suggest a large amount of movement and action within a scene while constrained by static 2D characters? Sometimes movement can be suggested with slides and camera shakes, but other times, those motions look silly and dampen the player’s imagination.
The character sprites can’t properly overlap in this situation…
We consulted a fellow artist who has taken an interest in the project, Mike Harvey, who gave us a great idea. We could take a lesson from comic books and use panels to suggest some action while leaving the rest to player imagination.
Panels show character talk over CG
With panels, we can catch a glimpse of off-screen characters with a more dramatic flare than the typical side-portrait. Scenes like the one above are still a bit tricky to set up, and we might need to keep tweaking it. But overall, panels will be a fun feature for us to play with to increase the drama and action of exciting scenes.
We can also use the panels to display minor characters in an abstract way. Long conversations with a minor character become more visually appealing if that character remains on screen.
PERFECTING A NOISE / FILM GRAIN
We’ve talked in the past about how we occasionally work in/adapt UE4 Marketplace assets to Crimson Spires, but usually that comes up when there is a very specific asset we need and we search to see if there is a sufficient existing version that would save us the time of making it ourselves. This time, something different happened.
Every month, UE4 offers a new set of free assets that all developers can claim and use in their projects. For May, they offered Chameleon Post Process, a blueprint that applies a set of post processing effects. We’ve had our own journey creating the camera effects in Crimson Spires, starting with using the UE4 Post Processing volume to apply film grain, then setting up our own custom effect using Post Processing Materials.
When we tried out the Chameleon effect, we discovered that it could easily do everything that our custom effect could and more. We could still have the scratchiness and CRT noise we apply regularly in the game, but we could also use it for a few other dramatic effects in individual scenes. This left us with a hard decision to make of whether to replace our Post Processing with Chameleon. We could have never known that this Blueprint would later become available to us when we did our initial post processing work, but it’s still hard to throw away stuff you’ve worked on. We eventually decided that the extra effects would be worth our begrudging acceptance that we didn’t have to make the effects ourselves a few months ago.
In-game screenshot with Chameleon film grain and rain droplets
Once the decision was made, we carefully went through and replaced our PP volumes with Chameleon, which revealed some inconsistencies with how we maintained our effects between our player camera and cinematic cameras. This problem would have sprung up eventually, and we’re glad we were prompted to fix it.
Greetings everyone! For awhile now, we’ve been posting weekly game development updates for Scribe-level patrons over on our Patreon. But as a result, we’ve forgotten to post regular updates here on our blog! So today we offer a summary of our development in January, picking out the best excerpts from our weekly Patreon Dev Updates.
SETTING BOUNDARIES – WITH AN ECHO FROM THE FEY
In the beginning of January, we focused on preparing a new demo build of Crimson Spires. We wanted the demo to include an explore-able section of Bataille. But to achieve that, we needed to cordon off the part of the town relevant to the demo.
Building the full town of Bataille in 3D is a huge endeavor, and we’re far from finished. So there are parts of Bataille that are still empty. Fortunately, the demo takes place in a small section around the town square, but we needed to prevent players from stumbling into the unfinished parts of the game.
To start, we placed long/wide boundary actors around the relevant parts of Bataille. These actors were children of our general “TouchClick_BP” actors used to trigger scenes, just invisible. The goal was to trigger a short scene telling the player to turn around.
These actors, however, had a funny side effect because of a little bit of code left over from Echoes of the Fey. In Echoes, clicking on scene actors from ANY distance would trigger the scene. That worked great in 2D space. In 3D space, this leftover “mouse click” code started triggering the boundary scenes in random spots in the world. The reason was simple: if you surround 3D space in actors that consume a mouse click and trigger a scene, sometimes you’ll accidentally click on them.
Finally, we removed that functionality and the boundaries now work as intended!
ART MANIA: DRAWING A SIBLING
In the screenshot below, you’ll see one of the minor town characters, Principal Vincent.
Well, Principal Vincent has a brother named Caleb Vincent. So far he has precisely ONE line in the script. But it’s kind of important, so I (Jenny) decided to go ahead and draw a portrait for Caleb. Due to the fact he’s Principal Vincent’s brother, I thought I should give them some similar facial features.
Unintentionally, by copying a lot of Principal Vincent’s facial features, my first pass at Caleb looked somewhat effeminate:
I love effeminate men and sometimes draw them on purpose, but it was NOT my intention with Caleb. In fact, I wanted him to be a gruff hillbilly type.
I asked some local artist friends for advice, and it blew up into a huge conversation about what typically constitutes “masculine” or “feminine” in anime designs, which is a difficult thing to pinpoint. The easiest solution for Caleb seemed to be giving him a beard, but for whatever reason, my first pass at that looked terrible. You can see the iterations below, ending with the latest (and perhaps final?).
This is a funny example of how you never know what will take up the most time in game development. I’ve probably designed full-bodied character portraits in less time than it took me to draw Caleb. And the most ridiculous part is that–so far–he only has ONE FRIGGIN LINE in the whole script! *Sigh*
THE CHALLENGE OF WRITING JULIAN’S PATH
Now it’s time for me (Jenny) to be real about something. I have an embarrassing confession to make.
I HAVE BEEN STUCK ON THE SAME FIVE PAGES IN JULIAN’S SCRIPT FOR THREE MONTHS.
Yep. You heard right. In three months, the script for Crimson Spires has not progressed. I have written and rewritten the same five pages over, and over, and over again. But each time I did not feel happy about it.
Firstly, I should point out that this is very rare for me. Writers talk about writer’s block all the time, but it’s something I almost never struggle with, and I’ve been writing novels since I was in middle school. This particular block was also easy for me to ignore, because I could always work on something else for Crimson Spires. There’s always portraits for me to draw, blueprints to code, and music to compose. But now, game development has caught up to the point in the script where I’m blocked. So I had no choice but to confront it.
It’s hard to say exactly what caused this block. Some of it might have been personal. Malcolm and I suffered a big discouragement regarding the project last November, around when my writer’s block started. This was when we thought we might receive some funding from a convention we attended, and were very surprised and demoralized when we didn’t. Creatively, this took a lot of wind out of my sails.
But I think the reason is also related to the challenge of writing Julian’s path. He’s a friggin vampire. On top of that, he’s sort of a snobbish jerk. As his creator, I know what makes Julian lovable and interesting. But getting Erika to fall in love with him has been the real challenge. In so many ways, they are incompatible. The section of the script where I got stuck involved their lowest point, from which Erika was supposed to start falling in love with him. But it just never felt right. I couldn’t find the spark between them.
I can’t go into too much detail without giving away plot spoilers, but I’ll just say that I finally broke down to Malcolm and admitted how much trouble I was having. I’m so grateful to have a creative partner I trust and respect as much as him! He listened and thought about it quietly for a long time. Finally, he told me how he would write it if he were in my position. Although I didn’t fully agree with him, his perspective allowed me to see the story in a new light. I saw where I might be able to create that spark between Julian and Erika.
We kept bouncing ideas back and forth, until finally, I went back to my outline and jotted them down. After a day or two mulling it all over, I knew it was the right way to proceed. Once again, I needed to go back and rewrite large sections of the script. But I finally did. And I finally felt capable of forging ahead.
The struggle has been real, but I hope that it pays off in the end. I hope the romances we write in this game are ones you can all fall in love with!
AND FINALLY, HERE’S SOME MUSIC
Sometimes my creative cycle hits a point where I strongly desire to focus on one outlet, whether writing, drawing, or composing. Last month, I went into a long composition spree. Here’s the primary new song I created, from which I’m developing a few other versions:
This song features a new instrument and starts in a different key than the rest of the soundtrack, so it will be a challenge to keep blending it with the other tracks!
Hey everyone! We’re happy to finally confirm that we’re releasing Echoes of the Fey: The Fox’s Trail for the PC on July 12, 2016. Up until now, we’ve stuck to the cagey “Summer 2016” because we weren’t done with the game and we didn’t know just how many bugs we’d have to squash as we wrap up our development cycle. But now that we’re deep in the QA phase, we can nail down our release.
Initially, Echoes of the Fey will be available through our itch.io page at woodsy-studio.itch.io. We’re still waiting on Steam Greenlight, so if you haven’t voted there yet, please head on over and give us a thumbs up! Once we’re out on Steam, any itch.io purchasers will receive a Steam key so there’s no reason to wait.
Leading up to the release, I’ll be publishing a short story, Echoes of the Fey: The Prophet’s Arm, in chunks on this blog. The Prophet’s Arm takes place before The Fox’s Trail and details Sofya’s first meeting with one of the side characters in the game. So be on the lookout for those posts, as well as additional information about our release as it is finalized!
*This post is from my Tumblr a while back, but I thought it might be useful to re-post it here!*
After creating my Serafina’s Saga animation (20 friggin minutes of animated frames), I thought I’d share some of my knowledge thus far, particularly tips and shortcuts that work for me. The images I’ll use are from this scene of the animation; watch it to see my personal speech-animation style in action.
Any aspiring animator has probably seen a diagram of mouth shapes corresponding to every consonant and vowel. I found Preston Blair’s diagrams most useful when I started out. But personally, I wanted my mouth movements to be slightly more realistic than Blair’s, which are very exaggerated. At the same time, I didn’t want to go to the anime extreme of just making a mouth flap up and down with very little emphasis.
I don’t claim to be a top expert, but I suspect that what I’ve learned so far would be useful to other people starting out, or other animators searching for a medium between Looney Tunes and Japanese anime styles. Therefore, I have gradually developed my own speech diagram and I hope you will find it useful (please forgive the fact that my current examples are drawn at a slight angle).
CONSONANTS
The good news is that for most consonants, you can get away with using a single drawing: the gritted teeth.
(K, G, H, S, Z, CH, J…)
This mouth position is my favorite because it can be the most expressive. You can turn the gritted teeth into a grin, a snarl, or a frown while the character is talking. For a sinister character, you can emphasize the jut of the canines over the bottom teeth. You can also leave the mouth in this position in between words, giving it additional exposure.
Due to the fact you will probably use this mouth position frequently and it has the potential to convey so much emotion, I suggest you put a lot of thought into how you draw hard consonants so you can use the position to its full potential.
Once you have finished developing your hard consonant mouth position, make an altered version with slightly drooped lips for what I call the soft consonant. You will probably use this for a lot of the same letters, but in the context of different words. For instance, consider how the shape of your mouth making the K sound changes between saying “I kicked” vs “walker” (okay random examples but hopefully you get the idea). When saying “I kicked,” the vowels around the K make it a hard consonant. When saying “walker,” the mouth will be in a lower, softer shape, forming the soft consonant.
Honestly, I use this position mostly for the letter L and hardly ever use it otherwise. The key is to show the top teeth and a little bit of tongue behind them. I don’t particularly like drawing it and I find that whenever I use it—for whatever reason—it looks like the character’s making the L sound, even if I’m using it for D or TH. Of all the possibilities other than L for this position, I find that the hard or soft consonant drawings work better.
Without a doubt, this is my least favorite mouth position to draw. It necessitates those awkward creases in the lip and it makes the character look like a chipmunk. But let’s face it, sometimes they need to make the F or V sound. In which case, just go ahead and draw the damn mouth position.
This one is pretty straightforward, fortunately. The B,P, or Ms are basically just closed mouths. However, you might want to pinch the edges and narrow the lips from the neutral position (like they’re pursing or puckering) to give the sounds emphasis.
THE “OOH” (OR KISS-KISSY) POSITION
I’m putting this mouth position into its own category because it can be used for W, R, or OO sounds. Personally, I find it very hard to draw, but I always end up using it far more frequently than I expect. The key to drawing it is to form an “O” shape in the middle of the mouth, but make it small enough so the character isn’t making an OH sound. If you still have trouble, just imagine that your character is about to give someone a kiss.
Kind of like the hard and soft consonants, I usually make two versions of this position, one more exaggerated than the other or even showing teeth. Alternate between the two depending on the word, or use the less extreme positions as transitions. A mouth moving from EE to OO can be far too extreme otherwise.
VOWELS
Take your hard consonant mouth position, pry the mouth open, and you’ve got your basic EE or I sound. But before you claim victory, make sure to turn the mouth up at the edges, almost as if your character is smiling. This will distinguish it from the next position.
When making the A or EH sound, the mouth pinches slightly at the edges, giving it a reverse slope of the EE position. Occasionally, you might need to make more versions that are even wider or narrower. If you need to make this position more extreme, don’t show the bottom teeth, and maybe show a little bit of tongue in the back of mouth. In which case you’re shifting it towards the next mouth position…
This position is another awkward one to draw, because either you show the tongue way in the back of the mouth, or you hide it and thus make the whole mouth look like a drooping black hole. I leave that to your discretion. But make sure you give that arching shape to the top and lower lip, implying the AH or UH sounds. Pretend your character is opening his or her mouth for a doctor’s thermometer.
And at long last, here is the OH position, which basically forms a wide oval. Similar to AH position, you might want to show a tongue in this drawing so it’s not a huge black hole, but I usually choose not to, because the big black hole is partially what distinguishes the OH sound.
***
And that pretty much wraps it up! But first, a few more tips:
One of my most frequent mistakes starting out was to close the mouth whenever the character paused between words. I soon realized this wasn’t very natural, especially when I put it VA recordings over it. People usually breathe or leave their mouths slightly open between words. When in doubt, use the hard or soft consonant positions to fill pauses!
Don’t draw every single letter in a word; it simply isn’t necessary, and will probably make the character look ridiculous. Watch yourself in a mirror saying the words and figure out which sounds your mouth emphasizes. Then pick which mouth positions to draw and utilize.
On the other hand, sometimes you will need to use two mouth positions for one sound. For instance, I provided one mouth position for “OH,” but if I actually animated the word “OH,” the OH mouth position would be followed by the OO position. Usually you just have to feel this out as you go.
Although I’ve provided most of the mouth positions I use here, sometimes I need to draw a lot of in-betweens. Stay flexible and be willing to draw more in-between positions if these just aren’t cutting it.
On a more technical note, I suggest animating the frames in Photoshop’s timeline and then bringing them into After Effects for timing. Right click on your movie and choose “Enable Time Remapping” to start matching the mouth movements to your sound clip. Once you do that, you might need to go back into Photoshop for tweaking, but it will save you the hassle of trying to figure out all the timing on your own.
All right, that’s all I’ve got for now! I hope you find this helpful!
More times than I can count, I’ve heard people say: “You can’t be the master of all trades.” While that may be technically true–no one can singularly master all trades alone–I don’t accept that motto as a general philosophy. I aspire to the ideals of a Renaissance woman: someone who seeks to achieve excellence in as many crafts as possible. I can’t help myself. I have a lot of interests, and I’m generally skilled enough to at least achieve competence in whatever I pursue, so I tend to keep trying!
As a result, I’ve often worked on my creative projects alone; not by deliberate choice, necessarily, but simply because I can. For someone with multiple interests, it’s often easier to go ahead and do everything yourself rather than take the time and energy to find other people to help you. Many times, this has saved me from failure; plenty of projects never would have been completed if I didn’t eventually do everything myself. I’ve recruited other people to help me in the past, only to find that they drop out or else vanish shortly into the project, never to be heard from again. This makes me reluctant to trust new people.
But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.
Over the last year, I’ve made ongoing efforts to work on creative teams any chance I get rather than flying solo. Game Jams have been great exercises in this respect, forcing me to focus on one specific role for 48 frantic hours of cohesive production. But the games I make at jams are very different from the games I make in my own time, which are narrative-heavy visual novels. Therefore, it’s still difficult to take the lessons I learn at Game Jams and translate them into my ongoing work.
A better experiment was the recent 8-Bit Dev Pipe here in St Louis, where I worked on a small team to create a game in 8 weeks. Unfortunately, a couple weeks in, our programmer dropped out, forcing me and my one remaining teammate to completely reevaluate the project and our roles in it. He and I shared a lot of the same skills, so we were stuck in an awkward position. We couldn’t just split up the project based on our strengths and weakness. We had to really ask ourselves: which part of the project do we want to work on most, and why?
Altogether, I’ve come to the following conclusions about why working on a team can be beneficial or difficult, even to one such as myself:
TEAMWORK CONS:
1) Finding competent people to work with you costs time, effort, and probably money. Other people probably won’t feel motivated to help your project unless they’re getting paid *or* they feel like the project is theirs as much as it is yours. If you start the project on your own, it will be even harder (or simply impossible) to bring other people on board afterwards.
2) You must trust your teammates to work effectively. This is a big challenge for me. I find it very difficult to trust or rely on other people, due to how many times they’ve let me down in the past. But you must set your doubts aside and have faith in your team members for everyone to work well together. This is especially unfortunate if they do not, indeed, deserve your trust.
3) Different ideas can lead to a fragmented project. Most likely, every individual on the team will have at least a slightly different vision of the what the final product will look like. If not handled correctly, or if healthy communication isn’t constantly enforced, this can cause the final project to lose cohesiveness.
TEAMWORK PROS:
1) Two heads are better than one. Sometimes if you’re stuck, a second person’s perspective can help you out of the rut, even if they know less about the craft than you do.
2) Moral support. When you’re alone, it’s easy to get depressed about every failure within the project. You might start to feel as if you can never fulfill your hopes, or that maybe it was foolish to try in the first place. All of the weight lies on your shoulders. But if you have just one more person working with you, you can take turns feeling the lows and highs of success and failure. You can provide critical feedback as well as ongoing encouragement to each other. In a sense, the stakes are higher, because more people will suffer from an overall failure of the project. But this fact can also help motivate you to do your best at every stage in the process.
3) Different ideas can lead to … a better game! It turns out the third con of working on a team can turn into a pro if handled correctly. If everyone on the team remains honest about his aspirations for the project, and–yes–argues out the reasons to do something his way rather than another, you might find that you agree with him. If everyone remains open to new ideas and willing to discuss them until a consensus is reached, then you will probably find that your final product gets better and better as a result.
Moral of the Story?
I’m still learning how to work effectively with other people, and trying to expand my studio to include more creative people with new ideas and perspectives. It’s not easy by any means, shape, or form. But I do feel like I continue to grow and improve as an artist the more often I challenge myself by working with other people–not to mention forging fun relationships with awesome individuals in the process–so I do believe it’s worthwhile to keep trying.
