2/8/18 and Planning
Added 2018-02-09 04:14:55 +0000 UTC
Hi everyone, it's been a bit since my last post. Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to open with a picture of the completed expressions for the main character, that couldn't be done. I've been pretty busy with some other things, and in addition to this expanded scope of the expressions for the game, I had to figure out how to do what I wanted.
To summarize things and to prepare you for the next post, I've broken down the expressions I want to make into a few components. For one, there are two images for each expression, one is the eyes and eyebrows, and the other is the mouth (the near-complete list is picture above). The various eye and mouth shapes let me create a wide variety of expressions and talking patterns. One such function of this new arrangement is that I can have about 3 or 4 different shapes for a mouth being open, and then cycle through them at different paces and order to create the illusion of speech, which means goodbye mouth flaps and hello pronunciation . I haven't tested it, but this is the same principal animators use to lip-sync audio and animation. Now I obviously won't be doing lip-sync for ALL text in the game, but just the animation should breath some life into the characters.
In addition to these expressions, I'll also have a handful of cartoonish expressions for use in more comedic scenes. These are the kind of exaggerated faces pulled off in anime. One such use of these would be for when Viridia get's annoyed at having to chase Lora. These will be used to not only give the characters more... character... but also to kind of signpost that a conversation is meant to be lighthearted, something that is hard to show with just writing and RPGmaker stock images.
I've finished all of the eye components tonight, and bye tomorrow evening I should have the rest done. So if nothing comes up, expect the next post tomorrow.
Song of the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOG3xZjX2j0
