New Garreth Expressions & Workflow Details

With our last post, we went into a bit of detail about Folsky's new sprite creation workflow. At the time of posting it, however, we still had more refinements to make to some of them, so we weren't able to show them as an example just yet. This time, we've come prepared!

First of all, we should start by acknowledging the elephant in the room. Yes, after almost 4 years of development, Identity still lacks an expressive set of character sprites, and some of the scenes in the game still lack sprites for side characters. Unfortunately, this was one of the many challenges we had to face during our long winded development hell. We apologize for taking this long, and are working to improve things on that end.

Our sprites have undergone multiple iterations since the start of the project. You can see how they evolved by taking a trip down our Patreon's memory lane to some of our earliest posts. And while this sometimes implied refurbishing or even throwing away finished assets, it taught us so much in the process.

The changes we made were mainly tied to us getting to grips with how exactly we wanted sprites to appear in the game (given the extensive size differences between the characters), and accounting for differences in outlining, shading and expressions as Folsky grew as an artist and got himself better equipment.

We also realized quite late that we should have been splitting the sprites up into layers that could be combined at runtime, instead of having one sprite per expression and clothing variation. With possibly hundreds of variations planned, and with each sprite taking up about 0.5 MB of space, it will end up burdening the game otherwise. 

With all that said, we decided we should change the workflow we're using to make sprite art. And the agreement we came to was the one stated in the prior development news post. Earlier in the year, we started working on a complete set of sprites for just one character, Garreth. He already had a handful of expressions we presented before, but now they've been refurbished and laid out on a single sprite sheet together with new ones as can be seen above.

This is an example of the number of layers we're splitting the image up into.

Each image has a base pose layer, additional genitals and clothes layers, and at least one layer for the facial expression, if not more (in case animation is wanted later on).

Even though these assets are not yet implemented in the game, we are laying the groundwork (both assets and programming) to be able to add them in the future. And we will eventually split up our backgrounds and side portraits into layers as well.