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Devlog 3: Experimenting with...


Animated sprites. So small news, I'm still working on the VN. I am having some hiccups with GPU being a bit older (I'm on a GTX 1660 ti which is on the lower end when doing a lot of rendering.) so its a bit slow but still steadily progressing. I might be able to upgrade soon if things work out.

Anyway, I had a few experiments with animated sprites, see below:


A lot of things still need work on these sprites so this will not yet come out in the next update. As you can see from the video, some of the animation is a little choppy, some of their arms are robotic. I mistakenly rendered the doctor's video at narrower a format so it clips when he moves his hand outward. They also have similar gestures of the hand which I need to learn more of. They also flicker occasionally during transitions especially when I skip along the dialogue and wait until they return to idle. This doesn't happen when I wait for them to return to idle before moving on to the next line of dialogue. (I'm still looking for solutions to all these.)

I tested this on an android build and the same issues are there, but the FPS surprisingly holds well(Samsung A12) so I think this could be lightweight enough for mobile.

IF/When I get these to a certain level of polish I'll put them in-game but sparingly. I still prefer the full screen CG stills over sprite but the sprites are quite useful and are reusable so they definitely have a place here. There will be some parts of the visual novel in the future updates where you hang-out with choice characters in places we've already been to and just talk. Those are perfect situations where these would be perfect. In the long run, being able to reuse these sprites will allow me to spare some space and keep the game size smaller. Of course, important scenes will still be full screen CGs. (IF you're thinking full-screen movies, I'm not yet sure about those at this point because of some technical stuff that I can't share, but we'll see.)

 I was hoping next update was this month but I'm really lagging behind, on that front. I had to rearrange some bits of the script, particularly some important parts that come immediately in the next update so I will have to give a tentative ETA of September for Early access on that.

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Comments

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(2 edits) (+2)

Personally I'd focus on moving the story forward. Animation with your rig is just going to make you feel frustrated and ineffectual. Nothing is worse than waiting for hours to get a result you don't like and unlike stills it's much harder to fix animated scenes in post.

I agree. And you're right, the animated sprites is definitely very low priority right now, I come to it from time to time and spend a small time testing it out, then I go right back into working on the rest of the VN. I did find myself spending an entire day on it at one point and felt very unproductive. So now, I've learned that and am very careful not to put too much into them. They're kinda in the back-burner for now since I'm way behind on my schedule for the actual VN.

(+1)

Thanks for the update.  I like reading about what's happening behind the scenes as well.  CG is definitely grueling when it comes to render times and even animation especially if your computer is not a top tier device (that most people can't actually afford anyway).  Hopefully things will turn around for you.

Thanks. I'm definitely slowly getting a handle on things here with trying to gauge what my rig is capable of and learning how much I can fit in the time I have so I still make my deadlines.