Sprite poses

[Auro-Cyanide]

I posted this on LSF but since a bunch of you don't go there, I'll post it here too since I'm looking for opinions. Please note I'm not exactly looking for the most visually impressive solution, but the best way to communicate and still finish the game within a decent amount of time

I thought I had answered this question myself previously, but obviously not since I keep thinking about it. My musings have lead me to think about many things related to the pros and cons of having multiple sprite poses and so I am currently still tossing up if I actually want to do them.

The background to this is I have currently done... 12 sprites for BCM, the 5 mains and a bunch of secondary characters. I am going to be editing the sprites in the near future, hopefully short of redrawing them. Must resist redrawing. There are things I need to smooth out, some anatomy to fix (seriously, why do I draw collarbones so low D:) as well as expanding on the current sprites. Right now the characters generally have (or will have) neutral poses. I had previously dismissed the idea of more poses because of the time it was taking to create the sprites, as well as all the other work that needed to be done. The point is to get the game finished after all. I can create the prettiest, most detailed sprites I have ever drawn, but that's pointless if they are never in a game XD

However, after Nanoreno I have learnt quite a few things, and we have made a couple choices that have cut down my workload. So once again multiple poses have fallen into the realm of doable and possibly worth it.

Now comes the choices. The way I see it, there are two reasons to have different poses.
-One is to exaggerate emotion. Humans use body language to communicate and while a neutral pose can read okay as either positive or negative, it doesn't have the same volume. However, theoretically you could have a pose for every sentence a character says. Sometimes every word. So where do you draw lines on what you draw? Should I go with 3 and have neutral, positive and negative? Would the fact these existed make the lack of more poses more obvious? I have learnt from drawing emotions that the more you have the more subtle they need to be and the amount can tend to increase exponentially.
-To give life to the characters. Like blinking eyes I feel these poses would be far more minor and are more about giving the characters a certain amount of animation. They would not be about conveying significantly more emotion, but giving some visual interest. I am leaning a bit more in this direction simply because I feel that I might cause problems having dramatically different poses. I am limited by what I can do in certain time frames after all.

Other problems to consider is that I would probably only be applying this to the main characters. With as many side characters as I have, it would probably be impossibly to do everyone and I don't think the effort would be worth it. Would it be weird to see the main characters move and the side characters not move? There is also a chance inconsistencies will creep in. I think I do worry about this one too much, I'm not sure many people notice it the same way I do. There is also the technical aspects like building the sprites to begin with and redrawing a bunch of stuff.

Anyway, thoughts and solutions?

[Angra Mainyu]

You know, I was wondering if perhaps you'd reconsider your position of not utilizing extra character poses. I have my own personal bias, but I always thought it was one of the larger technical deficiencies in BCM. Well, I suppose deficiency is a little too harsh. But from my perspective, I consider variation in poses to be of utmost importance. Otherwise, you end up with sprites in particularly awkward situations, given the dialog.

What we're employing (thus I would advocate using) are sprites which have three positions. Essentially, left-facing, center and right-facing. For the most part, the poses themselves aren't indicative of emotions. Instead, facial expressions tend to group around one of the positions.

So, the left-facing sprite may cover happy, laughing, etc. The middle sprite would cover more neutral expressions. The right-facing sprite might cover scared, disappointed, angry, etc.

This way, if a character changes from one extreme to the other during a given scene, the neutral middle sprite can serve as a transition. And believe me, after doing some testing, having a sprite switch between right-facing to left-facing is jarring.

I don't particularly like pimping my own work, but you can see for yourself how our implementation works out in one of our .

Although, all that being said (and you alluded to it yourself) I don't know that you would necessarily want to to put in this much extra work. The sprites do need to be planned out ahead of time.

I suppose an alternate, less strenuous solution might be to consider keeping all of your current sprites, but add alternate arm positions to them. You wouldn't have to redraw the sprites completely. And it would add variation throughout a given scene. Perhaps add an "arms folded" variant to characters who are stand-offish or untrusting. Maybe add a "hand-under-the-chin" variation for characters who are contemplative, or are typically lost in thought.

[Auro-Cyanide]

No, I agree. I originally choose not to do it because it was simply too much for me at that point in time. I haven't really been working on VNs that long so I'm still on a learning curve for sprites (though it's slowly getting better) and since I'm the only artists (obviously, since there are only two of us) with all the other work I had to do it didn't seem like the best use of my time. I would prefer that the sprites only had one pose and I could get the backgrounds and CGs done and the game finished than to have really nice sprites but still be working on the game a couple years done the road. I want this game to look really nice to match the wonderful story, but we also have other stories we want to tell as well

However, I found I could work a lot faster than I thought I could during Nanoreno. Not that I could keep that up all the time and the quality did go down, but i still learnt a couple things that helped streamline the process. Plus, we are going to be using photos as bases for backgrounds (like what I did for RisAmo but with more effort put in to paint and edit them) and many sprites are now only going to be side sprites after we discovered, surprisingly to me, that people didn't really like not that important characters to be shown too much. Also Camille recently learnt how to do them I was set on the course of the more the better, but other people found that visually confusing. So my work load dramatically decreased and it opened up so new possibilities I still have to decide which characters should be on-screen and who should be side, which is also hard. Technically it could just be the main characters and everyone else is said, but I wonder if that would be a bit empty... I'm not that far off completing the important secondary characters anyway. Probably only 3-4 more.

Our sprites flip okay (I'm soooooo glad I checked that before inking and colouring), though Masa and Kyousuke are getting edited poses cause they annoy me. Since Shuuki is the main character and is on screen, the idea is that the characters are talking to each other. They can also flip to talk to someone on the other side, or turn their backs on people. I think the emotional range of the expressions is pretty good, though I am going to add a couple more since there were spaces where they were missing in the story. If I did do different poses I would probably try to use what I could from the original sprite, so arm movement would probably be most plausible. I want to at least try and keep the face the same so I don't have to draw 3 score of them again.

Is that link similar to you demo? It's just I use a mac ^_^'

I've found out some very interesting opinions so far, and I feel I am closer to thinking up what I should do. I feel at this point it would be a good decision to make, and worth the effort. Just have to figure out what the poses should be. There is also a good chance I will be adding some more 'detail' aspects to differentiate things. Stuff like wet hair and clothes for rainy scenes, wounds, tired eyes, bed hair that type of thing. I tried this a bit in RisAmo and while only a couple people noticed it I think it adds a nice layer of realism without too much effort. Probably underlines the need for poses though, at least 1 more.


The fact is that I'm never going to reach visual perfection. There will always be something that could be better or more. That is what it is by it's nature. However, compromises need to be reached if I want to finish this before I die. Not being able to do all I want, not being as good as I want to be and having people point this out to me is something I am going to have to come to peace with XP

Oh, by the way, I'm not sure you know but we, ah, 'borrowed' your projects idea of tinting. We didn't do it the same way because we aren't sure how to use it with the way we have set up the sprites, but we are using nearly transparent coloured pngs to tint scenes. It looks really nice and really helps the sprites belong to the backgrounds. Good idea ^_^b

[Angra Mainyu]