There’s no trick to it—it’s just a simple trick!
I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on an incredibly simple trick that I just implemented in Errant Heart, which I find endlessly amusing.
At the outset of this whole visual novel endeavor we wanted to leverage our experience in animation and comics. And that is to say, we really wanted Errant Heart to be a visually stimulating experience. Of course, that’s easier said than done and has the potential to end up at either end of the extremes—too boring or too distracting/gimmicky.
Some might look to such a task and decide to focus on generating a boatload of special event images. And sure enough, an event image every few minutes would certainly keep up visual interest. It would also result in requiring far more resources and grind everything to a halt (um, more-so).
So we’ve been doing what we can to balance the needs of visual interest and minimal resources. And that has taken many forms—custom menus, image transitions, “paper doll” sprites with multiple poses, expressions, outfits, hair styles, custom in-engine lighting changes and effects, lots of (outsourced) backgrounds with multiple times of day, etc.
In any event, there was a spot near the beginning of the game which was a little devoid of visual interest. It’s just Lira on a boat, thinking to herself. The monologue is important as it’s the reader’s first glimpse at how the protagonist thinks. That baseline serves as an important metric—it will allow readers to understand how Lira evolves as a character later.
Still, was there anything we could do to ratchet up the visual interest during the segment? Well, the character is riding on a boat. And what do boats do? Sink? Um, well, yes, but more commonly, they ply the waters effortlessly—bobbing up and down as they go. Below is what we came up with:
It’s subtle, but I think it’s something that most people wouldn’t expect to see normally. Just separate the background and foreground, add in a little repeating motion in the code and voila!
Okay, okay, on it’s own this is nothing to write home about. But we’ve done our best to implement little touches like this throughout the game to help keep up visual stimulation without seeming too repetitive or distracting. Hopefully it all adds up into a satisfying reading experience.
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