industry practice - making sprites and expressions

 Making Sprites and Expressions

Character Sprite Line-up

Below is a line-up sheet of all our finished character sprites. They are all stood in a neutral position and expression to showcase their features well. Since our game will only showcase the top half's of the bodies of our sprites, their poses and lower body is not too important. Instead, I will be focusing on creating a series of different expressions to showcase their feelings rather than will full body poses and body language. In some visual novels, characters change poses frequently, often involving different hand poses and such. If we had more time, I would've really like to do this too. However, because of resitrictments with our group, it left me with not enough time to do this. Nonetheless, I am still happy with the character sprites I made.

Expression Sheets

After creating the base sprites for all our characters, I then had to begin focus on making some expressions. Since we aren't changing the poses for our sprites, I will mainly be telling the story through the characters expressions, which will change in the game dependant on what is happening or being said. I wanted to create the most expressions for the MC, and they would be the one on the screen majority of the time, and do the most talking. I created neutral, happy, sad, and angry expressions as well as a talking variant, so that they could be interchanged during conversations to make it look lie the character was speaking as the text appeared. I also created a sleeping and crying expression, as these would both be needed for different scenes within the story.

We also discussed the possibility of needing more expressions, and decided that in order to not give myself too much to do we would leave the ones we had for now, and if we decided as we were adding our sprites in that more were needed, I would work on them then.

I also created sprites for the secondary characters, Ivory Ash and Danielle. As these characters are only secondary, I didn't make as many expressions for them other than the default ones. These characters do not speak or appear as much as our MC does, so I spent less time working on expressions for them. I also tried to give them all varying features and ways of expressing emotions in order to make them look slightly different. For example, Danielle (our depression character)'s expressions are not as strong as the other characters, showing that her emotions are not as strong as some others. This helps create variety and difference between characters.

How these will be used in our Game

I added these finished sprites into our game files as pngs, and named them all accordingly so that they could be coded to show up when needed. in Ren.py, all image files must be saved into a specific file, and given a specific name in order to make them appear. An example of how this looks in game can be seen below:

Here is how our sprites look in game! I am really happy with how they turned out, and I think its easy to determine the characters feelings by the different expressions they showcase.