Progress Log 5/10/2020 - Dynamic Sprite Lighting, Overworld Sprites, Animated Dialogue Sprites (Patreon)

Work on Project Oni has been intense to say the least. The game has proven to have an insane learning curve when it comes to making assets for it, but we're confident that we're heading in the right direction! 

We’re Experimenting with Dynamic 2D Sprite Lighting!

One of the new features that we’re trying to implement in Project Oni is the option to use dynamic engine lighting on 2D sprites. After all, whats the point in using a powerful game engine if we don't even bother with its features? In the past, Unity only supported doing this with 3D models, but they recently added the option to use it on 2D sprites.

With this functionality in mind, we’re going to try and make a day/night system where the lighting is what affects the scenes instead of having Doku redraw a day and night version of the same thing. (Like what we had to do with the cafe background in Cappuccino.)

This system also lends itself to creating ambient light sources such as torches/fires/character attacks, etc.

Overworld Sprite Progress

We’ve had to go through some significant trial and error when designing the overworld sprites.

It’s been difficult to reach an overworld art style that lends itself well to animating without being too time-consuming or overly detailed. The dilemma on hand is that if we want to offer player customization, we need to keep the sprites simple. If we don’t then we risk sinking way too much time whenever we want to add a new outfit or a new hairstyle. Each addition will need to take into account that we have to make animations for walking directions, attacks, idles etc. So far, the middle sprites are the ones that we're digging the most and are going to move forward with those. They seem to strike the perfect ground of simple yet mature enough to not fall into shady territory when it comes to adult content and chibi characters.

The polish work will continue until we're satisfied and feel like it's up to our standards!

Custom Animated Dialogue Sprite System

Back in Project Cappuccino, we used a tool called Fungus to show the dialogue sprites on screen. The problem with that system was that it was a bit limited and only used static images to display characters. This did not lend itself to things such as blinking without extensive hacking.

(Please ignore Yuba's mutant hand, we're fixing a layering issue with her at the moment.)

With a bit more experience under our belt, we went ahead and wrote a custom dialogue system that piggybacks off of Fungus and allows us to animate sprites however we want. This will hopefully help us breathe more life into the character dialogues while reducing the workload on Doku.

The custom system also allows sprites to technically move anywhere on screen, and not just left and right. I'm not entirely sure if we'll use that feature but it may be useful for monsters/creatures that talk. Imagine a ghost for example that floats around.

Another Song has been Completed!

In our last progress log, we had posted a battle theme for a mini-boss that we plan on implementing in the first Chapter of Project Oni. Since the game starts at Tabu’s Orchard, this location also needed a new song. You can listen to it here! 

That’s all we’ve got for now! Hope everyone has been doing well and taking care of yourselves!

-Vanis & Doku