Behind The Scenes - Working Smart and Reusing Assets (Patreon)

A huge thought in our minds when deciding to tackle a second project was, “Is it even possible?”. The answer is yes but probably painful, and we can sure as hell try!

Along the way, we realized that a lot of the work we do tends to be flexible enough that it can be used for multiple projects. Today, we’re here to talk about some behind-the-scenes tricks and tools that help us keep a consistent workflow and helps us avoid duplicate work.

Let’s dive into the magic of MULTI TRACK DEVELOPMENT!

The Stigma Around Reused Assets

It’s clear that in the game dev world, there’s a huge stigma around devs that asset flip and launch half-baked games to make a quick buck. However, a ton of development time can be saved by avoiding duplicate work. Especially when you made those assets yourself in the first place. With a bit of effort, even assets that have served their original purpose can bring something new to the table.

Why reinvent the wheel when we already did it once? Here’s a few examples of work that was only done once, but will end up being used in both games.

Animated Dialogue Portraits: Since both games use the same VN style of portrait, we’ll be animating them using the same custom animation script. No reason to redo the work there when we already bled over getting the script working. The system works by letting us create a database of character portraits that we then place on screen using a line of code such as “SetPortrait(Rosaria, Middle);” or “SetPortrait(Kaneko, Left);”

Ambient Light Effects: Things like flame flickers and lighting glows will generally look similar across games. It was recently pointed out that Valve also did this in their Half Life games.

Save Systems: I’m saying it here and now. FUCK save load systems. The easier we can keep this, the fewer headaches we get. Somewhere along the way, I picked up an asset called Easy Save which honestly, isn’t that easy and had a steep learning curve. The good is that it provides a flexible framework to use across games without having to reprogram the entire thing each time.

Background Assets

Cappuccino 1 was our first game and there was a lot of learning while we were putting something together. That leads to a lot of realizations afterward that the way we were doing things wasn't always the best, but when you don’t know any better, you’re stuck doing things the only way you can. Now that we have more time and experience, we’ve realized that with some small tweaks, we’re able to lighten the workload when it comes to making the game worlds.

These toys may look familiar because it’s an edit of the one that was sold in Lucretia’s shop, though most people wouldn’t give it a second thought since this time they're being used as a decorative background item. 

Mixing it with the new whip helps them blend a little better.

Fire burns the same on earth as it does on hell right? We’ve got a flexible flame animation that we’ve used for the Crystal Road fireplace, campfire, and Labrys’ dungeon background.

It’s fully recolorable so we’ll also be using it for Charlotte’s tail and maybe some decorative candles.

It’s also the same fire that shows up when you use a fireplace in Crystal Road, albeit with a cropping mask on it to hide the full flame.

Custom Made Prefabs

A prefab is basically a game object that contains several components to it. Things like scripts, effects, even other objects.

Think of it like a box. If I made a box of gnomes into a prefab, I can then take that box and have gnomes anywhere I go.

This one is probably one of the funniest ones on the list, but most recently, I set up a “Cum Controller” and a “Milk Controller”. You can kind of imagine what those do.

With these made, I’ll simply be copying them between both projects and modifying a few things here and there to have them fit the scenes.

If we want more variety, Doku would just need to draw some new nut frames or milk particles that we can plug into the system and go.

You can also see these effects being used in Crystal Road in our last progress log. 

Adaptable Brushes

Doku sometimes needs to draw complex things that may not be too important to the overall game. Primarily things like ropes, leaves, and chains. In order to not spend literal days drawing individual leaves and rope fibers, she uses special brushes to speed the process. The chain brush is included in Clip Studio Paint, and the rope brush was drawn out and made by Doku.

By using these as the groundwork, she can then draw over them or adjust as necessary, saving a ton of time in the process for something that shouldn’t have time wasted on it.

Risks and Possible Issues?

There are a few things that we need to be careful of. By reusing assets, we run the risk of ending up with same game syndrome. We’re being mindful to not reuse too many obvious things that are better off being done separately for each game. Things like character art and music for example must absolutely be unique between the games. Though we are having a bit of leeway with this too in regards to Project Cappuccino 2 stuff looking a bit like Project Cappuccino 1 since it’s the same series.

Hope this post was an interesting look at what goes into a game! If you have any ideas for other behind-the-scenes things you would like to see, feel free to let us know!

-Vanis & Doku