UPDATE: Status of “Chapter Two” & Poll – January 23, 2021

Hi everyone, I trust that you all had a nice week and are enjoying your weekend… it’s that time again, where we provide you with an UPDATE and also have a REQUEST for YOUR HELP!

First of all, you’ll notice that there are three .MP4 files that are attached to this post… and once you’ve read this little update, I ask that you take a moment to view them… and would like you to participate in this POLL in regards to them after you've read this. 

You see, after doing a Sprite Demo Test to see how things would look IN-GAME, an issue immediately rose to our attention… when doing all of the Dialogue Image Sprites like I did, I rendered all of the Sprites with the character’s in various degrees of talking, like I should’ve… but I didn’t do ANY where the mouth was closed and with the character LISTENING to the other person talk!!!

As such, my week was spent creating and rendering an additional 1,080 (540x2) Dialogue Sprites for Karma and Brynhildr’s scene at the end of “Chapter Two” of the Prologue to “Wicked Choices: Agents of Karma”, plus an additional 108 Side-Image Sprites necessary for the rest of the chapter.

So, now, instead of there being 1,620 renders for each character, as before; each character will now have a total of 2,160 renders (which will include the additional 540 mouth closed renders that have been added to each one)!

Some of you may be wondering, why so many for just a mouth closed, why not just do one that would be a default mouth closed and, to be honest, we thought the same thing… but also realized that let’s say a person and YOU are having a heated discussion or argument with each other… when you are listening to the person talking to you, while angry (happy, sad, etc.) your face doesn’t go slack and void of any emotion… no, if you are ticked off, you may not be saying anything, but your face still shows that you are ticked off!

Long story short, we did 1 mouth closed render for each of the 10 emotions that are in the 18 poses per direction of the character, for a total of an additional 540 renders per character sprite… so, this week was spent doing all of those and getting all 1,188 additional and needed renders done. 

If you take a look at the “sprite_test01.mp4” attached to this post, you will see how the game would look during the previous way we did the Dialogue Sprites, without the “mouth closed” additions added to it… 

In the example “sprite_test02.mp4” attached to this post, you’ll now see how the game will look with the mouth closed Dialogue Sprites added in the example conversation, making it easier to see and tell who is actually talking and who isn’t in the scene.

Finally, in the example “sprite_test03.mp4” attached to this post, you’ll see the same scene as “sprite_test02.mp4” but this time with “Side Image Sprites” turned on… and this is where YOU and the POLL comes in!!

In the examples between “sprite_test02.mp4” and “sprite_test03.mp4” which do you like better? The one with the Side Image Sprites TURNED ON or the one with the Side Image Sprites TURNED OFF?

Just so you know, having either way doesn’t add additional work or time to our production, since Epadder designed it to work automatically based on the Dialogue Image Sprite used by each character… it is a simple feature that we can either “turn on/off” for dialogues… but want to leave it up to you if we have it turned on or not.

The choice is up to you, so let the voting begin!

We hope that you will take the time and share with us your thoughts on this and will be getting back this week on finishing the story renders (like I had originally planned to do this week, before getting side-tracked).

Take care and talk soon!!

~Jack & Crew