Before Crisis Remake

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It just occurred to me, but maybe I can meet you halfway on the creativity. Some of these plugins support 8 directional movement AND sprites. You want to give those diagonals a try?  Also could use an idle animation instead of one frame. Not too mention an unconscious frame / animation. Maybe a casting animation too
 
Increasing sprite size is as simple as resizing the sprite sheet, the game automatically recognizes it and adjusts.  Looking into QSprite by Quxios now to see how easy it will be to use it to add in new animation frames
 
I just checked the "Cissnei sprites" folder and oh lord, those are some blurry sprites.
Remastering them just isn't feasible imo.

Since you found a way to increase sprite size, I think we should go back to the original TWEWY idea.
There's a lot of pros to this idea:

-Line art is consistent with enemies as opposed to pixelated look
-Tons of poses to choose from, easy to use if we ever want to get into a battle system
-TWEWY's stylization is cool and is designed by Nomura, and it looks close to the original sprites in terms of movement

If you're OK with it, I can cook you up a basic Cissnei sprite sheet, just give me 3 days to polish it. How about it? I can even do her cross-arms pose as a basic neutral sprite. I'll have to leave 8 direction out for now tho, but we could always come back to it later.

What I'm thinking of is a 4x4 sprite sheet, 12 sprites per character.
Each running animation has 3, with the idle pose at the very right.
 
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Honestly, it's whatever you're able to do.  Ripping all 8 frames from the game is the most ideal, but I've seen those sprites myself.  Might be something I try to tackle later, but like I said the priority is to get something in a semi-releasable state. I can nitpick later.

What's your suggestion for all of the other sprites like NPCs and enemies?

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get much done yesterday due to the holiday. Should have some progress to show later tonight
 
Some more mock-ups. How do you feel about this? I think it's probably the best and more realistic option so far.

EkSk3HK.png

ExTedDV.png


A lot of detail gets lost when the sprites are downscaled, but it fits the world better imo, and leaves your imagination to fill in a bit.
I could easily do all the NPCs and enemies in the game like this, as long as I have reference photos for each of them.
It'd be a bit time consuming for me, but I get to be creative and it ensures a consistent art style across everything.
 
Yeah, the original Sprite work leaves a lot to the imagination as well. I think it looks good, my only criticism may be to make it look a little more dirty or grungy.  That's the right size for it in game, it just looks a lot more clean than the rest of the backgrounds.  Maybe like a noise filter would do the trick.  I could also easily do that though if you just want to focus on what you're doing.  It won't take much to screenshot the rest of the sprites
 
Sure, you can find a way to make grungier, just going to need some time on this sprite sheet so I can polish the animations.

Here's the running animation I have so far:

HAXsJn3.gif


And here's what it would look like if you stopped running for a second, then kept going:

cBeVmdZ.gif
 
Looks good!  I'll keep the 4x4 frames, it shouldn't be hard to switch to an 8x4 in the future if you ever feel like smoothing them out.  What's the pixel size?

Wish I had some update to show, but I'm mostly just figuring out RPG maker and how to script events.  I basically just have a smoother beginning cutscene, but I'm learning how to move characters and not create indefinite loops.  Trying some experiments with a few things so the game will look like it should.  So far so good!
 
Come one, come all
A DECENT UPDATE!

Opening cinematic is done, as well as a very slight amount of gameplay.   I only just realized that I'm using a wider screen than the original games boxy 320x320, but I'm unsure if I'll change it or not.  Please comment on the video or here as to your opinion on the matter.  I really want this to be as close to a 1:1 recreation as possible, but that will greatly limit the screen size and show the game's age.
Once Devina finishes some sprites it will probably take a little work to get them in the game since I haven't had to mess with that plugin yet (nor have I tried to find a battle system).  But all of the event scripting and scrolling and movement is pretty much figured out now.  I could easily make this into a playable cutscene where you auto win all battles.

Moving forward updates should be happening a lot quicker.
 
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Thanks! I actually already have all of the avatars and have them mostly resized to their original specs.
 
XlXW80g.png


Finally finished this sprite sheet, it'll be good for female characters in the future.
Once you've got it working in-game, I think it'd be a good idea for me to do Reno next to build a basic male base (since the men in the game should be a tiny bit taller, so you may need to do some pixel adjustments to get the proportions.

There really isn't a fixed pixel size I've come up with yet, but I think they should be scaled down by at least 50 percent.
I'm not sure if it's something RPG Maker automatically does on its own, or if it's necessary to do it beforehand (I can easily do that in Photoshop).

The running poses should go in a 12321 order, not a 123123 order.
Really eager to see what it'll look like in-game!
 
Dude, that's great.  It might take me a minute to find a good plugin for animations but I'll upload something as soon as I get it done
 
Haven't had a ton of time but I'm working on Cissnei now.   I'll send you the photoshop .psd for future use once I get it set, that way you'll be able to create and properly place the sprites within the image
 
EDIT:  You might also notice I've gone with the original box resolution instead of widescreen.   I'll try this out for a bit and see if I like it.

New sprite in action !

Devina, here is the psd.  I'm not sure what you're using to place the sprites on the sheets, but I had to manually move them around so they weren't clipping into other animation frames https://www.mediafire.com/file/c3ayattv65qt4e5/Cissnei.psd/file  I also cant make it loop 12321, It has to go from beginning to end.  Well, it can go 123212321232, but on the upward and downward animations it looks weird because that middle frame she is actually looking left, so her face goes left left right left, left left right left.  So the 4th frame she should be made to look right

It could still be better optimized.  I don't know jack about sprites but these should be aligned to the bottom or center instead of the top.  And centering them within photoshop isn't ideal because when her arm is out, the center of the image is her armpit instead of her chest, so it looks like she's wobbling around.

Also, I shrank the image down from 1030px width (with the 5 columns) down to 500px to get her to the size you see in the video.  Probably still  needs to be slightly smaller, and maybe some noise added to fit in better with the background, but I wanted to get this done so you could see the fruits of your labors.

I've got a pretty full work week this week, so I won't be able to get too much done unfortunately.

Also, RichterW subscribed to the channel, so that's kind of cool
 
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I vastly prefer the wider screen and the wider field of view, it's way more immersive, imo. I know you want to be accurate to the original game, although I feel this is one of those things that should be dropped. Playing a narrow cellphone resolution on my widescreen TV makes me feel claustrophobic and wishes for something more. It also reminds me that this originates from a flip phone game and feels dated from 15 years ago. I think there are many times when being too purist is a bad thing, sort of like how some fans get hot and bothered over literally any change the FF7 remake had over the original ("how dare Aerith's dress is more of a white tone instead of a hot pink tone! Rawrrrr!").

The main reason why people would play our version instead of Richter's is basically for a visual novel (for now, unless we get skippable optional battles as you said), higher fidelity feel with some better graphics, so we're already sort of appealing to the "higher graphics" crowd anyway.

The sprite actually looks good! Which sort of shocks me a bit because I've never actually done anything like this before. And yeah, as you said, they're a liiiiitle big and maybe should be reduced about 80% in height. If you pause at 9 seconds in the video when Cissnei is standing by the window, I think the best height would be where the top of her head reaches the top of the window.

Do you know if there's a way to disable 8 directions for now? The swerve between 8-9 seconds bugs me, and 8 directions is more of a stretch goal for now. Doing all the sprites in the game for me is daunting enough, but something I can do. 8 directions of top of that makes me feel overloaded.

https://www.mediafire.com/view/pr7kw61aukgn372/CissneiEdit.psd/file

Here's an edited psd where the fourth sprites are flipped, so her running up/down animation should look more even.

For now, I think I'm going to skip Reno and do the Soldier/Avalanche guys next. Reno has a lot of unique animations (for example, he has an attacking sprite and unconscious-on-floor sprite) and he carries a rod behind his back. I don't want to betray quirks like that so stuff like that will take a bit of effort.

I know there's going to be times where we're both busy. I think ideally, we could try to release the final game before the end of the year. And of course, I don't want to bottleneck you, so you can add chibi sprites as placeholders like you've been doing. I can pump out a spritesheet about once a week, so by the end of the year, I'd have 25 sheets done at that rate which should be enough to cover the whole game or so.
 
I think I agree with keeping the widescreen. It's more work to do widescreen, but it's almost nothing to go back and change it to a smaller resolution after the fact.  You don't have to do 8 directions. It would maybe look cleaner, but there aren't many wide open places that you could really notice it, and the original game doesn't use them. A much better use of time would be adding frames to the 4 main directions, or just getting other characters done.  I was just commenting about it because the plugin I use to get 8 directional movement has an option for it if you wanted to.
As for sprite sheets, just do it however you want. As long as they are properly aligned within the sheet, it only takes me maybe 10 minutes to switch them out.  That includes if you want to add those other poses like answering the phone or fainting into the existing Sprite sheet. It doesn't take much time at all
I'll keep the eight directional movement, doesn't really matter if there are sprites to represent those diagonal movements. Though, I think I can change the character movements speed, so maybe we'll look a little better
 
So, I'm most of the way through chapter one. I've scripted everything up to the part where you go through the reactor entrance. The only thing that may need some touch-ups are the sprites when Devina finishes, and some background photo shopping. I'll also need to figure out the battle system. I'll likely also create a "story mode" item that instantly wins all battles. And leave someone else to make a well-rounded battle system.

 Should be done with chapter one this week. Then I'll probably get a full playthrough uploaded on YouTube of the first chapter once Davina gets a few more sprites done. From there it'll be just cranking out chapters two through five. And then doing an alpha release
 
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Sprites are coming along, might take a bit longer because I have to adjust for male proportions, here's a preview of an Avalanche member:

oesBOgl.png


Like I said, I don't want to bottleneck you so if you want to do chapter 2 and beyond, you totally should.

Do you know if there's any body shots of Shears?
I might have to guess and create my own detail if there isn't...
 
Oh, don't worry.  I've been chugging along slowly but surely.  Clocked in 50 hours at work this week so I didn't get a lot done.  But I've pretty well figured out the mechanics of RPG maker, so the rest is just getting everything scripted in.

If you check the chapters folder, there should be some screenshots of Shears in the folders.  I know there are some of him facing sideways and up, but they are in game only. I don't think there's any concept art of him, but I'll look around
 
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