Wherein Kali Makes a Bestiary

[Khan]

a day late! oops. been doing some things for DB but ALSO, i’ve been setting up groundwork for next time’s update.

heads up that i do talk about vaginal and fetal imagery very briefly

Friend FIVE: Wynaut, Grass : CHERUB.frnd

This was the first friend i caught in-game, and i’ve had a vague idea of what i wanna do with em ever since i looked at their moves. So on their final level-up for evolving they learned moves which are signature to two legendaries - Doom Desire and Special Rend - and that shit just sounds, so wild. and their special attack is huge when they evolve! so i’ve had the idea that they turn into like a big god-thing in the end.

but for this form, i want them to feel like a lil babby who is brimming with untapped power. i also like the tail with the little eye on it that Wynaut has, so i wanted to keep SOMETHING like that. particularly, i wanted a second something - be it a tail, halo, or something else, which felt like it was what held the future power.

but i didn’t have much more than that. so i just started going:

now i like some of these friends, i think there’s some good energy here. but i wasn’t really feeling any of them that much for this, so i kept trying things:

this time a bunch of weird little bushes, cause i was playing into the grass typing. but i wasn’t loving these, either! so …

this time i had a new idea. i was thinking to the fact that this will be a big, unknowable, god-being-thing in the end, and got to thinking of some of the kinda imagery you see in like toku or JRPGs to signal “weird scary monster”. and, well, i’m not about to make this tiny buddy yonic, so fetal it is! inspired by the weird head shapes those little dudes got in the womb, but simplified and abstracted down to being a cute little weirdo.

decided to combine some of the aspects of two of them to make the final design:

weird eye inside of a mouth on a lump on their head! but they seem pretty happy about it.

so, i whipped up a quick sketch, putting em next to some past friends for a more visual size reference.

like the angy lil weasel, they are a bit bigger than 16x16, but a little bit less so. i do find it funny just how hard i’ve leaned into the sizes as rough limits (with the exception of the frame itself, obviously), but i really did just make them so small especially with the spriting style i’m going with, haha. live and learn!

just using whatever colors i felt like grabbing, i tried to render out the sketch a bit. it’s got a lot of problems, so lets talk about them!

• the eye inside of the teeth just does not read. the eye and teeth are both too light.
• also the teeth could use a better shape, i think. i don’t like the curve
• what the hell is that foot shading
• the shading on the body is pretty weirdly lopsided, makes the friend feel janky
• knew this wasnt the palette but also, man, this is NOT the palette lol

so here’s where i got to after some reworking of various bits! i really am feeling this new color palette, and the eye is now dark with a glowing, ringed iris situation. reads way better! also the teeth are a bit yellower, and more wedge than hook. and they feel more like an orb! those lines are gonna pulse with the light color when it animates.

also there actually isnt white in the palette oops! anyway, they feel like kuramon a bit to me, which is good imo

anyway

my first thought was they could float in the air, and bounce off the ground and back up. i thought this sucked. a friend pointed out just the still sprite kinda looks like they’re just sitting and leaning back, just seen from a different angle than i’ve decided to make these buddies. that’s my mistake for making a platform that they actually stand on instead of adopting Dragon Quest mindset! oops.

but, with some really minor edits, it would actually be easy to make this sprite into a seated friend at the angle of this “game”. so i did that.

also you mightve noticed, but ichanged the shading on the feet, particularly sending the back foot to nothing but the shadow color, to bring them into better consistency with the rest of the buds.

so, not being able to do the little drag around animation sketching, i decided to just sketch in my keyframes. of which there are only two, lol. but i like this! they lean back and forth, doing a chomp. good vibes.

here they are, coming along! very happy with it. nothing really to say other than i’m very happy with the squish on the chomp frame:

monch!

so here’s the full first run through of the animation.it’s pretty good! except, uh, i never thought to touch that front foot lol. both for its shading and for its movement - it should definitely be coming down flat on the ground with this movement and angle!

so this is a lot better, but the shading on the foot is a bit funny still. also it just hits a little too softly for me. but ill fix that coloring and some other minor issues while i’m working on putting them on the background. so lets do that!

still working off the grass with the clouds. this time, i wanted them to be a weird inversion sorta deal on the original happy, sunny BG:

so the lightest is on the bottom instead of the top. i even kept the same clouds, just adding in that one halo. but this wasn’t quiiite right yet, so i changed the grass to a new, blue color.

i also got this ready for final posting, so here’s what i did:

• made a portrait for our new friend
• brought in Carvanha for the player .frnd, and set them on low health.
  – decided on how to handle low health - they do their middle talk frame on the up and down frames of the bounce, and the health bar bounces between two similar colors. enough to notice if you’re looking down there, but not enough to take your attention away from the friend on screen.
• changed the “types” thing so that it’s only one. this is because i’m straying away from the pokemon types as i lean more into this being its own “game”. now, every .frnd has one type, and they’re more whatever i want them to be like digimon rather than vague elements like pokemon. so there’s things like angel or dinosaur, but also a few like substitute, educational, weird, dyke, and frog.

and so, with all that said, here’s what i ended up with this time!

also, some updates for this moving forward - next update will be a reveal of some new GUIs i’ve been working on and animating, and will be the re-design of our starter! after that, we’ll do our sixth first-stage friend, and then we’re going to evolve these 6 to their final forms before starting any new ones!

this comes because of a few ideas from, as usual, my pal sarah. for one, i’m not actually gonna bother with playing the ROM anymore. unsurprisingly, most of these buddies are really hard to use in the game, and it’s a little bit of work to play. also, i don’t glean anything from playing it that looking through the files doesn’t tell me already.

next, i’m going to be doing these in groups of 6, based around different netsurfers who have them as their teams. depending on how spicy i feel, i might even do sprites for them, once all of their friends are evolved. This way this project has micro-goals instead of just “make them til i’m done, i guess”. it’s also a good excuse to do the other two starters!

the more i work on this, the more i’ve also been thinking about maybe doing something with all of these friends and assets. NOT A GAME. i’m making this thing too intentionally maximalist in various ways in my head for it to ever be something that should be born into the world. but maybe sometime in 202X i’ll take all the stuff i did, make some more mockups, and put together a strategy guide for this fake game. (that idea inspired by splendidland’s Apple Quest Monsters, which i do love. though i’d wanna approach this thing in a very different way)

anyway, back to my cave while i get ready for the horror of this month ending in two weeks

[Brooks]

@Khan

the more i work on this, the more i’ve also been thinking about maybe doing something with all of these friends and assets.

just please, no more nft hell
promise me

[Khan]

oh good god no

nuh uh

noooooooo
nnope

nosireebob

nope

yucko

[Khan]

holy fuck me. its been three months. im a changed boi. (read: i had a major depressive spiral after releasing DB)

aaanyway. im back with one of these, and im not gonna lie im madly proud of this one! Basically all of the GUI work was done in October before i stopped doing, well, anything, and i think the design and first frame of the lil guy was also done around that time? and today and yesterday was just animating them and then assembling everything.

i am, as i slowly acclimate to life and work again, going to be probably slowing this down to one friend a month instead of every other week, because i feel like i can handle that right now. though lord knows i may end up doing more than that anyway when i feel up for it!

anyway. without further ado:

Friend six ONE(?): Tympole, Psychic/Grass : THOUGHTGRUB.frnd

So before the fun stuff I’m gonna explain to you what a row in my godforsaken spreadsheet is like here, because i’m not playing the ROM anymore so I’m not gonna bother grabbing screenshots. In order, we have:

• The original Pokemon in name and official art
• The file.frnd’s name and the first frame of their final sprite (blurred here so that we don’t spoil the journey)
• The type the Pokemon got and the Type that the file.frnd is (Cherub was an Angel)
• A role that describes the Pokemon’s random stat spread
• The ability of the Pokemon
• How I feel about the random elements
• The Pokemon’s evolution information and the compresion stage it is in file.frnds
• Some choice moves from the Pokemon and some ideas of moves for the file.frnd
• Whatever my initial thoughts were for the design

Did that need such a detailed run-down? Probably not. Moving on, in this case we also have what I did for this lil pal in the past:

Which I still like some elements of and want to keep - while I’m going to be doing a totally new "re"design (re in quotes because i never really took time to design the original in the first place honestly lol) I still want to be able to say “yeah thats the same lil guy but just re-imagined”. So what DO I want to keep? Well I like the big eye motif, it’s a good way to play off of Tympole’s shapes while also communicating weird/pschic. And frankly I like the green and magenta/red color scheme too.

Now the big idea going in here is the sporocyst of the green-banded broodsac (that’s e first life stage of the parasite that turns snails into “zombies” and gets them gobbled by birds), and lucky me that has a similar color situation. I’m not gonna link images here cuz some folks probably would find it pretty nasty to look at, but you have google

So here’s the first round of designs! Some consistent themes here are the tail, which has been reimagined into a weird leaf-thing from the sporocyst’s spore cluster, and then the biggest things i’m trying to figure out are body shape and what to do with the eyes. with the criminally small size i gave myself for these sprites, theres really only so many poses i can give a little noodle buddy. Anyway, I end up liking the two on the left the most and make them the major basis of the next generation, though i keep playing with the tendril-eyelashes of the others.

here i’ve also landed at a more consistent general idea for a palette. 3 saw me exploring more buggy features, and while i do actually quite like that weirdo, they don’t really work for what i’m going for here. especially considering another part of this design is trying to make this werido feel like a weird starter, which requires just slightly more anthropomorphization than that. speaking of which, 5 dialed cutesy elements (big eyes, bushy tail, chubby body) up to such grotesque degrees that it ends up being the most horrifying of the bunch. and 4 is just a bit weak - 1 and 2 end up being my keepers here. 2 looks like it is in constant pain, and 1 is a bit nondescript, but theyre the best of the bunch imo.

okay round 3. 1 is largely a cutsie-ization of our previous 1 and it still is kinda weak. 2 is definitely half-baked, and 4 still looks like theyre in pain (tho it was on purpose this time). 3 feels largely pretty good to me though. the purple patterning was an attempt to look like welling tears as a coat pattern but its kinda weak. but i like eye body, and i like squishy friend. though i do think they could use more body definition, and a slightly more defined head would be preferable. which leads us to …

the final design! segmented body to feel a bit more like a grub, the tail is slightly better defined, and overall it just feels more complete. here you can see i was experimenting with palettes, and well, you can also see pretty clearly which one won out lol. 1 and 3 are both pretty neat, 1 feels almost kinda mystical to me and 3 feels like, eldritch? iunno. but 4 is similar to the green-band, its similar to the og verison of this friend, and it just makes them feel the most like a simple, if weird, monster friend.

And then I sprited them, and i … super did not take any screenshots of that process. it was actually a relatively painless one.

I babied up their proportions a bit more with the head sizing, and I reduced the segments to work better at the small scale of these sprites.

animating them was also, honestly, pretty painless, despite the months-long hiatus from doing it! i worked up a sketch pretty quick by sketching in one other keyframe and then just doing my inbetweens:

i didn’t need to think too hard - them being a wiggly worm in the air just made the most sense. 8 frame loop, which is becoming so much the norm for these that i’m basically deciding to codify it as the length for all of these idles. anyway, then i went in and sketched in a blink and sketched in some shading:

naturally things got pushed around here and there between the two as well, notably the head hanging back a bit more when they come back down to give the wiggle slightly more snap (its barely there). the blink is two frames both times, and neither time does the eye ever fully close. (also there is a frame of lead-in to the blink, and then the blink, but there isnt any frames on the other end of it its just back to fully open). to me, i think this sells the blink pretty well, especially with how fast they happen in real. also they arent evenly spread, theres 1 frame between them one way and 3 the other, i just felt like it gives it more energy.

so then i cleaned it up the first time:

and there are just some minute things here that i feel like i have to change. and theyre the kinda thing that happen to me everytime i animate, so in the spirit of this thread being me trying to document how and why im doing things i’m going to get into it here:

decisions that make sense within a frame, but look bad in motion. i make these constantly, and after i get to this stage in like every animation, there’s always a number of them. in this case, we have:

• the little midtone pixel in the bottom left of their head. it serves to break up the shape and make the highlight feel smaller and define the head as they move. however, in motion, it feels like a weird tacked-on element that just muddies things.
• the shadow under the lower right antenna/eyelash. it ends up coinciding with some other shadows and as they animate, it almost looks like its forging a line of midtone down their head and body. but, on a frame-by-frame basis, it makes sense as shadow.
• the darkest tone that is used as sparse pixels near their butt zone. it’s important to add tiny bits of definition back there, shaping certain edges and curves, and can also try to help keep definition of their segmented body. However, here, there’s a lot of them that end up flashing like weird floating pixels because, while they made sense in a frame and made it look better individually, end up too far removed from their positions in previous frames.

each of these, when the animation is playing, haunt me, stick out to me like sore thumbs, even if all of them would have made their individual frames look ‘better’ standalone. what i need is for them to look good in motion though, so lets fix those. oh also lets add highlights to the middle eye when its fully visible:

Great! that’s them. so lets once again go back in time to the work i did on our new GUI - the pause menu, the party window, and the window for looking at one .frnd in specific.

So I decided to give the background animation this time because … i like pain, probably. but this one is bad so lets make that motion less janky:

Much better! also yes the pause menu is just our file browser

Anyway now things get exciting! I’ve added in another animated background, and our different programs, folders, and drives here bounce! isn’t that nice. We’ve got our root directory for C which is our inventory, we’ve got our folder with our .frnds in it, we’ve got our web browser (i dont remember what fake mechanics ive come up with for that, but they exist. also obviously its a parody of explorer and i guess safari why do they both have similar names), and we have our torrenting program (obviously its a play on kazaa, and kazham was funnier than kazam. thanks sarah once again, though my idea was ‘lemon plug’ and i still think thats kinda funny. the torrenting program has a lot of overly complicated fake mechanics that i’m very excited to explore the ramifications of … in that fake strategy guide if i ever make it in XX years)

the buttons linger in the middle spot so that theres some security as to where their ‘real’ location is.

and here’s some icons for them! isn’t that nice. the venturer one is SUPOSED to be a trifold map with an x marks the spot and little trail, it will be getting redone in future updates we make here.

anyway lets get a cursor going:

bam! so now only the selected one animates, we have our tapping mouse cursor, we have the flashing white border when the mouse taps, and the non-selected ones darken and lose their highlight tones. you may also notice a VERY subtle gradient on the text of the currently selected option. i just thought it looked nicer than a flat color and helped it pop subtly compared to the shadowed palette, thats all

also venturer is going to get redesigned again so dont get attached to that map

you won’t really get to see it later tho so here it is for you, as a treat. (except actually you will in snippets because i accidentally left it in in a few frames and that mistake is in the final and im not fucking fixing it) now lets get back to business and get into our frendz menu

so a LOT to talk about here! and before we get any further i wanna talk about one big thing that has been driving my thoughts with things like clicks or even the idle cursor tapping with this project - this isn’t a real video game and there is no sound. just gifs! which means we are lacking in one of the kinds of feedback that games send to players. this is like watching someone type on a typewriter and not hearing the keys click. it’s unsatisfying!

to account for this, i’ve been trying to make things look tactile - to have dramatic squishes or to make a button look like its depressing when its clicked. because i want these to, despite the fact that there are no inputs and no sound, to still feel like something is happening. to look at the Frendz button as an example, when it clicks, we have the mouse cursor going to its click frame and holding for a frame before the fade starts - that little frozen time effect helps give the moment of the click more emphasis. Also, when its clicked not only does the button go into its darkened, but the lil botamon lookin dude goes into their squish frame, AND, the lil dude and the text all drop down by one pixel within the button - it helps give the illusion that theyre pressing into it from the force of the click.

i think for the most part my attempts at this are successful? i feel pretty good about the tactile-ness of the menus. anyway.

the buttons fade, starting from the top one and ending with the bottom, but they fade from their bottoms to their tops. helps give the fade a sorta like, wave/screenwipe feeling. i like it! the fade is an interesting little dither effect where i think around 4-6 rows of pixels are given a transparent dither each frame, and each frame about 2-4 of those are totally erased, but then at the end it erases all but a few, which then each space out by a row and move upward. basically the idea is it feels like they disentegrate and then are wiped away / blow away. whether or not that comes across, i like the way it feels.

then we’ve got the frendz menu itself! once again, we’ve got shadowed palettes for options that arent selected, and we’ve got staggered floating for each. (i didnt mention it before but obviously the floating of the buttons in the first screen of the GUI are also staggered, in both cases here theyre staggered by 1 frame each with the topmost acting first and the rest following suit in order). and then we’ve got places for each .frnd’s portrait, their health, and their mood. what does any of that mean? who knows!

you’ll notice that the ones with missing health are kinda like, spilling over as though the health is a sorta viscous fluid? at least thats the idea. it gets animated later but i hadnt done it yet at this point. it comes across better when its animated

okay so what have we added? well first of all we’ve got our cursor on the frendz screen and we can click on a .frnd now! when it does, you’ll notice that the portrait box squishes, and the little mood face also opens up. more of that attempt at looking tactile.

more significantly we now have our window for viewing a .frnd! overall i’m pretty happy with it, and the space i had dictated the decision that each of these lil guys know two moves cuz thats what looked nice here. their name will fill in in the top bar, and then theres the .frnd extension baked into the visual. i will say that i end up changing the coloration up there to something much simpler, that weird dithering wasnt working for me.

what i DO like is my little display platform and its dithered abstract space. i like the energy and i think the colors strike a good balance between abstract net space and generic sky while also not being anything thatll clash too much against any particular .frnd

i decided that ‘type’ here is going to get to be a 5-letter abbreviation, rather than the larger icons for them (which you can see an example of in the angel from Cherub) uhhh cuz i thought centering the titles looked nicer here, no other reason.

also lets quick talk about this windows opening! it takes 4 frames to get to full size, and originates from the general area of the .frnd which was clicked. nothing too crazy, just a series of increasingly larger genericized versions of the window which have just enough of the colors and details to look alright as it opening. also its got a little bit of sideways motion, helps feel like it pops forward i think

okay so its all ready to be put together, so lets establish what’s gonna change:

• the top bar of the .frnd screen gets cleaned up
• an inbetween is added to the portrait squish when a .frnd is clicked
• added a one-frame darkening of the ‘x’ in the .frnd window for it closing, and used two of its 3 opening inbetweens as a close animation to make this thing loop.
• deselected .frnd portraits are only their darkest colors, and some have new bg colors to look a little better with this change
• the missing health gets animated, red animates slower than orange/yellow. also they splash a little.
• the portrait for the selected friend does its two talk keyframes while being tapped, and then has squish frames for the click

anyway without further ado:

i am … super proud of this thing. this is one of the best things ive ever done, i feel like. there’s a lot of parts going on, it was a lot of work, and i think it has a great energy. im especially proud of the GUI work, it was an interesting challenge to make these menus as nothing but art mockups of a game that’ll never exist

anyway. that’s thoughtgrub! the next .frnd is going to be yet another weird little freak, and then i get to start patching/upgrading/whatever i decide to call evolving this first party! which will of course mean needing to figure out more windows and animations but i’m kinda excited about it, a little.

love all of you sick freaks who read this fucking essay of a post

and the ones who didnt too

i wont judge sbutts too hard

[Khan]

[VastleCania]

love this little squishy fucker

[Khan]

well march was kinda rough, as it were, but also i took a brief break from this cause i had another project that i’ve been working on. oops!

it’s really hard to organize yourself when you got Funny Brain Chemicals and are tenuously, technically “self-employed” it turns out. i am mostly failing at it

Friend None: A Wet Interlude

okay so i did get something done last month despite mostly focusing on other work, actually! some new battle UI and a new background for an area besides the little grass zone from before. and a BIG part of this is the fact that i've switched over to aseprite for my animations. i used to use pyxeledit for everything, but, well, it's not exactly built for animation, and i started to really feel that when i was assembling that last one with all the menu navigation in it.

so, i decided to see what all the fuss was about with aseprite! i’m still getting used to it, but it’s pretty intuitive and it’s nice to be animating in a program with a proper animation timeline for … uhh … the first time ever with pixelart for me. (before pyxeledit i was doing my pixelart in a Totally Legal Definitely version of photoshop, and both only have animation as an afterthought) i actually think this is the first time i’ve used a proper animation timeline since like, making flash animations in the aughts?

anyway it turns out that theyre incredibly nice and i’ve been missing the fuck out. still using pyxeledit for some things in my workflow though, because its nice for certain things to have a program that is explicitly built around tiling!

anyway all that preamble out of the way, i don’t have a lot of progress images this time around because i just never remember to save them these days lol

so here’s where we’re starting! changing the coloration and thickness of the main window a bit from before, trying to inject a bit more style into it while still keeping it basically just a PC pastiche. inspired by the scrolling folders in the other menu, i decided to have scrolling swords and shields in the top bar with the name, and i’ve replaced the abstract demon buddy with a naruto headband with a sword that reads uh, way better lol.

I’ve also adjusted the player and enemy windows a decent bit! for one, i’ve changed the typeface in the enemy window drastically, and shifted it around. i also made the type icons significantly larger so that i can be a bit more expressive with those specifically, just because i had the space. you’ll also notice i’ve removed their face from their window - it just felt redundant, since the face for the player’s friend is there because you can’t see them, but the enemy is … i mean they are right there, lol. (it’ll still pop up when you open dialogue, since then i want mouth flaps and also then their body is covered)

you’ll also notice the player menu is significantly larger now! first off, we have three new options - you’ve got your inventory, your party, and because why not i’ve also added the torrent client to your battle commands. what does this mean? who knows! i’m sure i’ll make up funny shit for it later. really i’m just trying to take every opportunity i can to make this fake game more maximalist. relatedly i decided the three starters have associated main characters and each have completely separate stories that only intersect sometimes. i just think its hilarious

also their type displays now. mostly just a vibe thing, thought it would be fun. again i’m sure i’ll come up with some bullshit fake mechanics around the types later but like, most importantly theyre digimon classifications and i wanna draw fun icons. anyway i also shifted the platform (and the enemy on it, obvi) ever so slightly to be framed better with the new windows.

basically all of this stays except for those disgusting wide dots on that colon. awful choice. oh and eventually i wise up and copy-paste the HP typeface from the enemy onto your health bar.

here to model the new area we have everyone’s (my) favorite angel, Cherub.frnd! hey there, buddy. uhhhh so i will say that the background background stays basically the same, i’m pretty happy with it. the platform, on the other hand, will receive some work.

for one, it has too many colors - 3 on the cattails just draws way too much attention to them, when they should be a … well… background element. so i’ll be cutting that down to 2. also a bunch of separate cattails makes them feel too … real? present? and frankly even that grass is a bit too individual and detailed. so i’ll be simplifying all of that business down.

and here’s the final thing! the animation is intentionally a bit choppy but even then there’s definitely some adjustments i should (and probably will) make, particularly to the left clump of cattails. overall though i’m pretty happy with this!

also, i animated the ripple of the water and the grass+tails+their shadows on two separate layers so that i could easily have them be on two different cycles to get a lot more mileage as far as liveliness out of a lot less work. it’s just a background! i didnt wanna spend too long on it.

anyway it was a good way to start to work out aseprite, and i think it’ll make the future buddies look that much snazzier! i think everything just has a slightly more coherent and particular vibe now.

hoping to make the next .frnd sometime this month, and they’ll be the final first-stage member of our first party! then i’ll have to figure out how the fuck to animate evolution (which i think ill call some bullshit like upscaling or retracing) and won’t that be fun for everyone

tata fuckers

stay wet

or don’t!

i’m not your dad

[Khan]

good god. fuck me. oh christ. two and a half months???

yall ive been goin through it lmao. think things are on the up this time. anyway. it’s our last unupgraded friend for a hot minute, since they’re the sixth in our first team!

Friend SIX: Meditite, Bug/Dragon : CHOMP.frnd

ALRIGHT. FUCK. right. so lemme get it out of the way before we get into designs - my feelings about this go way beyond “meh”, once i worked out my angle i was actually super excited about this. that personal rating was from earlier. anyway.

so immediately for me i was thinking of meditite’s big onion hair with that split down the middle as pushing me towards this idea of a big maw pointing up. like it opens up and its just this giant dragon mouth pointing skyward. that was really the one point of inspiration i took from the original poko here, but honestly that is this designs biggest visual gimmick. the “run away” ability also inspired me to make them jittery, skittery (this obviously plays well with a little bug friend). didn’t really take any inspo from their move list.

here was my first round of designs. there’s a definite throughline of those cartoony, jittery little legs, though some are more simplified than others. although i would ultimately not go with them, i still like the ideas of 1 and 2. i like how paranoid that dragon head looks in 2, and i like how 1’s body feels almost like wings?

but i didn’t really know where to take this, honestly. i was a bit lost, consulted with a few folks, and found that a lot of people really liked 4 and their vacant little expression. also, as much as i liked 1, i had to admit they were a lot for the scale of this sprite. so, i went into my next round with the popular 4 and my pocket pick of 2 as my designs to iterate on.

now i really like 2, still, here. they look like theyre scared, like their little forelegs might be quaking a bit. i want to protect them. their pose and design does run a bit close to trapinch, but they have different shape language and are more anthropomorphized with that concerned eye.

the runaway winner here, though, was 5. just something about seeing this giant dragon head squishing this tiny little buddy trying to hold it upright. and from there, i let myself pull an idea from this little .frnd’s final form - so, spoilers for that - is the idea of a little monster ‘piloting’ a bigger one. there’s a lot of ways that could shake out, but that’s the jist. and so the idea came up in talking with my friend sarah that i could have that head be fake, something they’re manipulating to scare other monsters away. hell, it could even be TWO little guys - there could be one inside of its mouth. and its legs could be hanging out of the side, making it look like a tongue lolling out! and these buddies could have legs colored something like green or blue or purple that makes this seem like a poisonous lizard or something!

so i did one more round, just testing this general conceit with different silhouettes for the head:

big round one was fun, but it feels a bit more like a demon than a ‘dragon’. and yeah, i’m playing very fast and loose with ALL of the inspiration i pull for these designs, but i thought sticking close to the prompt for the two types was fun this time. the upside-down head idea was fun but ultimately i decided against it, and i also reckoned that the little buddy won’t have room in the sprite for a mouth, so just eyes is gonna be the goal. ultimately, it’s that one in the bottom left i go for - the bottom middle just has shape language that’s too harmonious between this fake head and the little cartoon bug. i like having sharper, boxier shapes for the head. you can also see that i brought bags under its eyes, paying homage to those ringed eyes i liked so much from the skittering head design from before.

and here’s me messing around with palette ideas ahead of time. in the end, i’ll go with … well none of these. it’ll be closest to the top left, though. right. well, time to sprite then.

haha. oops! forgot to capture the process of that, again. as ever, though, i do a rough sketch with black pixels, then i bucketed in some of the flat colors, and then i shape it from there with shadows, changing colors, pushing pixels, etc. all the fun stuff. this is actually the version of it i ended up with after some mild revision in the context of the animation. i gave the little buddy bags under their own eyes to make them seem more tired and also more, idunno, worried? i feel like they look anxious.

i should really record my screen next time i do the first sprite so i’m not standing here saying “well i did it”. lol

anyway before we get into animation, here they are next to everybody else for some context, mostly for size. on a day that isn’t today (probably) i’m gonna probably post again retrospecting myself on where this has gone so far, just for funsies. but i’m getting ahead of myself. anyway

here’s the first sketch of their idle that i did. four keyframes - standing, off to one side, back to standing, off to the other side. then just smears in between. but … i mean you can feel how weightless this is, right? it’s not capturing how big this thing theyre lugging around is at ALL. but i don’t touch that up quite yet.

here’s me rendering out the first few frames. with the smear frame on the leaning to the left, you can see that i overextend past the keyframe, trying to make it feel like a bit of a bigger, faster swing. something i’d heard kinuko talk about in that gdc talk on skullgirls that has stuck with me since.

also i use some of the lightest tone from the head as a sort of ‘shadow’ or afterimage on the eyes in the smear to break them up from being giant white shapes that take away all of your attention

right, rendering basically just up to the squish and … well this was about when i realized that this wasn’t gonna cut it, and i need to exaggerate it more.

and here it is, in what is mostly the final form for the core animation loop. i’m happy with it! the changes that come from here to this are mostly minor. but in the end, the blue shadow on the front forelegis going to be made more consistent cuz it was drawing my attention too much, some shadows are going to be adjusted around the rightmost top tooth in frame 1, the single pixel of the desaturated purple off on the left of the jaw in frame 1 will be removed, and the spikes will be made to feel a bit more rigid in the smears. but we won’t see most of that til the very end when i did a final pass for some polish

for now, though, i wanna work on an animation to break up this core loop. ever since having the idea of there being two little guys, i’ve wanted an every-few-loops animation of the one in the mouth getting out. specifically, the idea that the one on bottom gets tuckered out, and the one in the mouth leans out and smacks the side of the head to get them going again, like an angry cab driver in some movie in the mystical land of new york city

and here’s the first attempt at that. the lead-in could be a lot better, and there’s not really any lead-out, but this sketch will serve as the basis of my animation in the end. not much else to say here. it just lacks some energy, and it’s rushing some things.

now this is much better! the lead in now feels a lot more like they slow down, fall over, and doze off. i think there could be more energy in the bit where the other lil guy emerges, and we still need our lead-out, but we’re getting there.

and here’s the final! the other buddy leans out of the mouth more, and our lead-out is just going back to squish and heading back to frame 1. really happy with this

and here’s how it all comes together! in a recolor of that new swamp, and we’ve got some new icons! CHOMP.frnd is a puppet type, and they like Being Happy and Sleeping.

i’m super happy with this one, and i’m really glad that i managed to get it done. it’s still not perfect, looking back at it there’s things i’d polish up more, but i’m gonna resist that urge, at the very least for now. like i said before, i’ll be doing another post sometime looking back on this thing so far, what i’m happy with, what i want to change moving forward, etc, sometime soon but. aside from that i have to fully force myself to take a break from this for a bit, i have some other projects that direly need to be finished and i just needed to essentially tie up the loose end of having this little guy half-done so i could let myself focus on those.

anyway. thanks as usual if you’re one of the freaks who reads all of this shit

[VastleCania]

Love love love the concept and i think the final result communicates it really well. This rules.

[Khan]

glad you think so :3

[Khan]

@Khan

anyway before we get into animation, here they are next to everybody else for some context, mostly for size. on a day that isn’t today (probably) i’m gonna probably post again retrospecting myself on where this has gone so far, just for funsies. but i’m getting ahead of myself. anyway

THE DAY HAS COME - An Unevolved Party Retrospective

I somehow started this thing nearly a year ago? definitely making much slower progress than i expected on … well just about everything in my life in that span of time lol.

Anyway. like i said before in my efforts to re-organize myself better and also tackle some other shit that i super need to get done, i’m taking a break from this lil personal project for a minute. but it’s also at a pretty good point for me to look back and think about it as a whole, and also work out my plans for when i do later come back to it. so, figure i’ll reflect on it here like with everything else in order to force me to put my thoughts into words

First of all, and this comes easily, I’m really happy with how this has come along. it started out as, and still is, an excuse to get me practicing pixel art, animation, and monster design, and i think even over the course of it i’ve not only shaken off the rust but actively improved a lot from what i did before. aint none of it perfect, but that’s how it is.

Looking at the monsters so far, I’m actually really interested by the fact that amongst the baby stage lil buddies, a particular language has really started to develop in the design? there’s these two floating ones, both longish but curled up. and then there’s these two on the ground, hobbling around, with giant mouths and tiny faces under them. honestly completely accidental, but looking at all of those ones together there’s a lot of cohesion honestly? really happy with that.

for the two who are supposed to already be in the middle stage, i think you can tell that they were some of the very first few. with the muppety guy i’m more satisfied and probably won’t fuck with him, but the mouse? ehhhh. i got a few problems with the execution, but not really with the design concept tho i think that’s mainly fine.

so, one of the biggest things is the sizing. my mind has changed a lot on the sizing of these sprites from the start. not only have i become more lenient with how much i stick within my own sizing limitations, i’ve also started to think about extending the limits for animations beyond even the current maximum size, just from thinking about how i use up the space in battles.

but so our little trilby was made when i was a lot more strict about those sizes, which means his WHOLE sprite fits within three of my 8x8 tiles. except here’s the problem with that - he has that big tail. which means he takes up much less than that full 3-tile space. combine that with the smaller friends that i made later being slightly bigger than just 2-tiles, and you end up with this situation where he’s not really looking as strong as he should. i also think it causes a lot of detail to be packed into his sprite that should be given more room to breathe.

we can see that, compared to cherub, the muppet is more obviously a larger sprite. even then? ehhh i might like them to be a little bigger, but them being on the smaller end of the mid-tiers makes sense considering they’re only 2-stagers. this kinda is their baby form. they just need to seem a bit more strong than that, and only a bit.

as far as execution, i think i only really nailed down what these sprites are like stylistically in that regard with THOUGHTGRUB and subsequently CHOMP. in comparison, CHERUB and even to an extent the floating mustelid and the muppet (and definitely also the trilby) could maybe use a little bit of pushing with hte way i shaded them and defined their forms (and picked their colors) to better fit. on the one hand, thinking about going back and making edits to most of these has the potential for me to fall into the trap of never just letting something be done, but on the other hand as the first of these lil pals these kinda act as me defining what the vibe is. and, besides …

i’ve been thinking about the palette a lot. due to a combination of the things i’ve been feeling from using both this palette and the one that i made for our bird game, and from going and re-reading androidarts’ Famicube project, i’ve really been trying to think about how i’d go about improving it. because it is … okay, but it has a lot of problems. problems that, frankly, shouldn’t be surprising for the first palette of this scale i’ve ever put together.

my current plan for developing my knowledge in this capacity is going to be a mix of making smaller palettes and doing little sprites or mockups with them as part of my art practice, and also by doing a really big post-mortem on the graphics for that bird game. particularly, and this was one of the big things inspired by that androidarts thing, making a histogram of how often all of the colors in that palette were used. there are only 64(+ 16) colors in it, but i still know for certain that there could be less and that some should probably have been changed. and i definitely know they did not get evenly used. so it’ll be interesting to learn from.

as far as what’s going to happen for the file.frnds palette, i’m thinking i want to cut down the number of colors, by as much as maybe half, putting together what i learn from practice, study, and picking apart previous work of mine. i also, as a stylistic choice, am considering dropping the palette-per-tile down to 8 colors instead of 16, because i think that’ll force me to think about it more in a way that i really don’t have to at the moment. and as much as this project is imagining some magical handheld with extremely strong graphical capabilities but a tiny ass screen, i do think reigning it in some would be fun.

anyway. so when i come back to this, my main focus is going to be:

• re-making the trilby with a bilby, particularly making them a tiny bit larger, and beefing up their design a little too probably.
• touching up the shading style on a few of these friends
• editing the palette and color limits, and subsequently editing all of the .frnds to fit it

before i make any new shit.

other things i’d like to approach:

• bringing the old background into my new workflow setup and beefing it up a little for the shots of the re-done frnds
• bringing the pause menu UI work into the new workflow, and also possibly beefing it up a little.
• working out what the animation for IRC looks like in the new battle UI flow
• getting all of the tiles done for my different Types, maybe also a list of Likes. i keep doing them as needed and thinking them up on the spot and i kinda hate doin it that way

anyway then there’s the shit i’ve been thinking about for fun. I think i mentioned before, but as i’ve gotten into these i’ve started to build out an intentionally overcomplicated amount of bullshit around this fake game, and started to like the idea of at some point in 20XX putting the art together with a bunch of writing to make a fake game guide? in part because it sounds like a fun way to channel my energy from this shit but also because i was disappointed by apple quest monsters a bit. i think it has some cute sprites but it doesn’t feel like a book for a game … at all! i want to put shit together that takes itself seriously, takes the mechanics of its fake game seriously, is layed out like a game guide from 2005, and actually feels like it’s a guide for a game

and idunno, i need somewhere to expel some of my maximalism as a vent. (but not all of it, obviously, fuck minimalism)

anyway some of the other shit i’ve been thinkin about for this:

• wanna think about how i can incorporate some things like town and trainer design into the project, both to practice and start to build out this thing a bit
• i think i wanna do each evolution as its own unique animation with character to it? on some like, later era digimon anime shit. is it more work than the pokemon game solution? yes. is it really fun and an excuse to practice FX, a thing i definitely also need to work on? also yes
• i thought about the idea of eventually doing a few big boss type things who are the background of the battle, and destroy the platform and enemy UI at the start of the fight

uhhh that’s probably enough rambling. iunno. i’m excited to get back into this when i’ve gotten some other things handled. might end up using it as an excuse to beg for money on the wider internet with a patreon or something, but regardless i’m gonna be keepin at it cuz i enjoy it and it’s a good way to work on a lot of stuff. and because i need an excuse to keep a thread going here where i make posts that are way too damn long