This Is My Dev Blog Now.
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Well, mostly…
Hiiii to all who bother to read my written content here! 👋
Just so you know, you’re part of the very rare ones who know exactly what’s going on with me while everyone else regurgitates the same stuff they think or imagine I’m doing online. You should feel special, because you are! Don't let anyone tell you any different.
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Solo Dolo
As I’ve mentioned many times before here on this site, I decided to take game development 100% in my own hands. I even specifically stated a couple years back that I'll be seeing Cryamore thru to the end, even if it meant killing myself and living like a zombie in order to do so. A lot of people got mad at me for saying that and showing that I have integrity in my work and my reputation. Guess they really hate I have the skills to do this shit after all. There’s something incredibly appealing to me about shutting naysayers up… I mean— I’ve been doing it all my life, especially when it came to becoming a professional artist.
But let’s face it: drawing is easy (to me). Matter of fact, there are tons of celebrated artists out there in generations over me who know who I am and appreciate my work! There are also artists in generations under me who cosplay me and my style(s). I congratulate them for being able to even do that. But that’s all they’ll ever be capable of, because I didn’t put myself and my work out here to shout ‘bout how much art I can create or draw for likes and followers.
Advancing in my art always had a larger purpose: to be able to make my own games and IPs utilizing it. Over the years, I’ve tried to form alliances with others who have specific skills because I know that building a brand or original IP is the real key to success as a creative, and that doing the industry “monkey dance” is temporary money. Fortunately for me, not everyone has the same goals nor desire to do that sort of thing over a long period of time. I did manage to work with a crew of talented creatives on the 1.0 project of Cryamore, as I’ve written before, and there’s no ill will towards any of them. I still talk to the core group to this very day and even those who I put on still have my back.
Ex. A: My composer Aivi is not only a great musician, but a good friend of mine who saw how everything happened behind the scenes, as an example.
So, I figured that in order to see the original outset through, I had to learn and teach myself the rest of the development pipeline in order for it to come into fruition. So this first dev blog post will primarily be about my personal history with animation and 3D that not many know about, and how I incorporate it in the production of “Cryamore 2.0”.
Getting Re-Animated
This doesn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway: Game development is brutally hard. There’s a reason so many attempt to make one and immediately run from it with their tails between their legs when realizing they need to know how to write code and do math to do it. Thankfully, for someone like myself, I enjoy immense challenges. It’s the only way I know how to grow as a person and artist. If I’m playing that game, I’m going to put that shit on the highest difficulty. If there’s something that seems insurmountable, I’m going to climb it anyway. If that chick is hot and attractive, I have no issue dating her.
However, developing games is only one part of the overall puzzle. First, you have to know how games work intrinsically under the hood in order to even design them. Secondly, you must have a keen artistic eye to express and demonstrate the vision of said game. Thirdly, you have to program the dang thing. Fourthly, (and this goes for the kinds of games I aim to make), they’re used as a vehicle for storytelling— meaning you have to also know how to write stories. And there are so many other things that go into it that require a particular set of skills to see a game to completion. One I’ll talk about today is animation.
Ex. B: A segment of an intro I animated in 2017 of my original IP “Martyrium”, which I intend on turning into a game itself in the future.
Now, one aspect a lot of people may not know about me is that I can animate. It’s a skill I never really showed much of because for one, I don’t like drawing animation frames; it’s a tedious and time-consuming task. And two, I tend to show off only a couple aspects of myself (like drawing) because it’s easy for others to get in their feelings about me taking on allegedly wild challenges. So, I keep my hidden skills to myself most of the time. I have shared glimpses of myself animating in the past, like the fake Martyrium anime OP above. (Heck, you can even grasp my “laziness” in how sketchy the frames are…)
Ex.C: There are a lot of animation frames in this simple idle pose… All done by hand, of course.
In Cryamore 1.0, we had to do quite a lot of animating. My partner Alan and I had to come up with and design animation actions for every single character and enemy in the game. As that project was 100% 2-Dimensional, you can probably understand roughly how much effort it took. Esmy herself alone had close to 1,500 individual frames of hand-drawn/pixelated animation, and that wasn’t even all of it because we scrapped the project.
It was a top-down game, meaning that we had to animate actions 5 different times and sync them based on the direction the player moved in, as the gameplay movement was in 8 cardinal directions. Needless to say, we were criminally insane. One action could take well over 20 frames, sometimes.
This is where 3D animation comes in.
I’ve lowkey been teaching myself the 3D pipeline behind the scenes for a decade now. I’ve done small mini projects in private over the years that built my confidence to not only create any sort of model I want, but to also animate them. So, the decision to reboot Cryamore was mostly influenced by this, as I always wanted to be in a position of creating my own games utilizing 3D techniques. They’re more friendly to a solo-developer, meaning that I only need to animate one action and use it once, cutting out a lot of the time in contrast to doing it in 2D.
Allow Me To Reintroduce Herself
Ex.D: Esmy’s “new” look and direction for the 2.0 version of the game. I made sure to keep it closely tied to the proportions of the original sprite.
In the process of redesigning the game, I had to first redesign Esmy’s appearance. I’ve always aimed for Cryamore to be aesthetically akin to my favorite PlayStation 1 titles such as Brave Fencer Musashi, Threads of Fate, and Megaman Legends. Even though I’m well capable of making high-density character models, for all the intents and purposes, I wanted to stick to a reasonable polygon limit. So, Esmy is polygon modeled from scratch; there was no use of sculpting or retopology whatsoever. Her polycount is much higher than even a character from an average PS2 title, sitting at a little over 28K triangles, for crisp lighting purposes in cel-shading. Majority of the game, she’ll be seen at a top down camera angle, so I felt it wasn’t necessary to have her be immensely detailed. After all, I designed her from the jump. So, there wasn’t much of a question to me how she would appear in 3D space considering I’ve already long dealt with animating her in 2D beforehand.
Ex. E: I’m quite happy with how she came out! Nothing like having full creative control. 😌
But there’s just enough room for her to be very evocative just as much. I also decided to use the classic texture-flipping animation technique for her face card, cutting out the need for making blend-shapes for expressions. Reminiscent of those aforementioned titles. Considering that my overall art style and aesthetic has been highly influenced by the Capcom and Squaresoft games of that era, it only made sense for my games to have that kind of spirit behind them. Having the freedom to combine modern technical capabilities while enforcing graphical limitations allows me to be intentional with the art, as I firmly believe games back then were purely more imaginative because they had to work around said limitations of the time.
Ex. F: She stretches.
She poses.
She runs.
I rigged her as well, which is a necessary part of the pipeline. While I was never crazy about rigging beforehand, I utilized a free software called Akeytsu to rig and animate with, which actually made the overall process very enjoyable in contrast to doing it all in Blender. (I love modeling in Blender and that’ll always be where I work regarding that). Now, I can’t wait to jump in it to rig and animate more characters and enemies LOL. I have to say I’ve fallen quite in love with the process of working in 3D and I can’t find myself changing that soon as I strengthen my personal workflow.
Ex.G: The game is going to be much more dynamic and cinematic than originally intended, that’s for sure.
With all that said, even when the camera angle is not hovering over her head most of the game, I can set up cinematic camera angles based on the level or particular areas. And the look really sells exactly what I’ve always been striving for ever since starting the project way back in 2013. While I have no issue with particular art styles in indie games, I find no desire to continue development in a conventionally “indie” way. I’ve always wanted to make an impression as not only a solo game developer but as an artist, and build it from that. Games have always been art to me, and I intend on invoking that definition with my projects from here on out.
Ex.H: The game’s cel shading mimics the look and style so many have borrowed from me in my own 2D art. 🙂↕️
The way I’ve always illustrated Esmy has a very specific look to it, so I made sure to tweak a really nice toon shader to give off that look in 3D as close as possible. This isn’t close to her final look, as I still have some texture work to do on her, but you can see it in how the light hits her hair with the “diamond-shaped anisotropic highlights”, just as I would color her in 2D. And working in 3D also gives me free real estate to give her hair volume and weight; they naturally bounce around exactly how I imagined it to be and how we animated her in her sprite format. It has quite an appeal to it that I’m very happy with!
The Switch Back to Unity
Oh yeah, I should state that I since moved development back to Unity. Reason being is that, while I really enjoy working in Unreal Engine, I don’t have nearly the same amount of experience working in it as I do working in Unity. After all, we did build an entire game from scratch over the course of 7 years at the time, and it’s my very first production-level engine, so I feel a lot more at home in it.
Going back to Unity has not only been easy, but the confidence I have working in it gives me a heightened resolve knowing what I’m now capable of as a whole. I’ll always prefer coding in C# over doing it in C++. Lastly, I think the game looks overall better in Unity than it did in Unreal; primarily because I have default freedom to build the final look from scratch just as much as I would be using Sketchbook or Procreate. With UE, I have to strip a lot away to get a unique look I’m going for. It looks cleaner and runs like silk in Unity.
In conclusion, I’m feeling pretty good. This will be the main location to get updates on the progress of 2.0. I work on this nearly every day, so you can expect some new footage relatively soon as I have an entire roadmap and surprises laid out.
If you want to actually support me and my continuing work on the game, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the gallery here on the site, buy some stuff from Teknakolor to help Maika and myself out over there, or drop a donation at the bottom if you fancy! Meanwhile, I’ll keep the nose to the grindstone.
I still owe Atlus some money.
By the way, I’ve been listening to this new Clipse record on repeat. Hey Siri. Play Ace Trumpets by Clipse. It’s time to get louder.
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