Finally over my stupid cold. To understand, more than a week passed between my last Developer Journal and this one. I’m back on the final cut scene of the prologue and once again, because it involves a bunch of buildings it’s taking forever. I promise not all the cut scenes and backgrounds require skyscrapers and…

I have been following the news of the Detective Pikachu movie for months now. From the first announcement of the movie’s creation to the casting news of who would play the titular Pokemon, I have been keeping my finger to the pulse of this story. The concept was just too wild, too absurd, too majestic to actually be…

Today I’m going to show you guys how I work on the cut scenes for Kaiju Crush.

Today marks the day that would have been the last day of the Six-TAY Day Writing Challenge if I hadn’t gotten the leg sweep from life. I would have much preferred being able to do it all at once instead of falling on my teeth all the time, but progress is still progress. Coding is currently still banging my head…

Two cut scenes down, two to go until the end of the prologue. Running into another coding problem that I’m going to have to look up this weekend. I’ve been using the tutorial that comes with Ren’Py for most of my references, but the tutorial doesn’t go into much detail for certain features like animation. For the cut…

In spite of how bloody annoying it was to do, the first cut scene is finished, and it actually looks really good. I’ve been using a few save files to work back and forth to put new content into the game, move it around and test it out so that cinematically things look the way I want. There are three more cut scenes in…

Back on working on the cut scenes. Still hate working on buildings. Still hate backgrounds. Still whining while every moment.

That break to work on Morrigan was a really good idea. Not only is my mind more fresh from taking a break from Kaiju Crush, it let me get better with Fire Alpaca. Fire Alpaca still can’t do a lot of things that Photoshop can, or Photoshop still does a lot of things better, but I found out something that will save me a…

The cut scenes are coming a lot slower than I was anticipating. I think I’ve been working on this project so much (and pretty much nothing else) that I’m starting to get a bit fatigued. I know most of the hard part is behind me, and actually the cut scenes are a lot more fun to draw than just the plain backgrounds or…

The second character is done! All the variations got inked, colored, saved and inputted. With everything the one character ended up being 37 different image files, which is nothing compared to most games, but it’s a lot for me. Now I’m starting to put the sprites into the game and have them move around. I haven’t…

I managed to fix all the snags in the scan and have the second character all inked up. This will easily be the most complicated sprite in the game because this particular character has not only three different poses, but three different costumes in the game meaning that each expression will have roughly three…

I’ve finished all the sprites for one of the romanceable characters but hit a major hurdle with the second one. It turns out one of the scans got warped (that can happen if the paper curls on the scanner bed and the lid isn’t closed all the way) and even though I thought I calibrated it properly, one of the costumes…

I’m spending a lot of time now inking and coloring, and while I work I usually need some background noise to help keep pace and to break up some of the monotony. Sometimes I’ll listen to music (usually heavy metal or anime soundtracks) and sometimes I’ll watch DVDs. For this recent bout of work I watched Gravity…

Got the character sprites all drawn up and spent the weekend scanning them. Because these are the non-static sprites and will shift expression, they are a bit trickier to scan. See, most paper isn’t truly square (square = 90 angle at the corners) but most scanner beds are. That means that when you scan, the paper will…

The static sprites are looking good and working properly, two very positive steps. Now all my focus has been in the romanceable characters. If they don’t work, the whole game is moot. I’ve been playing around with color pallets to see what I like best. None of these are the final designs, but it does give you an idea…

The first batch of static sprites are done and ready to be incorporated into the game. I still need to work on the character sheets I already have scanned, as well as the two others and the last two static sprites. Based off of the way I finalized the sprites I might go back in now to the backgrounds and change some…

I spent the weekend doing some more research for reference images for some more characters and settings while using the BF’s scanner. With the drawings inputted I was able to get two static character sprites done in one day. Sprites are definitely going the fastest, and then it will be back to the more complicated…

Two of the character sprites are going to have to wait a bit since I ran into a couple of hitches while creating them and will need more reference images until I get what I want. One character is supposed to be a sleazy looking politician, but while the character designs I developed are fine looking characters, they…