magicnuts

Card-reading improvements (0.6 spoilers)

Added 2022-08-17 20:40:06 +0000 UTC

Hi everybody.

Since we have just started working on Gomira's story and can't share anything from 0.7 yet, we thought it would be interesting to show one of the events from the 0.6 update that needed a lot of visual improvements (and coding) to reach its final state.

In one of the introductory events of Rose's release, the main character used tarot cards and magical incense to see Rose's past in a series of visions. Now that scene was extremely problematic to make, and until the last months of the 0.6 development, the visions in question involved randomly sized particles raining down against a background of black color that formed the shapes of characters from Rose's past. You can see it better in the video above.

I think while this approach was good for quick magical transformations (we had used it for Serena's change from an old woman to an elf), it didn't work too well for story-telling, especially since the visions were too neat and didn't feel like they were drug-induced. I remember Chestnut drawing several versions and corrections until we increased the amount of smoke in the background and made the shapes seen transparent and smoke-like, floating left and right. Looking at it now, it seems obvious that they had to resemble the smoke of the incense, but it wasn't obvious then.

What's more, the particle approach was a lot more complicated since each of the images in front had to be a flat image with a hole formed like whatever character was to be shown cut out of them to act as one of the layers that would sandwich the falling particles. It was resource-heavy and challenging to edit.

I hope you like this little video of before-after doing the editing/improvement phase.

Have a great one.
Cheers

P.S. Tomorrow, I will post an image from the tarot cards Chestnut had designed for this event.