Art Style for Neverending Nightmares 2?

[matt]

I'm willing to experiment with the shader and have a few ideas for a bit of a different effect. However, I think if it's random and constantly changing, then it loses the hand drawn feeling and conflicts with our art style.

[evilkinggumby]

i agree. the art style should make the whole game seem like it is made out of spam or potted meat. I can't think of a more grotesque frightening or nightmarish world than one made all out of processed bits of flesh.

[matt]

That would be pretty horrific!

[Grabthehoopka]

Have you thought about emphasizing the hand-drawn nature of the art style by leaving in "mistakes" to call attention to it? Sort of like how the character textures in The Walking Dead sometimes have outlines that overshoot corners and angles, not only on the character's bodies themselves, but sometimes with black lines jutting off of their shoulders and heads. And that's with 3D models, it would be a lot easier with 2D ones. Or like how the new Kirby game looks like everything's made out of clay, and they deliberately put fingerprints and thumbnail marks on the models to really sell it. In Metro: Last Light and the redux versions, they made the screen look like a dirty, smudgy camera lens whenever you look directly at a bright light source.

Have you experimented with a scratchier, sketchier look, with rougher outlines, smudges, fingerprints, and things like that? If everything that was animated had outlines that constantly shifted around like the lines were inconsistently animated, how much more work would it be? Or is there some kind of shortcut you could take?

[matt]

We have a new art style, but we are doing some things along those lines to make it look more authentic since we are creating everything digitally - well mostly. We are basing some things on actual scans.

Animating lines can be done, but it is a lot of work, and I think it might draw too much attention to things that are supposed to be static. It would be fun to experiment with, but unfortunately, we have some fairly tight budget constraints, so we can't spend time on it. I'd love to spend like a year just on visual development, but I think that'd be pretty impractical.

[evilkinggumby]

you haven't even done the kickstarter and gotten buttloads of cash.. how do you dismiss work due to budgetary constraints? *confused* I mean yes I can see you saying doing ultra HD photo realistic 3d rendered models might be outside of your comfort zone, but come on man. hehehe

though if you use a similar style from NeN you aren't doing handdrawn old school animation so getting that sketchy effect would be tough on a skeleton animated 2d model.

if you guys actually DID a more sprite based 'hand drawn' animation game though.. hooo boy.. especially if it went for some old school classic animation style and some sequences used rotoscopic effects for the scene.. heheh.

there is a strange familiarity and yet odd nature to animating off film. Have you guys ever checked out The Last Express and how they animated it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpKlv7Lm4zE

Creepy but interesting stuff. if you could create a solid pipeline to translate footage and animate characters off it like that you could potentially do all kinds of interesting things quickly and for a modest budget. Jump to 1:35 to see a freaky animation in the game and a few more samples of the flowing animation.

[matt]

With the kickstarter, I doubt we'll make so much money that we'll want to throw away the work we've done on the art style and try to take it another direction. If the kickstarter is a super success, we'll probably make the game longer and have more polish. I suppose that could include tweaking the art style, but realistically, it seems that even if we get 50% over our budget, it will STILL be a tight development cycle... :-/

We are using an improved animation system from Neverending Nightmares. We started Neverending Nightmares with pure vertex and mesh based animations. We've added a hierarchy to the meshes, which is like a skeleton. Then we added new features, so we can control just parts of the hierarchy in order to "composite" different animations.

The animation will look more or less the same, but be easier to create and more flexible.

[evilkinggumby]

wow, that sounds pretty intense. Glad to hear the refinement will make the dev cycle a little easier. means possibly more variety and detail to animations (maybe more facial expressions? ) in the next game.

it is kind of disheartening to think if you get the full kickstarter you'll be making the game but if you got 50% OVER the target it would still be a tight development cycle. tight as in funding, or you refuse to allow for more than 12 months work on the game?

[Grabthehoopka]

We are using an improved animation system from Neverending Nightmares. We started Neverending Nightmares with pure vertex and mesh based animations. We've added a hierarchy to the meshes, which is like a skeleton. Then we added new features, so we can control just parts of the hierarchy in order to "composite" different animations.

The animation will look more or less the same, but be easier to create and more flexible.

So if I understand this correctly, does that mean that you can have items the character holds and not have to make a new animation set from scratch for each one? Or that you can have more complex facial animations or something?

Sort of like that thing in first person shooters where the character models can run forwards, backwards, and side-to-side while independently aiming in any direction?

[matt]

Tight as in funding. I'm thinking about budgeting for release in May/June 2016, but maybe not promise until August, so we can get some extra time if we exceed our kickstarter goal or Neverending Nightmares sells more than my projections.

My goal is to set the kickstarter goal around $100k, but the real development budget is much larger, so 50% of a fraction of the cost of development doesn't get us a TON of breathing room. Honestly, I'd like to have a full two years from when we do the kickstarter, but that would cost a lot. Even if we got enough money, I'm not sure I want to be one of those projects where we miss our expected date by a year...

The main feature that we added makes it much easier to do the holding animations and cool stuff with the arms and whatnot. It does make facial animation a little easier because Joe can animate the face with the rest of the body. Previously the face was a totally separate object with separate animations that was timed to match the body.