ReaderLuv's Vaguely Organized Art Stuff

[ReaderLuv]

WE GOT THE PERMS LESGO

The reason I wanted to join this forum was because I wanted to share some of the maps I made based on the levels in FEW; 3H. I started poking around the FEMapBuilder and such because I idly thought it would be neat to make at least Azure Gleam into functional actual FE gameplay, and so I started screenshotting the map layouts and seeing what I could do experimentally and realized it was fun as hell actually, so here’s what I have so far (as screenshots, because if the map editor has a way to export maps as images I have not found it yet lol)

Hopes Chapter 2

Hopes Azure Gleam Chapter 3

I split this one into two maps, since that made the most sense from a size perspective, a tileset limitation perspective, and also a “what would a game following the same story beats but in the style of a proper FE game on the GBA actually do here” perspective. They’re both somewhat works in progress because I’m messing around with details on 3-1 and I made 3-2 a bit wider near the end and haven’t resized and redecorated everything yet lol but the basic ideas are there.

Other experimental maps

Field Tile Experiment - Village Rescue

So I’ll keep maps on this post, editing-wise, then I’ll make another post after this for the other little set of things I’ve been working on

[ReaderLuv]

And now we have project 2: animated talking Pokemon sprites!

I’m not sure why this hasn’t been done yet, and I’m the last person I’d ASK to do this job, but sometimes you discover things you’re good at in weird ways. I was noticing that a lot of Pokemon themed games on here were using what looked like sprites traced from 3D models, and I figured I may as well experiment to see if I could get the PMD sprites working in some way that might work for these projects, and it worked surprisingly well!

I’m not an animator by any means, I just know some of the basic concepts from watching animators talk about the process and examining animation sheets in gamedev stuff. A lot of my spriting is just playing frankenstein and Vibing™ until it looks good, but so far it’s been going pretty well!

Here are the kids I have so far, both in their original size and in a size closer to FE portrait sizes. I had to remove some of the anti-aliasing because these were originally meant to go on backgrounds and started out a bit blurry, but it wasn’t too tough. I may have missed a few pixels of shades that don’t belong in my excitement lol

EDIT 1: Added Meowth and Eevee and moved everything to dropdown boxes for space optimization lol

Original Size

Double Size (FE Portrait height)

I still need to make them blink, and I have no idea if these would actually function in place of FE portraits without a lot of work because the dimensions are different and I don’t fully know how all of the tools available handle sprites, but I figure I could at least mess around and find out what I could do. Stay tuned for a possible rendition of Sacred Stones but everyone is a talking Pokemon, lol.

[Starshadow_Melody]

Pikachu, Chimchar, and Treecko have small enough mouths that they can probably be made to work if placed correctly. Tototototototototototototototo, though… that long, crocodillian snout is not gonna do them any favors on that front. Not moving the upper jaw is a good call for that purpose.

[ReaderLuv]

Ah, cool, see, I’m learning. I did think something along those lines but it’s nice to have it confirmed. I’ll have to look into that more myself eventually, even if the process is mildly overwhelming, lol

[ReaderLuv]

Alright, having looked at the dimensions for how the talksprites seem to work, I would have to do some alterations to get Totodile to work but it would mostly just be a matter of having its mouth open a little less wide, I think? I’ll experiment later today since I have work lol but for now, I come bearing More™!

Two excellent Normal-types I hold close to my heart. Time to edit the original post to have dropdown menus for big and small ones lol

[ReaderLuv]

Alright! After examining how the FE mouth sprites seem to work, I altered Totodile so that the mouth movements fit in the correct space, although I might have to alter it again depending on what the spacing for where the mouth animation tiles go is

It’s not exactly anatomically correct, but it doesn’t look too bad at least.

And while I was at it, I did Chikorita and Cyndaquil! Round out the trio, and everything.

Cyndaquil might need some tweaking but it’s hard to make an animation for a sprite that starts out with no mouth lol

The Gen I starters all have big wide reptilian mouths so I gotta check and see what space I have to work with on them, but I’ll probably do that next.

[ReaderLuv]

Decided to mess around with trying to import these, and realized that eye size is a much bigger issue than mouth size, so I might just not be able to make them blink. The issue of mouth SPACING is its own issue, that does appear to be An Issue; I’m going to have to study up to figure out exactly where the breakpoints are and see if I can mess with the sprites to make them work.

As for maps, the next map I have to make for the Azure Gleam route of Hopes is a goddamn lava level lmao and the existing lava pools on the lava tilesets are… mildly inscrutable, with only a few fairly limited existing examples in the games for me to work off of. The generative tools don’t seem to know what to do with the lava pools, either, so maybe I’ll just make some generic maps for a bit, mess around with things, etc. Who knows, lol.

[ReaderLuv]

Alright, since I ran into trouble with recreating the lava level in Azure Gleam, I figure the best way to get the ol’ creative juices running would be to just go through all of the available tilesets and make some random stuff using the generative tools. Excellent algorithm, btw, having a great time with it.

First up, I figured a field-based map would make the most sense, so I thought of a quick prompt for myself and got to work. In this case, I wanted to try recreating one of my favorite vibes, which is “race to all the villages as fast as you can”

The general idea is that you start on the left, near the ruined village, and work your way to the gate village where the boss is, who’s the goal of the chapter, and you get rewards at the end for how many villages you visited in addition to the rewards for visiting each individual one. There are a number of similar missions in the series, and this map’s size would mean it would be best in the midgame, after you’ve gained access to at least a second flier since there’s two directions you would need to go.

I also have no idea if this is a healthy number of trees, there were actually originally more that the generator put in but I tried to make clearish paths to each village. I’d have to playtest it to be sure lol and I have not actually done any putting of maps into FEBuilder to try out. There’s a few places where bandits could spawn from after a set number of turns, or depending on how many villages you’ve saved maybe? No idea if that’s actually a thing you can program but it seems like it would be neat lol

I’ve already technically done a village and a castle, so the next tileset I want to use is probably going to be the fort or plains maybe? Gotta come up with some kind of fun idea or theme for the level, we’ll see what we can do

[ReaderLuv]

So! After a bunch of experimentation, I have discovered a very large issue with the talking Pokemon project. It is as follows:

When importing this file to FEBuilder with FE8 open –

This happens:

And when moving Bulba over to the other side to try and account for this, there’s a similar gap on the other side, and after looking over various official portraits, I realized that dead space is where the space above human shoulders usually is.

Now, I have no idea WHY this dead space is here or how it works or how this program reads images. I still am extremely puzzled about how the hell exporting a battle animation, which as far as I can tell are made in full real space, results in a goddamn jigsaw puzzle and a bin file I don’t know how to read or open. I have looked up tutorials and either I’m stupid and am looking in the wrong places or it just has not come up. Is this one of those things people take for granted because it’s everywhere and they just don’t ever explain to people??? I am so confused.

Anyway, since Pokemon don’t have shoulders, I thought this project might just be dead, and then I was like “no c’mon. you can do this it’s just going to take more work” and so… here is the more work in question.

Before the problem solving:

aaaaand after!

Originally, I just resized them exactly doubled, which let the pixelation just be twice as big and it looked fine. But if I want to work around this shoulder space issue, I’m going to need to resize by partial steps and then deal with the artifacting, which is SO MUCH MORE WORK, BUT!

It worked. And it doesn’t look half bad, if I do say so myself! It looks like I messed up the placement of the mouth frames a little bit, but I can fix that up in a jiffy and it should be fine. We’re learning quite a lot through this, lol!

EDIT: Almost forgot, but this is the little guy properly in motion. Not bad!

[Starshadow_Melody]

yeah that specific rectangle (and the one opposite it) is Not Within The Hackbox. Bulbasaur is screwed, but as you see, more vertically-oriented pokémon may be fine. and IDK if the hackbox extension patch covers that much space.

[ReaderLuv]

Lmao, I was just commenting to my friend about how Bulbasaur was next on the list for giving me trouble on this, I think there MIGHT be a way to make it work if I’m creative about proportions but that’s a problem for tomorrow (or more likely the next day since I have to work tomorrow lol)

EDIT: almost forgot, do tell me about the hackbox and the expansion patch thereof, I want to learn as much as I can about this