Pre-Made Character Discussion Thread

One thing I have intended to do is create pre-made characters. I have gotten a lot of requests for them over the past year, and it makes sense to have them. Granted, making custom characters is great, but sometimes you also just want to grab a handful of existing characters and throw them into your game without having to build every single one. It's just faster and easier.

What I am proposing here is not a replacement to the character pieces that get released at the $15 and above tiers. I will continue to make those. The primary issue with those is that they take soooooooooo long to create, so I can't create a lot of them quickly (and certainly not to everyone's satisfaction).

Instead, the proposal is to add new fully-formed characters to the $5 and above tiers, and character pieces will continue to be released at their normal tier.

The pros to pre-made characters:

• You don't need to make the character, everything is already set to go into your game.
• The characters will overall look a bit better due to not having conflicting layering issues that naturally arises when layering 2D sprites atop each other.
• Additional detail and quality can be added to every character that just isn't possible when dealing with individual layered pieces.
• Higher frequency of released characters. I can release probably 2-4 characters in the time it takes to make a single element of a character piece. In the time it takes to make a top, bottom, base, hair, and weapon for a single character set, I could probably make 5-10 full characters.
• Additional content for lower-end Patrons.
• Ability for me to actually package and sell them in the future - this one probably doesn't matter to anyone here, but a large roadblock with the character pieces is that they take up so much file space due to the sheer volume of animations and pieces involved (this is entirely my fault I know, since I made all of those animations), which makes actually being able to sell them really difficult. At least this way I can bundle characters up and release them like the old days. The character customization pieces at the $15 tier and above will be Patreon-exclusive.
• The potential to create unique body shapes and animations for different characters. With 2D character pieces, you are forced to have a single body type otherwise all of the pieces simply will not fit properly. With pre-made characters, that is no longer an issue so there can be tall people, short people, fat people, skinny people, and everything in between.

Cons to pre-made characters:

• Lack of customization. Basically what you see is what you get.
• Probably can't make it so you can switch weapons/weapon types. The best that would be possible to allowing different weapons of the same overall type to be interchangeable but probably not.
• Might require additional work on the part of the user to set up since they would use different animations. I imagine this would be a one-time setup for most.

With pre-made characters, I would also aim to drastically reduce the number of animation frames and pair down the total animations greatly, but also expand the size of the animations from 3 frames to 5 frames for all 8 directions to make them look a little nicer and smoother. After looking through my notes, thinking about what is important in terms of animations, and seeing what people have mostly been using in their projects, I have come up with this tentative list:

• Walking - 64 frames
• Running - 64
• Idle 1 - 40
• Idle 2 - 40
• Crit Idle - 40
• Attack 1 - 40
• Attack 2 - 40
• Use Item/Interact - 40
• Block - 40
• Evade - 40
• Get Hit - 40
• Either resting (sitting/sleeping/whatever) or Use Skill - 40
• Jump - 40
• Dead Animation - 24
• Dead Pose - 8 

This equals a grand total of exactly 600 frames of animation, which is one single master sheet in the current size (so about 1/4 the total size and sheets to deal with). Walking and running will remain unchanged at 8 frames of animation, whereas all of the other animations have increased to 5 frames with the exception of the dying/down animations which remain lower (mostly to fit snugly within that 600 frame cap). 

An additional idea behind the 5 frames is that you should still be able to take frames 1, 3, and 5 of any animation and make a 3-frame animation from it that works more or less just like the ones you get with the custom character pieces.

Each character animation frame will remain at 160x160 pixels so they will be able to be used right alongside all of the custom characters. You will be able to freely mix pre-made characters in with any custom characters you make.

Also, the number of faces will be greatly reduced. The only reason there are 24 of them with the custom character pieces is to provide multiple options for each general expression. Instead, the facial expressions will be reduced down to 8: happy, sad, angry, neutral, nervous, scared, thoughtful, and annoyed. Each expression can be different and more unique among the pre-made characters, so although each one has 1/3 the number of expressions compared to custom-made characters, they are more unique. These would most likely not be broken down into separate faces/busts/paperdolls, but instead be large images that you can freely crop or reduce in size to fit your needs. All of this greatly reduces the amount of work required to produce a single character.

So, with my overall intent laid out above and reasoning behind it, I wanted to open this up to you good folk for any feedback, ideas, suggestions, etc, that you might have regarding this. 

Thank you kindly and I look forward to hearing what you have to say!

-Jesse