Friend Facts! A Postmortem
This feels a little arrogant, but I did spend like 1200 hours or some ridiculous amount of time on this project, so I wanted to write a little something as reflection for myself ^^
If youāre interested, hereās the playlist of the whole project with all of the minor errors from the premiere corrected, and hereās the spreadsheet which contains all of the artist & writer credits, so definitely check that out! An unbelievable amount of people worked so hard on this project, and I cannot thank everyone enough.
The rest of this post is going to be about my personal experience and contributions as the founder though, so scroll on if youāre not interested in my long ramblings about myself!
ā BACKGROUNDS ā
Making the backgrounds was one of my most extensive tasks for Friend Facts, as I personally made the vast majority of them, or about 300 or so (I donāt know exactly, I only roughly counted!) As the project went on, the backgrounds got increasingly more complex and specific, but I think it was worth it to try to replicate the unique areas of the game.
Some of my favorites were the ones that had multiple matching versions, such as the playground backgrounds you can see here:
This background for Deeper Well was one of my favorites, despite its simplistic look. I really liked how the six layers blended seamlessly into each other. This one was based on the view from the telescope in-game, and also is a great example of how complex the backgrounds were, though this was far from the most complex background I made! Some of the most complicated ones (such as Neighborās Room) had up to 50 layers ^^
Basilās house (Headspace) was another fun one that changed each time you see it in the video. The first one had its assets collected and put together by one of our background helpers, which I then added my own touches to and then edited for the other two versions. A lot of time was spent even finding images to edit ā for example, would you know what to google to find a nice image of a hole in a wooden floor? Especially if you want images that arenāt AI, google images is a hellscape.
Basilās house is also one of many backgrounds that had the parallax showing through a transparent section of the window ā I always thought that was a fun touch, so I added it in a lot of places throughout the video.
Pessiās house was just fun to make! An example of a hyperspecific background used for one entry and never again (which still took an hour or two to make, mind you ^^)
I also loved how the Cattail Field barn background turned out ā mostly I thought the snow in the background was very pretty and atmospheric.
The train is definitely one of my absolute favorites! I think the yellow and purple dithering in the original is really nice, as well as the white turning to bright magenta-purple in the dark version (based directly on the game). I also prioritized keeping the references to the truth from the game, such as the shadows of the handles shaped like nooses, and the jumprope-like route on the wall.
For Sunnyās bedroom, my favorite part is probably Momās sticky notes on the wall :] And for the Truth sequence, I added back in Mariās bed :[
I just liked the colors of the closet with the toybox :] I think this one took like 3 hours or something haha.
[ Big Yellow Cat by shinoataya and Aubrey by skelaxo ]
The many backgrounds for the Big Yellow Cat! These are also some of my favorites because of how iconic these scenes/rooms are. Neighborās bedroom especially is such a poignant, nostalgic, and bittersweet moment, and I donāt think I captured it in its entirety, but maybe close enough! The Friends Playground I had a bit of trouble with at first until I moved the wall further into the background so that the Big Yellow Cat could be small with distance, and then the perspective fell into place :] The angle of monkey bars is another thing I remember image searching for like 30 minutes to find the right picture š
Deeper Well was one that I had fun with! I actually didnāt realize until making this that the blue āfloorā here is pools of water, despite it being very obvious if you look at it. I also just liked the Church of Something exterior, which I ended up making as an establishing shot last minute, mostly to tie the Church of Something scenes in the Hikikomori Route and the true route together (so that hopefully people understood where in the video we were āresettingā back to). The backstage background is another one I spent a lot of time on, but I really liked how the color palette came out, as well as the music stand appearing.
For the truth Something reveal, we decided to base it off of this red/purple scheme from Basilās Meadow, rather than being black-and-white like in the Something reveal in the canon truth album (though the composition of the image is obviously based on the truth album!) Just a small artistic choice we made, but I think it made this moment appropriately ominous.
Finally, we have the Boring Room (or āLamp Roomā, or āOmoriās Castleā), and the scary version of it shown in the truth sequence. It was really fun to recreate this very iconic room based on the promotional poster for Omori. This sped-up screen recording of the process is about 2 hours of footage condensed, not including the time it took to find the images. It has 2 versions and one bonus, with the third one having the screen door open. This is another one that it was very important to me to perfect, and I was pretty proud of the results ^^
Bonus: I was also in charge of making the glitches! Some of the glitches were done in After Effects, but most of them were handmade by this cool process of converting images to raw data and then adding effects to the āaudioā in an audio editing program. I donāt know what it will look like until I convert it back to a digital image format, so a lot of it is randomized!
Here are three of my favorites:
[ Cooking Hero by floweringpotss, Hell Sunny by retzxis, & Boss Rush Mari by byeolimation ]
The Hero and Hell Sunny ones just look really cool!!! I was fond of how they turned out. The Mari one I love especially because I accidentally glitched her neck of all places (and her bad kneeā¦) and more than that, the flipped version looks like her real world colors! That was not on purpose by the way, just a coincidence that I really really loved.
ā MY ART ā
Curtsey was drawn in October 2024 for the first Friend Facts trailer like I mentioned. I think sheās cute! Pink! I like the small animation she has on her shoes and skirt. There are things I donāt like, like her hands and collarbone/chest area looks odd⦠I had some sketches to redo this entry, but I ran out of time to do it since I was so busy working on the video editing. Oh well! Iām not too upset, itās kind of nostalgic anyway to have the old version in the final video.
The vases were drawn more recently! Iām a lot happier with the way these turned out, because I experimented more with the coloring and texturing to try to replicate a painted look. + a closer look at some of the detailing!Ā
We wanted to include a few objects from the memory house section of Crossroads, and I immediately wanted to include (and then draw myself) the porcelain vases. These have always been a really intriguing object to me because of the flavor text which reads, "MOM's porcelain vases. There used to be more, but I broke one of them. MARI took the blame for it thoughā¦ā, which always made me think about how Mari took the blame for her own death. Itās not just that Sunny killed her, itās that he disparaged her name and tainted her memory to the entire religious town and possibly even their parents.Ā
So! These vases represent Mom, Sunny, and Mari, with the broken Mari vase getting a little ghostly appearance. The Sunny vase is mostly yellow and purple (like Headspace) tones, Mari gets purple/pink/green, and the Mom vase has all of the above :]
And bonus! Here are some custom pixel sprites I made! The cute chubby baby Sunny is my favorite ^^
And finallyā¦
ā Video Editing ā
The video editing was an absolutely massive undertaking, and if Iād known how to do things properly, there is so much I would have worked on along the way instead of rendering animations in separate files for months that I pretty much had to redo anyway. That being said, I had never touched After Effects before starting this project, so I have to say that managing to edit a 3-hour long video in the end was pretty impressive at least.
For the last 2.5 months of Friend Facts, I worked on it 4-8 hours every single night (as long as it took to finish one section), and I'm not exaggerating! The record goes to the Black Space section, which took me 23 hours straight, stopping for 20 minutes twice to eat, but not getting up otherwise.
I know that there are lots of other people who have more video editing experience and would have even done a better job than I did, with less errors, more creative choices, etc, butā¦! I also know that I am the one who actually sat down and did it. And my philosophy is that working really hard will always beat out having talent but lacking the motivation to use it.
And I learned a lot during this project! There are effects that took me hours to perfect that someone else might be able to do in minutes, but I didnāt give up and I kept working on it until I figured it out ā so hey, now I know how to do it for the future.
This video highlights some of my favorite highlights of the editing (not necessarily my only favorite parts of the video, just the things I'm proudest of, though many of those overlap!):
Neighbor's Room It was just fun to animate this one panning down! Iām proud of this idea, and we ended up using it a couple more times throughout the video. I also erased the cat hole on the borders to let the parallax show through like it does in the game (while Iām on the topic, massive shout-out to the border artists, because the atmosphere of Omori's distinct areas would be impossible to capture so accurately without them!) I also liked how Kelās foot was perfectly in between the jacks on the floor, because that was a total coincidence and otherwise I might have needed to remove them haha.
Basil's House Iām already partial to this scene as the āaccidentsā and āpushingā is foreshadowing to the truth, and it was fun to figure out how to do the jumpscare here! The white space section also teases the knife in the corner if you notice hehe :]
Junkyard Ems is a very cool entry to me, because it has a meta reference to the pixel artist of Omori (Emily Shaw) in the writing, and was drawn by an artist we communicated to entirely through translating apps, which is so awesome!! Friend Facts even broke language barriers! I had to manually line up the two tracks to have them transition cleanly into each other, as the fast version is not actually just the slow version sped-up, but also remixed.
The download window was also SUPER fun to make ā the Junkyard was the first section of the entire video that I worked on actually, so I was still figuring things out. Replicating the crash effect from the game was really enriching, and I thought it was clever to make the parallax in the background stall too :] (Also the written entry makes me laugh every time I read it ^^)
Barn / Prologue Ending Here I reused the panning effect, and added some jittering and glitches in After Effects (this is an example of a glitch thatās actually a preset, unlike most of the other glitches in the video). Mostly my favorite part of this one is how the lightbulb wire lined up perfectly to make it look like Something is hanging from it, which was completely on accident but I think it makes for a really cool effect :]
Train As I mentioned, I really adore the background I made for this one, and the animator did such an excellent job perfectly framing the characters to look like theyāre in the scene. I decided to add some train vibration effects, which was fun, as well as the effects of the lights going out. This one was a lesson too in hunting down Omori sound effects in the files ā it turns out the train movement sfx is actually reused from the āhitā sfx for the Clash of Jash minigame. Who would know that? Well, now I do.
Slight tangent, but I gained so much Omori trivia just by trying to recreate some of the soundscapes. For example, did you know that Shattered Omori breaking is the same sound Dorothi makes? Or that the sfx for Basil getting his head cut off in the elevator is actually Omoriās cut skill at 50% speed? The āhitā sound in the Basil Boss Fight is se_dig, which is primarily used in Dinoās Dig, but also for Aubrey sticking the pinwheel in the stump. And one of my favorites is that when Stranger stands over the hole in Sweetheartās stage (urging the player to jump down to the Lost Library), it actually plays Thalassophobia (or, the fear of drowning ost). Which, if you recall, hasnāt even been played in its actual scene later on yet. Probably few people care about this, but as an Omori nerd, I was excited every time I learned something new ā it felt like re-exploring the game on a whole new level!
Sweetheart This one I just think is awesome, mostly because of the iconic music and cool art! I was worried going in that I might have to leave the Sweetheart entry on the screen too long just to feel like Iād played enough of the song, but it ended up fitting just perfectly. I was really proud of the transition both into and out of Worldās End Valentine :] And in general, one of my favorite parts of the video editing was the song transitions, because I enjoyed listening to them to try to find similar notes in both songs where they could naturally overlap.
Forest of Stumps The text appearing to the beat of the music is one of those subtle touches that's not really noticed at first glance per se, but the kind of small intentionality that all coalesces in a polished final product. My favorite little detail I added here though was the āI love youā turning to 143! This is obviously apt because of their shared meaning, but itās even more apt for this moment specifically, as we select āyesā to jumping off the edge which you can only do after waiting for 143 seconds :]
Friends Playground I like the Headspace fakeout we did here! And the eyes showing through the borders on the dead Basil entry is fun, as well as the Black Space that creeps back in in each subsequent entry. And more of making things appear or settle to the beat of the music, which I enjoyed doing a lot :)
Sweetheart Clones To be honest, I just like these :] I thought the music transitions were really nice, and Iām glad I got to include an ideal section of Tee-Hee Time, as itās one of my favorite tracks !
Hell Sunny + Omoriās Castle This moment in the game is so heartbreaking for so many reasons, and I think we totally nailed these ones. It doesnāt hurt that the art is so gorgeous (and Iām fond of the glitch as well!) Another thing I did in this entry is have him disappear just before the rest of it does, since this is the last time you see Sunny in the Hikikomori route (as the next time you wake up, youāre now Omori in the real world). Omoriās Castle is a scene that means a lot to me personally, and I thought a lot about how to perfectly capture its meaning in Friend Facts (that being that Sunnyās deepest desire is mundanity ā for things to be simple and normal like they once were). But writing my own entry here felt a little heavy-handed, so instead I decided to do something more subtle by just changing the title to āOmoriās Castleā, as people who knew about the Keeperās dialogue would be able to put the pieces together themselves. And this room is called Omoriās Castle in the code as well!
Boss Rush This part is one of my very favorite parts of the video to be honest! The way it starts with a full animation is incredible (kudos to the artist!), and I thought it was fun to be able to use the unique character borders that you donāt see anywhere else. The ost here is also iconic so I was vibing to it the entire time editing haha. And Mariās entry going into the glitch was also incredibly fun to make, as well as the static and blur effects of Sunny and Basil. I decided to have their dialogue on both sides of the box, as if they were saying it to themselves and to each other, because theyāre tied eternally now because of this ā made to have immense inward guilt and both loyalty and resentment toward the other.
Black Space II The Corrupted Junkyard is an incredibly cool area, and I loved trying to replicate it here! I think we did a pretty good job! Using the Otherworld borders, but making it extremely glitchy and falling apart.
The Pillow Hider has a really quick glitch frame that says ā??? HIDERā and āVyes especially for _________ā, as reference to his dialogue āForget about the PILLOW HIDER thing... I decided I'm better at hiding something else insteadā.Ā The pillow in the next entry I had my friend draw last-minute, because I thought it would be more fun if it glitched to Tomatogirl instead of her being there to begin with, and it turned out so well!
And the Doorway Basil! There are lots of entries in Friend Facts I adore, but this may be my #1 favorite⦠Mostly because of how high quality each of the elements are on their own. I really enjoy the background I made for this one, as itās both aesthetically-pleasing and accurate to the game. I already wrote above about my writing for this entry! The art is very beautiful and interacts in a really innovative way with the background! And most of all, this entry gets major bonus points for being such an intriguing and obscure moment in the game (and additionally was drawn by an artist who helped with the original Omori progress document (so they were one of the first people in the world exploring things like Black Space II upon its release!) The fact that we were able to pair this character up so perfectly with someone who would so deeply appreciate this moment makes it really special in my opinion :)
Shattered Omori is here to admire his shiny rainbow shatter effect, because I spent (no kidding) like 5 hours just on that few seconds. Mostly because I didnāt know what I was doing, but I digress. The radio effect that comes next looks SUPER COOL, but honestly I just followed a tutorial and it was luckily pretty easy to make :) But this moment is really cool to me in general because of the excerpt of final duet playing (which is so chilling in the game), as well as the idea of the Radio being the last entry for Black Space II, right before Sunny will presumably recycle Headspace yet again. It makes me really sad :[
Where Oh Where is my SOOOOOOOCKKK I imagine a lot of people were really confused when this guy whipped out some lyrics for this song if theyāve never done Universally Loved. Itās just very amusing to me that there are 3 songs with lyrics in Omori, and this is the only one that made it into Friend Facts. I was also proud of the transition to the Ginoās song hehe :] (Bonus: Note the āGinoās Pizzaā sign on the wall !)
The Truth I was thinking a lot about what kind of parallax I should use for the truth segment, as the Black Space one didnāt feel exactly right, but neither did the nighttime one. Eventually, I decided to do a red version of the sunset background to highlight a very specific fact that some people miss ā that the truth happened at sunset! And not only that, but thatās (in my opinion) part of the reason why the windows and the sliding door in the scary scenes are always glowing red (not just for the āscaryā factor). The hospital background was also fun to make, and notice that the clocks are accurate to the game (which was 4 oāclock, I found out).
About the whole sequence itself, I thought it was clever we chose to write it from Basilās perspective, as he is the keeper of the truth, and the truth photo album is from his perspective in-game. The truth sequence was obviously very daunting, as one of the most breathtaking sequences of the game⦠I think though we did a pretty good job getting across a similar story while putting our own spin on it so that it was innovative instead of just copying the original in a way that could never actually live up to it. Friend Facts is a different medium, so we adapted!
Basil Boss Fight Despite none of this being our original writing, I was really happy with how this scene turned out. Luckily, the artist had a version of him without the Something, which I was grateful for so that he could stay on screen longer with more visual interest! I enjoyed slowly escalating the background music, and having the words show up everywhere on screen was probably my favorite video effect of the whole project to be honest!
As you can see here, it used like 50 layers (there is probably an easier/more efficient way to do this, but again, I just figure out how to do things by problem solving on my own)... I thought it was a really innovative way to adapt the feeling of panic and desperation from this scene. Also a small thing, but I was fond of how the fade to black seems to slowly take over from the right (blinded) side of the screen.
Credits Easter Eggs And finally the credits! I worked several days making the ten minute long scrolling credits! I should have made them faster/shorter, but by that point I would have to redo too much to fix them. To my surprise, almost everyone in the premiere actually sat through all of the credits! I enjoyed using the different areas' battle themes for this, as they were songs mostly unused throughout Friend Facts (since we didnāt include foes), and they had an upbeat energy I really liked to keep people engaged.
I included quite a handful of small easter eggs in the credits, but these were two of my favorites: Basil disappears and is replaced with a little āmissing fileā icon (at the same time, the red footprints appear on the borders!), and disguised Rosa does a little run down to the next line while shedding her disguise. The latter probably took me over 30 minutes to figure out how to do it properly haha, but I had a vision and I wanted to see it through! I know that most people wonāt even watch the credits, but I wanted to make them special as a small way to give back to all of our artists, so that they could see their username next to their little character icon and be proud of themselves :)
AND FIN~!
Thatās all! Over the last year and change as the head project manager of Friend Facts, I experienced a wide expanse of different feelings ā the joy of community, stress, inspiration & awe, workaholism, satisfaction, and even heartbreak⦠but I can say that Iām genuinely proud of what Iāve accomplished. I know now that Iām capable of having a seemingly unreachable goal and actually seeing it through.
This long post is my way of getting closure as I move on from this chapter of my life. Thank you š»















