#livecomposite

Behind the Scenes - Hallie's sketches, Photoshop layers, and RenPy's LiveComposite

So generally speaking, this has been my first foray into making a game at all, but most of all a visual novel. I could have used static character sprites, but instead I chose to use a template system using RenPy’s LiveComposite feature.

That means making a bunch of character expression sprites that I exported separately from the plain base sprite.

In the coding, you wind up with something like this:

# HALLIE sprites # character sprites and animations! image hallie flirt = "images/hallie/hallie_flirt.png" image hallie engaged = "images/hallie/hallie_engaged.png" # lean expressions image hallie lean away = LiveComposite( (631, 942), (0, 0), "images/hallie/hallie_base2.png", (0, 0), "images/hallie/hallie_leanaway.png") image hallie lean towards = LiveComposite( (631, 942), (0, 0), "images/hallie/hallie_base2.png", (0, 0), "images/hallie/hallie_leantowards.png") # base expressions image hallie curious = LiveComposite( (631, 942), (0, 0), "images/hallie/hallie_base.png", (0, 0), "images/hallie/hallie_curious.png") image hallie smile = LiveComposite( (631, 942), (0, 0), "images/hallie/hallie_base.png", (0, 0), "images/hallie/hallie_smile.png")

Hallie wound up with 16 different sprite configurations, and she was the first finalized sprite that I worked on for the game as the focal point to build everything else around.

I’m hoping that for a future update I can give her a different outfit on her base sprite, and hopefully it’ll be a fairly simple affair considering how I structured the PSD layers.

Anyways that’s a peek behind the curtain on Hallie’s character sprites and the work that went into her! Let me know if this is interesting to you, and I might make more posts.

If you're interested in the game I made, please be sure to check it out! Its a visual novel that I made as part of the 2017 Yuri Game Jam over on itch.io!