Saturday, November 17, 2018

They won't show up in School Rush (?)

a few post-mortem sketches of ideas for the good-ending of Bilou: School Rush that didn't make it to the game.

since early in the redesign of the game on NDS, I tried to work with the idea that most foes we encounter while playing a Bilou game are not really evil, although they can be quite dangerous.
I hope I made it clear enough with the ink.jets who are trying to defend their realm against a pendats invasion but may occasionally help Bilou.

The comic shows the bopping erasers speechless quick to anger when disturbed during nap time. The theory in School Rush was that the sudden ink rise made them very nervous. The secret ending should have shown them relaxed again, being taught that pendats are dangerous, but that they should behave friendly with Bilou.
Unlike bladors, erasers aren't speechless, although I'm not sure I've ever published any of my sketches about the "erasers bridge", and you'll have to dig deep into this blog to see some evidence that they can speak (or trust the picture shown just nearby).

All my attemps so fan to draw those erasers as pixel art were unsatisfying once I reached the "animate them" step. But I was trying to just reuse the sprites from "normal" erasers, with some overlaid sleepy eyes or snoring mouth. I was about to just write "I'll just use regular eraser instead" burl had my DS in my pocket, so I tried another approach.

First I used a draft 32x32 blocks page to draw a few keyframes for a sleeping eraser. I used SEDS limited animation features to check it was fun and only then I split them into 16x16 blocks for AnimEDS. This way i keep only 2 sprites for the animation, but I can do squashes, stretches and wobbles to make the animation look smoother.

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