[Originally written August 21 2020]
However, while the sprite set is certainly nice, much better than what Cyberlife gave us, it’s still… insufficient. Based on what I’m seeing in Nornpose, there are issues with part positioning for the baby and child sprites; looking at them in SpriteBuilder reveals that they don’t match the dimensions used by the Emerald and Hebe Norns. Further, there are no old or senile sprites, and the females are differentiated only by their eye color. So I’ve decided to embark on a rather ambitious quest to bring the Frog Norns up to par with the other official breeds.
Fix the body data.
This is likely to be the most daunting part of the project.While NornenMeister has saved me a lot of work by making the sprites to begin with, I’m going to have to manually edit each and every one of the baby and child sprites to fit the same dimensions and positioning as the Hebe Norns. I'll just have to do the male sprites which I can then recolor for the females. Still, the males for these two life stages alone are going to be about 520 images if I’ve done the math right! But once the sprites fit the standards, I can just copy-paste the Hebe body data onto the Frog Norns.Update: It turns out NornenMeister’s sprites aren’t scaled quite right, so it takes almost as much work to fix them as to just scale down the adult sprite myself, and I get better results that way. Also, the body data for the tail sprites might take a little more work, because it turns out the tail positions/dimensions don’t match across Hebe and Emerald Norns either.
Differentiate the females.
This will actually probably be a simple flat recolor like making them a different shade of green – easily done with a photoshop batch job. If I'm feeling ambitious, I might add some extra details to the female sprites. I’d like to make them look like red-eyed tree frogs: orange hands and feet and red eyes, maybe white bellies and perhaps even a bit of blue on their sides.Create old and senile sprites.
The old sprites are the same size as the adult sprites, and the senile sprites are the same size as the child sprites. Therefore this, too, will just be a matter of batch-recoloring in photoshop and copying the Hebe body data.
I’ve got a lot of editing to do. Did I mention I’ve never dabbled in creatures sprite files or body data before?
[Originally written August 26 2020]
The Frog Project is moving much quicker than expected. I’ve finished reworking the baby male sprites and body data; while I have not tested them in-game, I still have C2 installed on my Windows 10 machine, even if I can’t effectively run the game there, so I’m using it along with NornPose to check that the files are readable and connect correctly. I like my results so far!
Compare a Hebe Norn for reference on the left, NornenMeister’s Frog Norns in the middle, and mine on the right:
Again, by no means do I intend to disparage NornenMeister's work. It's much more than Cyberlife gave us, but it's just got some room for improvement. My Frog Norns have smoother sprite scaling, and aren’t so disjointed because they use the same body data as Hebes except in their tails, which admittedly could be polished some more.
I had a little trouble getting the sprites to read back into the program, but once I figured out how to cut entire sheets, it got a lot easier. That’ll also make recoloring the females much easier, since everything’s already in one big file. While I was at it, I also fixed the sprites where the original artist forgot that Frog Norns have rounded ears, and the ones where the cheek fur hadn’t been recolored correctly. While I initially intended to leave the official adult male sprites alone, I did carry these over.
[Originally written August 29 2020]
Having finished making the child sprites for the Frog Norns, I loaded them into NornPose to check on my work. While it’s going well overall, the longer I work on these sprites, the more convinced I become that the originals were phoned in by an intern. In addition to having unfinished sprite sets and art mistakes, I keep finding sprites that haven’t been cleaned up – rows or columns of duplicated pixels, excessive black haloing…
So then, despite my initial intention to leave the official sprites alone, I just had to go in and fix those too, to get rid of the weird excessive shadows and wonky pixels. But, aside from a handful of sprites left to fix, this means I’m almost done with my base sprites! At this point, it’s just a matter of running a couple batch recolors!
[Originally written September 2 2020]
On the 31st, I finished constructing my Frog Norns!
Oh. Oh no. Back to the editor!
Turns out that’s the expected appearance – the lightbulb went on, and I opened the Genetics Kit. Sure enough…
| Gene | Sex | norn.gen | frog.gen |
|---|---|---|---|
| 391 392 395 396 411 418 425 432 434 436 438 442 444 445 447 449 453 454 459 462 464 466 467 | B B B B B B B B B B B B B B F F F M M M B F M | 174 red 76 green 198 blue 106 red 60 red 196 red 86 green 41 green 110 green 200 blue 44 blue 225 blue 128 rot 128 swap 128 rot 128 swap 128 rot 128 swap 0 rot 128 swap 128 rot 0 swap 128 rot 128 swap 255 rot 128 swap 128 rot 255 swap 128 rot 128 swap DNE 128 rot 128 swap DNE 128 rot 128 swap DNE | 0 red 255 green 0 blue 0 red 0 red 0 red 255 green 255 green 255 green 0 blue 0 blue 0 blue 128 rot 128 swap DNE 128 rot 128 swap DNE 128 rot 128 swap DNE 0 rot 128 swap DNE 128 rot 0 swap DNE 128 rot 128 swap DNE 255 rot 128 swap DNE 128 rot 255 swap DNE 128 rot 128 swap DNE 128 rot 128 swap DNE 128 rot 128 swap DNE |
So I tried again, with the bleed genes unaltered from the basic Frog, but with the pigment genes all set to neutral values, and bingo! I’m not sure how well this will interbreed, pigment wise, but I plan to use this as my basic Frog Norn genome.
These look fantastic! Have you ever considered porting these to C3?
ReplyDeleteI have not, but others are welcome to do so.
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