what you mentioned about the talky heads and limited sprites is interesting. i want to chalk it up to limitations of the engine, but it's been foreverrrr so this is mostly going to be be dredging up memories of working with the rpg makers 10+ years ago so be warned, they all blended a bit and i am not sure which did what. FEEL FREE TO SKIP
the tiles were 32x32 in 95/98 (weren't they the same thing with some bugfixes? I DON'T REMEMBER IT HAS BEEN SO LONG) and got dropped down to a comparatively miniscule 16x16 for 2k. it's even odds on the person just not wanting to bother with making variations of each character or the engine not supporting that many total sprite sheets. the sprite sheet limits, they were so annoying if 2k had the same walk sprite limits as 95, it only supports a total of two or three images for walking in each direction. it was left foot/right foot/standing still but i def remember sometimes not having the standing still sprite at all and sometimes having to do some weird programming voodoo to make it have your character use the standing sprite to STAND STILL WHEN NOT MOVING so who knows which version did what. i'm betting a lot of the samey sprites is because everyone is still working off the same set of sprite skeleton sheets. either that, or they're still all using the same program to mix and match parts. same for the faces, i know there was something you could download to mix and match parts and colors for the talky faces. they may have just taken those and used them as a stencil. or possibly the lack of movement on face sets is a limit of the engine. at least one of them didn't allow face sprites to be bigger than X, so people had to resort to weird hacky kludges to do stuff like have HUG ME ARMS or I SALUTE YOU, GOOD SIR that ended up breaking half the time. the community had a lot of sharing of spritesheets and background sheets, plus so many people just using the stuff that came with the program, so that caused a loooot of sameface games too
EDIT: there used to be kludgy ways to make sprites do stuff at predetermined times. you could have a party member swapped out for party member version 2 that had the movement set as their main sprite, like BASIC WALKING VERSION, JUMPING VERSION, DANCE VERSION, things like that. i think there was also a way to do it where everyone was actually a background tile on screen at certain points, and you could force them to do things by swapping specialized tilesheets around since one version or another had essentially unlimited background sheets. i know i played with the second one several times but i don't remember if that was because i was trying to do things by myself or because i was too dumb to make the game swap spritesheets correctly, haha
TL;DR VERSION: the RPG maker engines have some weird and restrictive limitations that could explain some of the things, but it's equally possible the person didn't care enough to fiddle with stuff more, or lacked the skill to fiddle with stuff more. i can download the makers this week and mess with them if confirmation on anything is wanted.
NO I'M INTERESTED haha I don't really know too much about RPGmaker so I guessed that limited movement and such could be part of the limitation of the engine, but I haven't actually worked with it myself to see. :O
The talksprites in this game seemed pretty big! But I'm not sure if that's natural for it or a hack or what. :O I do wonder if maybe walk sprites just straight up don't have the ability for more complicated movements or emotions. I'M NOT HASSLING THE GAME ABOUT IT it just made me realize that of the two options I'd prefer walk sprites emoting instead of talk sprites. (for what it's worth wadanohara is 2k i think)
I figured the samey sprites were due to a common source! It'd make the most sense. And I don't blame them if they don't have sprite artists and want to focus on other parts of the game! It just sticks out to me as an enjoyer of wellmade sprites, haha.
I JUST GET SO TALKY ABOUT RPG MAKER it was such a big part of my life for a decade or so and i NEVER SHUT UP when the chance to talk comes around :B though looking at those sprites again, i think they may be original? comparing them to the 2k spriting tutorials i have stored on an old computer they are a couple pixels larger in the head than what the tutorial says to do, but oldoldold tutorial maybe it updated at some point. HARD TO SAY
just about all of the sprites appear original, but the character sprites in particular. i don't have any character sprite skeletons saved that match those walking sprites, but the wada character sprites could be heavily edited. mysteries~ i found 2k and a file converter already all nice and installed on an old machine, so here's what i've found!
it seems to support unlimited spritesheets? i didn't hit a maximum on importing but i also didn't try for long, haha. i got about 200 spritesheets into the charset folder before i got bored of downloading them. it let me pick from any of them i wanted at any time so it's either got a really high ceiling or it's unlimited.
here's one of the charset spritesheets. that's all the walking animation the game allows. looks like 95 was the one with the NEVER STANDING STILL problem because the 2k test game i just did had everyone's sprites using the standing/walking animations correctly. HOWEVER! it looks like one could make it do other animations with event triggers. it'd involve drawing that many extra sprites, but it looks entirely possible. the person probably could have done it if they wanted, there's a lot of complicated looking events going on in this thing. or you could do it with swapping characters but looking at the events stuff, swapping is needlessly complicated. the rpgmaker chargen/facegen site is still up, hilariously enough. a quick skim says none of the wada sprites are from that one.
the facesets are an interesting thing! this is the only file in the faceset directory. i'm not sure if most of them are seen in the game proper, but it looks like the blank spots get called to be filler behind the nice big face/torso images, so the text isn't obscured. they have plenty of extra space that some degree of motion could have been added to. could be not wanting to draw that much extra, could be they did it to avoid obscuring text. OH LOOK THE BLANK SPACE IS INVISIBLE. SHOCKING trust me there's a good deal of blank space :v
judging by the stuff i have saved, 95 had a lot more variance in visuals than 2k games, but it's hard to double check since most of the websites have long since gone under, without even an internet archive page to show for it. DID THINGS HAPPEN? WHO KNOWS!
so a lot of the weirdness i remembered was from forcing 95 to do things. WELP
Haha I figured they'd be original! Stuff like Ao Oni though definitely seems to use sprite templates.
So you COULD have a sad or surprised or crying animation if you triggered it as an event? :o Interesting, haha. I think Ib had some unique sprites that did stuff like that in certain contexts, although to be honest some of the art/spritework in Ib was... iffy at points. STILL, IT WENT THAT EXTRA MILE.
Oh, those facesets are for the save screen! Haha that makes sense. So the general talksprites COULD have moved around or had multiple fullbody changes? :O I can see why someone wouldn't want to to do that much work BUT (then again, i'm that wacko whose ukagaka has like eight billion unique poses)
I did notice looking through the horror game list that a lot of the games did look pretty samey. I don't know much about old 95 games though! :O I have not dabbled much into indie games of this nature, haha.
after much fiddling with 2k, i have discovered if there's a way to have more than two fullbody shots layered onscreen, i can't trigger it. could easily be something i'm doing wrong, i'm pretty much just pasting in code stolen from other games. haven't seen anyone do more than two layers though so who knows. i cut the faces off fish skeleton girl, and tried layering a blank head with EYE FRAME and MOUTH FRAME but during test plays the game either glitched out and crashed to desktop or it only displayed the last two called images instead of all three. but it's quite happy to crash under NORMAL USE too so THIS HAS BEEN AN ENTIRELY UNINFORMATIVE POST. NO REFUNDS
this is mostly going to be be dredging up memories of working with the rpg makers 10+ years ago so be warned, they all blended a bit and i am not sure which did what. FEEL FREE TO SKIP
the tiles were 32x32 in 95/98 (weren't they the same thing with some bugfixes? I DON'T REMEMBER IT HAS BEEN SO LONG) and got dropped down to a comparatively miniscule 16x16 for 2k. it's even odds on the person just not wanting to bother with making variations of each character or the engine not supporting that many total sprite sheets. the sprite sheet limits, they were so annoying
if 2k had the same walk sprite limits as 95, it only supports a total of two or three images for walking in each direction. it was left foot/right foot/standing still but i def remember sometimes not having the standing still sprite at all and sometimes having to do some weird programming voodoo to make it have your character use the standing sprite to STAND STILL WHEN NOT MOVING so who knows which version did what.
i'm betting a lot of the samey sprites is because everyone is still working off the same set of sprite skeleton sheets. either that, or they're still all using the same program to mix and match parts. same for the faces, i know there was something you could download to mix and match parts and colors for the talky faces. they may have just taken those and used them as a stencil. or possibly the lack of movement on face sets is a limit of the engine. at least one of them didn't allow face sprites to be bigger than X, so people had to resort to weird hacky kludges to do stuff like have HUG ME ARMS or I SALUTE YOU, GOOD SIR that ended up breaking half the time.
the community had a lot of sharing of spritesheets and background sheets, plus so many people just using the stuff that came with the program, so that caused a loooot of sameface games too
EDIT: there used to be kludgy ways to make sprites do stuff at predetermined times. you could have a party member swapped out for party member version 2 that had the movement set as their main sprite, like BASIC WALKING VERSION, JUMPING VERSION, DANCE VERSION, things like that. i think there was also a way to do it where everyone was actually a background tile on screen at certain points, and you could force them to do things by swapping specialized tilesheets around since one version or another had essentially unlimited background sheets. i know i played with the second one several times but i don't remember if that was because i was trying to do things by myself or because i was too dumb to make the game swap spritesheets correctly, haha
TL;DR VERSION: the RPG maker engines have some weird and restrictive limitations that could explain some of the things, but it's equally possible the person didn't care enough to fiddle with stuff more, or lacked the skill to fiddle with stuff more.
i can download the makers this week and mess with them if confirmation on anything is wanted.
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The talksprites in this game seemed pretty big! But I'm not sure if that's natural for it or a hack or what. :O I do wonder if maybe walk sprites just straight up don't have the ability for more complicated movements or emotions. I'M NOT HASSLING THE GAME ABOUT IT it just made me realize that of the two options I'd prefer walk sprites emoting instead of talk sprites.
(for what it's worth wadanohara is 2k i think)
I figured the samey sprites were due to a common source! It'd make the most sense. And I don't blame them if they don't have sprite artists and want to focus on other parts of the game! It just sticks out to me as an enjoyer of wellmade sprites, haha.
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it was such a big part of my life for a decade or so and i NEVER SHUT UP when the chance to talk comes around :B
though looking at those sprites again, i think they may be original? comparing them to the 2k spriting tutorials i have stored on an old computer they are a couple pixels larger in the head than what the tutorial says to do, but oldoldold tutorial maybe it updated at some point. HARD TO SAY
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which sprites, the world sprites or the talk sprites? I assume the world sprites. |D
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i found 2k and a file converter already all nice and installed on an old machine, so here's what i've found!
it seems to support unlimited spritesheets? i didn't hit a maximum on importing but i also didn't try for long, haha. i got about 200 spritesheets into the charset folder before i got bored of downloading them. it let me pick from any of them i wanted at any time so it's either got a really high ceiling or it's unlimited.
here's one of the charset spritesheets. that's all the walking animation the game allows. looks like 95 was the one with the NEVER STANDING STILL problem because the 2k test game i just did had everyone's sprites using the standing/walking animations correctly.
HOWEVER! it looks like one could make it do other animations with event triggers. it'd involve drawing that many extra sprites, but it looks entirely possible. the person probably could have done it if they wanted, there's a lot of complicated looking events going on in this thing.
or you could do it with swapping characters but looking at the events stuff, swapping is needlessly complicated.
the rpgmaker chargen/facegen site is still up, hilariously enough. a quick skim says none of the wada sprites are from that one.
the facesets are an interesting thing! this is the only file in the faceset directory. i'm not sure if most of them are seen in the game proper, but it looks like the blank spots get called to be filler behind the nice big face/torso images, so the text isn't obscured. they have plenty of extra space that some degree of motion could have been added to. could be not wanting to draw that much extra, could be they did it to avoid obscuring text.
OH LOOK THE BLANK SPACE IS INVISIBLE. SHOCKING trust me there's a good deal of blank space :v
judging by the stuff i have saved, 95 had a lot more variance in visuals than 2k games, but it's hard to double check since most of the websites have long since gone under, without even an internet archive page to show for it. DID THINGS HAPPEN? WHO KNOWS!
so a lot of the weirdness i remembered was from forcing 95 to do things. WELP
Reply
So you COULD have a sad or surprised or crying animation if you triggered it as an event? :o Interesting, haha. I think Ib had some unique sprites that did stuff like that in certain contexts, although to be honest some of the art/spritework in Ib was... iffy at points. STILL, IT WENT THAT EXTRA MILE.
Oh, those facesets are for the save screen! Haha that makes sense. So the general talksprites COULD have moved around or had multiple fullbody changes? :O I can see why someone wouldn't want to to do that much work BUT (then again, i'm that wacko whose ukagaka has like eight billion unique poses)
I did notice looking through the horror game list that a lot of the games did look pretty samey. I don't know much about old 95 games though! :O I have not dabbled much into indie games of this nature, haha.
Reply
THIS HAS BEEN AN ENTIRELY UNINFORMATIVE POST. NO REFUNDS
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