Time Fantasy Faces Preview (Again?) (Patreon)

Hello! I have a special update for you today.

Now that Future Fantasy is finished and released, the next big project that I'm working on is the Time Fantasy faces. You'll remember this from the 2019 game plan that I laid out in a previous update.

You also might remember this preview from last year, where I was working out a style for the faces. Based on feedback from those, I've decided to take another try. 

Today I'm going to share with you what I have so far, and the process that I've been going through over the past couple of days as I worked on these.

So we started with these-- these are the faces from the previous preview:

These are far from perfect. For one-- they aren't the right size for RPGMaker. These are based on a 32x32 square, but RPGMaker wants them to be a bit bigger (as you can see from the empty black space around them).

(Omega Modern's faces are actually also a little too small for RPGMaker, based on the same 32x32 square. I considered going with the same approach for these, but I figured since I was reworking the style anyway I might as well try filling out the full grid space.)

On top of that, patron feedback pointed me in a different direction. This batch of faces weren't a great stylistic match for the old-SNES-RPG vibe of Time Fantasy.

So this is where I went next:

These faces are an expansion on the previous style. I used the old ones as a base, expanded them to fit the full grid, and tweaked the style a little bit to try to give them a softer/cleaner feeling more in line with the RPG style that patrons wanted.

I didn't like them though. Similar to my original faces a long time ago, something about these seemed off-- and personally I felt like I could do better. On top of that, these take a long time. Doing the entire set (nearly 200 characters) like this would be brutal.

I decided that I'd take a different approach. Instead of trying to rework the old ones, I scrapped them and started over:

These ones were made by painting the faces at a higher resolution and then downscaling them. Not only is the process significantly faster than creating them by-the-pixel, but I think that this style is a lot more in line with what people are expecting.

Of course, there's the obvious problem -- the downscaling process makes these really blurry and they look out of place with Time Fantasy's crisp pixels.

I made some more attempts, using different ways to downscale and manipulate the images. I spent most of yesterday messing around with variations like these:

Getting closer! Still, it's clear that they aren't a perfect match, and stand out awkwardly from the pixel graphics. 

Eventually, I decided to look at a slightly different approach. I found this software that would convert the painted faces into something more manageable. 

After a lot of experimentation with the software, the results looked like this:

Now that's more like it! They're far from perfect, but these are absolutely manageable.

With the faces converted into pixel art, I was able to work with them directly. I could now manually clean them up and make any finishing touches, and get them looking right for Time Fantasy.

This is what the faces look like now:

I think that we've finally found the right style. I'll be going forward with these in the upcoming weeks to develop the full faces collection.

Let me know what you think! If you have thoughts or suggestions for these faces, please share with me in the comments.

In the meantime, if you want these two faces for some reason, I'll share them with you:

Downloads:

• Two Faces - 100%
• Two Faces - 300% (RMMV)

-------

Whew, this was a long one! I'll be back after the weekend with some new graphics for you.

Thanks!