Patreon Peeks 43: Chatting on the Train in Here Comes Niko! (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Today I wanted to talk about my recent What I Love video, in which I interviewed Stijn van Wakeren and Melissa Kragten about their work on the indie game Here Comes Niko! The video is here if you've yet to watch it: https://youtu.be/8tt-5Xzh89A

Several times throughout the video, whenever the topic shifted, I wanted to frame things as an interview, and what better place to set a Here Comes Niko interview than within the game world itself? So, I came up with a design for myself that would fit in the style of the other characters but still represent how I usually appear (light outlines on a dark background), and put myself in the frame alongside Stijn and Melissa, whose characters are already in the game! For the backdrop, Stijn was gracious enough to let me use a demo build of the game, meant for trailer-creating purposes. I set the scene to the train interior that appears between levels in Here Comes Niko!, and oriented the camera to frame a group of seats so our characters could be overlaid on them in post. The scene animated itself, and with a simple color key in After Effects, I could also change the sky's color to reflect the passage of time/place during our train ride.

The next step was to put the characters on top, and in addition, I wanted to animate them in a way that could keep the scene fresh for long enough to transition away to the next scene. Here Comes Niko! has a simple sprite animation for every character, cycling between 2 or 3 sprites, so that would work perfectly and keep the workload light enough!

For each character, I had to hand-draw several versions of their sprites, a few more than appear in the game, to illustrate who in the video was talking and who was listening.

Then I set up a controller in After Effects: a simple slider that could be any float value. I'd have each and every sprite here as a layer above the controller, but they all start off invisible. Then I'd write an expression for the opacity of each layer: change to 100% if and only if the slider equals a certain value. So, for example, a value of 0 would make the idle pose visible, 1 would make the second idle pose visible, 2 would make a blinking pose visible, and so on.

A good deal of time was spent on setup, but as a result, creating each of these scenes ended up being a breeze. In retrospect, this is probably very similar to the way the game handles its sprite animations! But it's not the first and I'm sure it's not the last time that gamedev systems will help with building a What I love video!