Devlog: Designing an amazing anime-esque opening scene (Patreon)

Friends! Thank you for following our progress.

We’re almost sure everyone saw our opening sequence (if not - we higly recommend downloading and playing the build 

The opening sequence took us almost a month to make.

We started with a goal to explain (or, more likely, show) to the player the way our hero gets transported to a new world.

At the start of the development the scene looked like this:

(Hero is falling through the portal and comes to inside the Academy courtyard, where Isabella, Maria and Vanessa find him.

This scene looks nothing like the current iteration, including the design of MC.

We thought that an opening scene should be more visually impressive and immersive. Just like an anime opening. So we took to work on it.

First we wanted more of a short-comic look. MC would disappear from our world, and reappeared in the sky above the academy (a tribute to the first episode of “No Game No Life”).

We gathered a couple references:

and made a sketch with the falling MC.

We also wanted him to disappear from a public space and stopped at a lecture in a university.

The main idea was - MC is bored at a lecture, when someone summons him as a Wanderer to an unfamiliar world, and he vanishes from his classmates’ view

(Below are some sketches of MC at a lecture)

After the sketch and linework was complete, we started to develop the vanishing cutscene.

When our animatic was finished, our artists began coloring and finishing the drawing.

The animation was too good to leave it as a comic, so we decided to fully animate an opening sequence to make it more dynamic and immersive.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/697735899 

When our animation was complete, we compiled it in video editing software and added music and SFX.

The end result looks like this:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrW1nQGS56k 

We hope you liked reading through our development process and will be grateful if you can check our build out!  

The latest version with a couple quests is available to our 3$ patrons. We are thankful for any support on Patreon and Itch.io!