How It's Done: Characters (Patreon)

 I noticed a few people wondering about how I'm doing a few things, especially on how the art is made. I've even seen a few people suggest I'm using official content! Short answer for that question is: "NO." Long answer would be: "Definitely not." Everything in our game regarding characters was completely made by me!

 So I'm going to give you guys a little peek at what went into making these characters Been a while since I put anything like this together so bear with me!  So one thing people definitely nailed is that choice to use Movie-esque designs. And that's completely correct. I just adore their little chubby cheeks and tiny hearty hooves! Luckily I was able to get a look at how they came about these designs before the movie even came out thanks to Hasbro publishing  The Art of My Little Pony: The Movie art book, which I cannot recommend enough. It's a fantastic read and a wonderful look into DHX's own behind the scenes.  

So this time around I decided I would use Paint Tool Sai to sketch us some horse doodles that I'd eventually turn into rigs using Adobe Animate. Now that we got our sketch horsie, let's just pop it into flash and get to work.

Bam! There we go, our very own Princess Placeholdia! Now we can really get to work making some tiny horses.

Of course if you're stubborn (like me) or just have poor planning (like me) you could sketch out some horses as well using your last sketch horsie as a base!.

It's much, much easier to just export your new fancy horsie rig as a flat image and sketch over that instead, though! Y'see there are a lot of horsies that were never in the movie so they don't really have established redesigns, so now you get to take some creative license and just have fun with it. Look, Basil, twins!

Of course, you should probably not go about it so messily like I do, but hey, it works! Also seen in this screen shot is a facial expression FacelessJr drew up for me using a quick placeholder I made in ms Paint because I only like to do things as hard as possibly apparently.  Jr made the rough draft for a lot of the facial expressions before I polished them up to make our horises look super cute.
Jr also helped me out with backgrounds as well, but I'll talk about those in another post sometime.

Now you're really horsing around!

Just look how happy she is! Good job!