Dream Machine Transposer

Here's a short clip of the mess I have in Godot so far, a start to a rough draft as I'm still watching Godot tutorials and mixing up code and nodes. I also have the introductory scene in Dialogic.

I've also been watching videos on animation, comic book art styles, and pixel sprites. I'm trying to figure out which method of using sprites will take the least amount of time and effort. I've been getting a better workflow to make pixel sprites an option again, especially as rigging a 2D puppet skeleton hasn't been working out so well. I'm still stuck between going the 2D sidescroller route, or beat 'em up, or 2.5D. I wanted to keep it simple like Castlevania, but I'm pushing the art style a bit more like SNK vs Capcom, with Yuri being my foundation to make new sprites for Emily. 

Here's my first attempt at some original sprites, which could be better if I made the folds in the clothing match up, and if I added some wiggle to give the pelvis some rotational motion, but for a rough draft walking animation, I like it. I may make new pants entirely for taller legs though. Three main colors is all I should use, a base coat with shadow and light, and then two more if needed for a dark shadow and bright highlight.

I heard about some websites with free music for commercial use and was browsing around to see if there was anything I could use for my game, and did find some potential game tracks, which are in my playlist at: https://freemusicarchive.org/member/geogravitki/dream-machine-transposer-potenti...

Also new character: Liza Efthymiadis, the narrator of life. 

She's like a cross between Purah from Zelda Breath of the Wild, Sucy Manbavaran from Little Witch Academia, and Merril from Louie the Rune Soldier. A Pisces Dragon Dandere/Darudere who's full of contradictions. Such as being like a goddess yet life never goes her way. She likes art, black metal, anime, and giving people food. She may perhaps have secretly been the world's best girl hiding in plain sight.

Some bonus unedited pictures for a better look at the characters:

Stacy with the pendulum really messed up with the AI, but it still looks so good. Emily and Stacy usually look really cool in AI.

I finally got AI to make a group picture. I only have so much room to write a prompt and it takes a long description for each character to come out looking right. I still had to make some color adjustments in GIMP due to AI mixing them up, but both images here are really cool to see. It's too bad the sides had to be cut off like this, but maybe I can fix it later.

Player 4 is ready, this here is Marion Carey!

Based off the two to three girls that Emily is based off of, I was trying to think of someone from their friend groups I could use, but I don't know most of them that well, and wanted a character that stands out from the other three. I began to think of character traits I needed, as well as someone with a different hair and eye color from Emily, Stacy, and Kalina. What I came up with was Marion, who's largely based off of a college classmate I had in multiple classes, but combined with some of the personality of Emilys' friends. My college classmate was kind of serious and boring, but I had concepts about a singer magician, so this mix of reserved loudness ended up forming a new personality for this character to use. She's now someone of a Xena and Sailor Mars type of personality. On the astrological level, she's more Uranus than Mars though. My college classmate had an Irish name, so Marion is supposed to be mostly Irish-German since her appearance is based off of her. 

I do want more playable characters, but I think 4 is that common expected number of players on screen at one. I'd really like 6 instead to be possible and multiplayer able on Steam. But I have to start small, see if I can even get 2 players to work properly. Player 5 and 6 will likely be from the character collage I posted earlier. In some ways, Marion kind of reminds me of Kairi from KH2, so this is really fitting as Namine and Xion remind me of Emily and Stacy, which I guess leaves Kalina to fill the roll of Aqua.

Other generated concept images of character designs.

Some more generated concept artwork that I liked. I imagined the elemental attacks to look nothing like these, but was curious as to how it would look if Emily used some esper style summons like in FF12. Here are some representations of light, dark, fire, air, water, earth.

(Open image in new tab for a better look. Still small due to 3MB size limit.)

I have some character portrait artwork to use for some scene dialogue, although I'll likely only use a few of the characters below. I may use some portraits for some quick references to different events. The top three images in the pink box are all the same character, just different poses, because she's the main character that you play as. Blue hair below her is supposed to be another character you can play as, named Stacy Fusco, and she specializes in tarot magic. The main character, Emily Tritten, specializes in elemental magic. To the right of Emily is the character who's dreams she's trying to enter so she can erase his memories of meeting her because she wants him out of her life forever, which is how the game begins, so not much of a spoiler there, but he's not an antagonist either. The story comes together later on in the dreams with psychic connections, shadow demons, and high strangeness. He may be playable depending on how the plot goes. The yellow eyed squirrel girl is Kalina Gwozdek, and I'm thinking of making her a main character to go with the other two. If anyone here's going to be a villain, it's certainly going to be the vampire in the upper right corner.

Here's the first track created for my game. This is going to be used for the main menu screen background music. Afraid to Dream was not made by me though as I hired someone else for this one, although I was very much in control on what I wanted.