This is something really minor, but something I am super happy about. Hahaha.
I forgot to mention this, but I recently (like, last week?) had a good friend of mine try out OUHE. She doesn’t know anything about visual novels, so I thought, what better way to expose her to this genre than to show her my own work, right? Hahaha! She got quite interested, so when she got home, she downloaded an android VN on her phone. Guess what she told me the next day? “Ran, how come the characters in the game I played blink? How come yours don’t?” Whoopsie.
Well, the truth is, I simply didn’t know how to make characters blink. Hahaha. But since she asked about it, it got me thinking… why don’t I try?
So, yeah, hahaha, I decided to look for the old .psd character files made by Erumin for OUHE. I thought I had lost them when my laptop crashed and burned last month, but thankfully, it turns out I have copies saved in one of my ext HDDs. Whew. Thank goodness for backups!
I remade all the sprite expressions (basically, I just chose combos from all the layers that Erumin had made), and added the closed-eyed expressions for the blink effect. Two hours later… ta-da! They’re all set!
For those who want to create a blinking effect for their visual novel, you can use this code, found in the Ren’Py cookbook!
image (name of the image):
“(path of the open-eyes file you’re going to use)”
choice:
4.5
choice:
3.5
choice:
1.5
“(path of the closed-eyes file you’re going to use)”
.15
repeat
It’s really really easy to implement, and I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner! Hahaha. Thanks to M.A. (my friend) for giving me the idea! And of course, I’ll always be grateful to Py’Tom for his wonderful engine. 🙂
I’m actually still not done with the coding, but I’m feeling more psyched now that the characters are no longer so lifeless. Haha. They blink, they blink, yay, they blink. :”) Like I said, it’s a super minor thing, but… yay. Hahaha.
Keep playing!
P.S. I would really love to implement the lip flap effect too, but we unfortunately don’t have enough mouth layers to do a convincing lip movement. 😀 And also, as of now, I’m confused as to how exactly I could make it work. Maybe I could try again for the next game? Hahaha. Who knows.
ran writes 