Thrallworks Update #20: Expressiveness

Oh look, a more-polished-up Cerise! Kawaii~

Been drawingboarding how expressions work this past couple of weeks. I think I've hit on a system I'd be pretty happy with, but haven't been able to code it in yet. But I can give you a bit of a rundown.

First, I took all the current expressions I've made and plonked the larger attributes into clusters, like so:

And then parsed out the 'main' feelings that get expressed and set them to escalation-levels, like irritated-angry-livid-enraged' as an x co-ordinate, and then secondary expressions of 'confused,sad, worried' as a y co-ord that flavours each, and then finding the faces to sit in the spots of crossover.

The faces are made-up thusly:

So it's a case of getting the right combo of eyebrows, eyeshape, make-up, eyeball and lip positions for each specific area.

And once that's arranged, we can set those particular object layers to be called up based on a couple of variables, with things like if the character is talking or not is a seperate variable. And hopefully then to move up or down the rung, it's be a case of writing a '+1' somewhere, or changing a single characteristic to flip to another.

As you can see, this's going to take a bit of legwork to sort out, but in the end we'll have a tidy list of cross-referencey things that will let me type up faces all quick-like, and is easy to expand on if needed. And also, it'll save a lot of memory space, which is kinda important when itch.io only lets you put stuff up for free when it's below 1GB!

I imagine the next two weeks will be finishing off some outfits/arm stances for Cerise here and solidifying this expression system. Real Life is promising to be very stressful over the next couple of weeks, but not so stressful I can't take up some new commissions while I work on this- seeing as Dossier entries will also be making their way into the game, it's not something that weighs as heavily on me as other content.

Anyway, I also added Mistress Sixx aka 'Red Knight' to the Dossier link, so there ya go...I've yet to make a proper 'escape' function for the  Thrallopedia or Dossier, but hey, it's coming! Probably when I mash them together...

Enjoy!

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