DEVLOG 4 - Animating Puzzles
Hi hi!
It’s devlog time! I’m teaisfortoby, the developer of PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE. Good to have you back!
WALLPAPER
Here’s your wallpapers for the month!
This is from the new version of the start screen, which I recently revamped. It won’t be added to the demo, but it will be in the full release. Look forward to it!
NEWS
In terms of development, the game is very polished by this point. So, this month, I’ve been working on getting more good press for the game. This means a lot of fun things have been happening behind the scenes… but I can’t share them yet. Please stay tuned!!
Also, once again… I’ve made another game!
For the Spooktober VN Jam, I made caduceus, a disability horror yuri time loop. Time loops are some of my favorite types of stories, so please give it a try if they interest you, too!
I’ll send out a devlog discussing the development process in about a month. Play it now while you’re spoiler-free!
ANIMATING PUZZLES
This month, I want to talk about some of PIAV’s most striking visuals — the puzzle animations. These were definitely the hardest and most strenuous part of the game’s visuals. To give you an idea of the time these take:
On average, one puzzle takes around 5 hours to animate.
The longest took 7.5 hours, and the shortest was just under an hour.
All 5 animations took a total of 25 hours to animate, line, and color.
This is a long time!! But almost none of that time was every dedicated to finding and assembling the game’s backgrounds.
PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE takes up a weird space in the games world — it’s not really a horror game, but it’s not just a relaxing mystery, either. The puzzle visuals are emblematic of that idea: they feature cartoony characters on top of realistic black-and-white photography.
Design-wise, this was inspired by a scene in episode 3 of the absolutely excellent Scarlet Hollow by Black Tabby Games. In the episode, there’s a sequence where the main cast encounters a ghost. The ghost begins showing the player memories of its life that have angered it in death. This ghost is trying desperately to communicate its vengeance towards you and the Scarlet family, but the memories it shows are one-sided and difficult to parse. In other words, you’re communicating with a being you don’t understand.
As the ghost guides the player through this sequence, we see environments like this:
Collages of dozens ton of photographs and art together. To me, it gives the feeling of someone trying to “fit” their own perspective into someone else’s understanding of the world. The player and the ghost's view of the Scarlets just don't line up! (It’s also very unsettling, especially with the audio.)
PIAV doesn’t collage to that extent, mostly because of the game’s slightly cozier tone. Instead, puzzles have one photo and one illustration. I hope it evokes the idea that the perspectives of Louis and his puzzle partner are misaligned…
Now, back to our five-hour time sink. During development, I broke these puzzle animations into four different “phases“:
idle 1 - the first idle pose you see. Usually, this is just a posed blink.
action 1 - a transition action between idle 1 and idle 2
idle 2 - the second idle pose. This is typically another posed blink.
action 2 - a transition back from idle 2 to idle 1
After action 2, everything loops back to idle 1! Which phase is drawing onscreen gets swapped around in-game with code, so I was able to work on each phase separately and then export when I was ready.
I follow 2D animation principles pretty strictly here, so if you know anything about that process… that’s what I’m doing here. Importantly, though, I tend to animate at a lower frame rate than most 2D artists (around 10 fps), which means two things:
less frames to draw (yay!)
the frames I DO draw need to be extremely effective (oh.)
So I spend a lot of time fiddling with timing, smoothing my arcs, and generally making my clean sketches look as good as they can.
After that is the tedious part: lining and coloring every single frame. This takes the longest, and is… not very fun. I usually dedicate at least two days to this entire process…
Once it’s all colored and lined, I start the last, most important part of the process: going to bed, and staring at what I’ve done the next morning. Not just because I’m proud of it (which is true!), but because watching it with fresh eyes lets me check for any little mistakes I might’ve missed. Did I use the right colors everywhere? Does her hair move smoothly? Showing it to a friend also helps with this.
Once I’m satisfied with it, all that’s left is to throw them in GameMaker and watch it come together… you can check out a few of them in the first few seconds of the game’s debut trailer!
Thanks for reading. Some very exciting things are coming up soon… please stay tuned! Wishlist the game if you haven’t, and tell your friends! See you next month!
