Essay: Art Assets Advice

This is a list of the different Art assets a Visual Novel needs and some advices about them in general. Please feel free to edit this section if you feel there's something missing!

Sprites
First thing you need to start working is a list of the important characters with the description of their personalities and the way they're supposed to look and behave, and, if you have them, their concept designs. Making the basic design for the character is better than start with the sprite right away.

After you have this, you have to decide how many poses are going to be needed for each character. Usually main characters will have at least two poses and probably more than one outfit, and secondary characters will have only one pose and one outfit. According to the character's pesonality, look for references and make tiny sketches of poses that would suit the chaarcter best. Pick a pose that's neutral but not too static or boring. Take in mind you'll need the poses to suit the character's facial expressions (neutral, happy, very happy, sad, angry, etc...). It's better to draw the character poses naked first and then draw the outfit on top, this will help with common anatomy issues and will allow you to have different outfits in different layers.

For expressions you can either draw every expression's face separately or draw different eyebrows/eyes/mouth positions, so you can combine them. I find it more fun and to do the latter, but drawing each facial expression separately could add to the uniqueness of the character.

Make sure the poses of all the characters are of the same size! Sketching/inking them all at the same time before coloring them helps in this.

Sprites are usually saved as transparent PNG, so keeping a bright neon solid-colored background is helpful to figure out if there's any bit of color going out of the lines. Change the background color often to not get bored and to be sure everything is fine.

In your checklist, you could add for each sprite: [ ]pose 1 (etc...) [ ]outfit 1 (etc...) [ ]expressions

Backgrounds
Once you have the list of the backgrounds and the different times of the day you'te suposed to draw them in, find yourself good references, but try to avoid tracing directly from photographs, as the photos often distort the perspective. If you need to, eyeball them.

Keeping the horizont line in the middle of the picture or at the eye level of most sprites on screen is a good habit and will give the combination of Sprite and Background more credibility.

If you have some 3D software knowledge, use it to your advantage when making backgrounds, creating the background you want to draw in 3D first and qiuck-rendering it from an interesting point, so you can draw on top of it.

Look at turtorials and references regarding light during the different times of the day, in case you have to make different versions of the same background to fit that. If you're using Photoshop, Adjustment Layers will be your friends here, but don't rely only on them, as the lightsource changes during the day and it'd be awkward if your BG has the same light source in the morning and the sunset version.

For your checklist: [ ] Day [ ]Sunset [ ]Night (etc...)

Event CGs
You'll need a list of the Event CGs needed on the game, the characters participating, what they are doing, when, and where they are doing it. If you can, get the piece of script asociated with said Event CG too, to get a better grasp of what is supposed to be going on.

Now that you know what's supposed to be going on, use your character designs/sprites and your previously made backgrounds as reference. Mind the light source... is it coming from a light on the ceiling? Is it coming from the sun? Or from a window? Do you have more than one light source?

Now take in mind the plane shot you're going to show. If you want to focus on the character's emotions, do a face close-up. If you want to show the character's body or outfit, make a full-body shot. If you want to focus on the interaction of two characters, show them full body or 3/4. If it's the character(s) doing somehting related to where they are, show more of the background.

If the characters are moving, try to portray them in the midddle of an action: not at the beggining nor in the climax and give hints of what happened just before and/or what's about to happen, this encourages the viewer's imagination.

Pick a nice camera angle. Since sprites and backgrounds are quite boring perspective-wise, add some dynamism with foreshortening, 2-3 points perspective and/or tilted horizontal lines.

Also, if you can, make variations of the event CG. Examples: In one CG, a girl is simply looking in the main character. Then, in the variation, she's smiling at the main character. A character is trying to do something discreetly. In the variation, he is caught and surprised. Things like changing the face, arm positions, or et cetera aren't major variations and don't require much work, but are a nice touch.

It's also a good thing to sketch the event CG as one image, but to draw and color characters and background separately in the working copy.

Others
Here you may include: - SD/funny/silly CGs going over the screen but not big enough to fit it all. they usually haveuneven edges and have transparent backgrounds.

- Items shown on small portviews during game. This could save you time an deffort without you having to make a full Event CG to show them.

- Game Logo design and Layout design. Be creative but don't everdo it. Think about the theme and "feel" of your game and what you wnat to comunicate with it.

- Promo/Poster/Main menu art. Having extra art for this is also a good thin. If you have spare time after doing all the previous stuff, try doing something for this area. group pictures of the main characters are good for this.

The original article was written by Deji.