omniokami

Managing sprites with Kanban Boards

Published: January 5th 2025, 5:07:31 pm

Hello, hello, insiders.

Creating sprites for characters in a visual novel can be a complicated process, especially if there are multiple characters, multiple outfits, and (in our particular case) multiple physical forms. Keeping track of which characters have which sprites and emotions can be tedious and confusing.

To make this task easier, I came up with a simple way of tracking. At the beginning of development, I created a project in Notion to store the necessary information, story, lore, and notes for myself. Inside the project, I created a so-called “kanban board”, which is basically just a table with columns between which you can move items.

In my case, each column is a “basic pose” of a character in a specific clothing and physical form (for example, Tangerine Buff SwimSuit).

I create several such poses that differ in mood for the future variety of emotions depicted on the character's face.

In the context of a kanban board:

• Column - Sprite Pose

• Item - Emotion of the character

Every Item can have statuses, let's look at them:

• Needed - I know or suspect that I will need to depict a character with this emotion

• Unknown - I'm not sure if I'll need this emotion on this set of sprites, but it's better to place it in the appropriate column at the bottom anyway.

• Done - this sprite has already been made and is in my project/git folder.

  

Before I start making the faces themselves, I scatter the emotions into the poses that I think best suit them. I try to make sure that each pose has the same number of sprites, depending on the frequency of their use in the game itself. I also always make a more restrained neutral pose for any set of sprites.

After that, I start each pose by changing the face of the base sprite and mark them as Done. This way, I don't have to look through the names and facial expressions in the png images in the folders to find the sprites that have already been implemented.

For ease of use, I have a template table that I simply copy every time I need to create a new set of sprites for a character. There is a set of default emotions in the column without a pose and 4 columns with the ability to place pictures with poses.

I hope this little article was useful to you, or at least interesting.
Thank you for your support, see you soon.