Portraits in messages vs visual equipment

Well, you really can't have both. (As visual equipment wouldn't show off in portraits properly) Like, in my case I can either have no visual equipment and have big detailed portraits like this



Or I could just have no faces showing in dialogue and they'd only be seen in menu and would be altered with visual equipment. However, I wanted to ask people's opinions, which do you prefer? Seeing big portraits showing emotion, or various equipment that change your character sprite?

I'm completely fine with not seeing any equipment on the sprite. But portraits with different emotions contribute to the atmosphere of a game, which is very important to me. :) Then again, you could as well create a great atmosphere with no portraits or faces at all, which means you could add visual equipment, just because it's possible and, well, kind of cool. Huh. Well, atmospheric stuff before cool stuff, I guess?

I'm all for portraits in messages, provided the emotions change as stated above, like in PrinPrin: Another Story.

I would find it very pointless to have large portraits and not have emotes. Plus, I always found games where the character has same expression, no matter how bad or how good things go for them. :p

portraits cost lot of eventing . xD

or you can just have few equipments

and have more portraits for the equipment . that would be so cool xD

I was joking . that would be a lot of work

If you went that extra mile you could make a naked character and add the clothing as a separate picture layer that would cover them up checking based on the equipment the character is wearing.

It's a lot of extra work though, but it is possible to have both.

Out of the two however, I'd prefer emotions over sprite changes.

Why can't you have portrait equipment? Only what, 4?, characters will have equiped items as is. You create 4 base portraits, modify the script to now include an overlay portrait, name the overlays based on character Id and armour id and boom, your equipment appears in the portrait. Example 1_1.png would refer to character 1, armour database slot 1. Using only that, you can show virtually every piece of armour they're wearing from their headgear, chest plate, necklace, or any subtypes of armour your scripts support.

I'm gonna say visual equipment. The placement of your portraits is very awkward and rather takes up the whole screen. I think I saw you were working on custom sprites too, right? Why not just stick with the sprites, especially if they are going to be complicated. You can still portray emotions just only with the sprites.

I have a few opinions on the matter.

1) Portraits should almost always stay the same with the exception of emotions. The main reason is because portraits are the primary way you use the player to identify with your characters. The tiny sprites which represent our game characters are too small to have much detail, but the portraits allow the player to actually see what the player looks like. Because of this, they will identify the portrait with the character, and in a way the portrait becomes the character. Because of this, you want to keep your portraits visually consistent. One way you can use this psychology in storytelling is changing the portrait if the character undergos a significant change, such as losing his family and 'turning to the dark side.'

2) And in spite of this, or because of this, I think it's fine to have both static portraits and visual equip. Visual equip is more of a neat flavor feature, but because of the graphical limitations of 2D, it's not really for immersion like you would expect from a 3D RPG with detailed graphics like Skyrim or World of WarCraft. Players will probably not care about visual equip not matching the portraits, and I would say visual equip on portraits would be distracting.

I'd like to believe having both at the same time is acceptable.



Otherwise if it's one or the other, I really can't decide. Visual equipment would give your game a certain charm because of the uniqueness of the feature but you lose out on the visual impact you could get out of the story by using your portraits (which I think look pretty cool).

For a 2D game? Defs go with portraits. The visual equipment changes will be barely noticeable, and it's probably more trouble than it's worth!

If it was 3D, I'd be all "OH SURE GO WITH THE VISUAL EQUIPS THAT IS GREAT", though.

Hmmmm.... I think visual portraits are good but I think they shouldn't be there all the time. I would use a portrait just to portray how my characters looks like from head to toe and then just stick to emotional face sets for the rest of the story and then just use it again when introducing a new character or a story highlight to add impact..

Of course you can have both. And it's more realistic as well. Might as well extend that to faces if you're feeling adventurous and want to draw extra face parts as well (or just take your portrait and crop it)

I would throw in visual equips along with emotions. Just have your naked character with no face, and then layer the equips and the expressions.

It's conceptually the same idea, so if you just use the same naming scheme for both your character parts and your portrait parts what's the problem?

Then just draw your portraits so that your equips are shown properly.