I had fully (and now, looking back on it, ridiculously) planned to make my own full length RPG from scratch. That was when I first answered my curiosity and re-entered the world of RPG Maker, a piece of software I'd got bored of trying to understand when I was 11/12.
VX Ace, the series' most recent incarnation, impressed me. And I was excited. I thought: I'll make a simple game and its narrative will make up for its use of default tilesets and sprites and animations. But as the project went on, I decided to add more and more features to the list of things I'd do myself. And, over the course of several hard-worked months, I taught myself pixel art and the rudiments of frame-by-frame animation.
In the process of piecing together the skills to make this game, I realised that there was too much involved in making a full title for one person to manage alone within a reasonable time frame. And so Omnis: Erias Line became a skills-demonstration. I am writing the script, producing the sprites and battle animations, putting together a soundtrack (using samples from Looperman.com) and drawing all of the pre-rendered backgrounds (instead of using tiles and tilesets, which make anything other than very square maps awkward).
The process of putting backgrounds together is seeingmy Wacom Bamboo tablet getting unexpectedly thorough use.
For the most part, however, an art tablet is too free flowing for pixel art, so I'm sticking to using a mouse. Because pixel art, I've discovered, is much less like drawing a picture than it is like building one. There is much less scope of inaccuracy, too. A single pixel out of place can throw the entire piece, much more so than a stray pencil stroke can upset the overall visage of a sketch. And so the process of animation using pixelated characters, once a basic shape has been laid out, is one of trial and error, copy/pasting, tweaking and testing.
I hope to upload the completed demo within a few months.
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