Alright, welcome back.
Time for a minor update regarding portraits and dialogue, as well as the reasons behind our decision making.

Presently, we are looking into the animated portrait option presented below.

The mockup is not animated, but shows the composition of the dialogue box and character portrait that we’re going to pursue.

We spent a few days researching other RPG’s that use a variety of dialogue styles, including Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Breath of Fire.
From our studies, we determined that full body portraits were more at home in visual novel style games, which rely on a combination of description and full body portrait in order to convey the personality of the characters.

For a game like ours however, smaller portraits allow us to focus on characters interacting in the overworld to show players what is happening, and convey the personality of our characters through sprite animations.

With this in mind, I’d like to present our first animated portrait for testing, SilasNeutral.

While the rest of the new portrait assets are being produced, we’ll use Silas to help assemble the look of our new dialogue.

Silas is expected to have upwards of 18 different emotional reactions in game, though we’ll be starting with the 12 most common. Likewise, the same can be expected of Gaster.
This is going to take some CONSIDERABLE GRINDING, so we hope that you like the look of the animated Silas portrait above!

Thanks for reading. Until next time, do your best!