Trust me, this is part of the process of making cinematics.

If I can't do Sega CD-style, but don't want to resort solely to visual-novel style, I'll take Sierra-Adventure-Game on CD route.

Cutscene work begins with drawing backgrounds.

...maybe I made Timothy's hospital bed too small.

I just scanned in some artwork. I do a lot of hand-drawing for reference, but there is a bit of a gap between the hand-drawn stuff and the pixel art.

Again, I hand-draw with my left, and do pixels with my right.

Concept art time!

Early on, Tiel had a backpack because in the fic she was originally created for, she was going on an adventure along with Rick. That's why I was kinda attached to her.

First, I hand-draw it and ink it with a felt-tip pen. Then I scan it, making an HD image. Then I save it as a 16-color BMP, then clean it up and crop it. Then I add color and transparency effects.

For games, I shrink the HD version for the game's window.

Once again, I felt like compiling a font I made into a sheet.

Why? So YOU can use it and modify it, and so you won't get sued by Monotype for using Arial in a commercial project.

Well, I was looking through some old files, and found some cool stuff.

Again, this is more Sierra-styled than Sega CD-styled, but it gets the point across.

It doesn't help that the small-sprite BAC-PAC doesn't exactly pop from this kind of background.

Besides that, I'm making progress.

As part of the process, I learned that my new dialogue-scrolling system isn't perfect. It's possible to break it if you can push the button faster than humanly possible.

I guess I'd better dig out the Turbo controller for further testing.

Well, this might give you an idea of the kind of scope my cutscenes will go.

I probably should hire voice actors, but I think I'd rather do what I can without money first.