We're now entering the "hard work" phase of work on Harmonic Odyssey's systems. Luckily, it's also the fun part.  With the battle system functional, working on the battle sprites has been a task that's been a long-time coming.

Our previous sprites were okay, but limited in movement capabilities. In so many ways, they were sketches. Similar to the sprites themselves, your humble artist was unfamiliar with the capabilities and limitations of the Dragonbones systems, and hadn't put a lot of time into learning them at the the point in time when those placeholders had been made. I'm happy to report, that's all changed.

In working up to the daunting task of refashioning the existing sprites, a lot of research was done on other games -- some AAA, some indy, and many in-between, which were using 2D battlers of the same type, as well as some games using sprites and full 3D renders. Dragonbones is a pretty robust system for creating animation, so it by itself gives a real boost to a project with little room for guessing about what's going to work or not. The RPG Maker engine itself, of course, has its limitations, but the Yanfly plugin is surprisingly capable of circumnavigating this.  In the end, Dragonbones renders JSON files and PNGs, which, as anyone who has worked on one of these games before can tell you, are native to the RMMV core.

The result of all this research and study, I hope, is going to make a big difference in how the game looks and feels, overall. Comparing our previous sprites to our current incarnations (even in their rough stage, likeCherry's model, below) is like night and day:

Work is currently progressing on these systems, and I'm really looking forward to showing off some new screen shots and video, in the coming days.