Hello!
Recent work has been 100% on prologue and epilogue cutscenes. This has been pretty interesting from a development point of view because it's an important part of the game which is entirely story and art (at least my approach to it is).
Making the Cutscenes
The design goals of these cutscenes are pretty simple; the prologue needs to quickly set the scene for the game as well as give a little introduction to who you are, and the epilogues need to wrap up the story and provide a satisfying ending (though not necessarily complete closure). I wanted to use Papers Please's cutscenes as a model, since they're simple and effective, but also very accessible in terms of development and artistic skill.
The actual making of the cutscenes was quite straight forward. I worked on the prologue cutscene first since it's a straight sequence without any variations (unlike the epilogues) and the storytelling goals for it are pretty simple. I sketched out a bunch of panel ideas, from there worked out a sequence that would let me show and explain the setting, and then got to making the actual pixel art.
I found that they came together quite easily (compared to some of the epilogue panels where I'm trying to show more complex scenes). The small size and reduced colour palettes help with that, I think, but I'm also enjoying pixel art more and more, and this game seems to have been the perfect thing to properly get started on it with.
(I had a rough time making this video, and I'm still not 100% happy with it. More on that below.)
Coding the cutscenes was pretty pleasant. I now have a little cutscene engine that takes arbitrary sequences of panels and captions and displays them in order, letting the player skip to the next panel or the whole thing. I also made it so that the highlights in the captions are specified in the source text by enclosing text in pairs of asterisks, something which will come in handy if I get round to adding localisation support.
Recording for YouTube
To make it easy to show the opening cutscene for this devlog I thought I'd just record it and stick it on YouTube. I thought this would be easy but I had huge issues getting the colours to not appear super washed out in the final uploaded video. I think I haven't really had this issue so far because I've mostly been using gifs which tend to have very true colours (at least for pixel art), or the videos I have made haven't really had noticeable colour issues (the trailer for the Alpha is mostly fine.).
I tried a lot of different colour formats for the video, and had some really nice results until it finally came to upload to YouTube. Ultimately I ended up moving from using ShotCut for my editing to Davinci Resolve and then just manually colour grading the video until I was happy with the final uploaded video. I'm still not 100% happy with it, but I need to move on at some point, and the cutscenes are going to look fine when rendered in the actual game.
I've included a gif version of the cutscene here so you can see the colours a little more as I intended.
(Text is a little squashed by the page here, so open in its own tab to see nice crisp pixels)
Finishing Up Epilogues
I still have a little bit of work left to do for the epilogue cutscenes, and then some tweaks to make sure everything is cohesive. Since there are multiple endings to the game (at least 5 at the moment, with varying levels of difference) I want to make sure that each path and its epilogue is actually satisfying, and players don't get punished for their choices with a lame outcome to the story. Doing all this art and figuring out how to end things has been a really welcome break, but I'm ready to start designing and coding some more interesting tools for the player's ship now. :)
I'll leave you with one panel from the epilogues that I hope is interesting enough while not spoiling anything.