Face Portraits have been updated, and panel art is gone (the text box on the right side no longer has an image with it).
I spent this week getting rid of the old placeholder art for portraits and event panels to finally bring Scourge of the Reptiles to a state where there is no Generated content left in the game. All Code, Design, Art, Music/Sound, and Text in this game is now human made.
Using a cool and fun to use pixel art portrait maker from Itch.io, I was able to get the new portrait art style to fairly well match the style of the human-made pixel art in the tile-sets and sprites. The art also keeps the 90's retro look intact without heading too much into JRPG style or cartoon style. It uses similar restricted colour palettes and resolution to achieve that consistency. I went up a level in Aseprite (pixel art tool).
With the scene images, I decided to just remove them entirely! This makes the event panel much smaller and less "in the way" when exploring, so you can more easily ignore it if you wish. You can certainly see more of the cinematic sequences (moving sprites) that occasionally tell the story - the smaller panel not only shows a wider view of that but also is often merged with the dialogue panel text to leave most of the world view clear.
I also upgraded the camera systems to zoom into NPCs, objects, and scenes that are being described by panels or dialogue events - thus focusing the experience on what is happening for the player. It works as a good replacement for the old panel art, as its in-game and not over the top of the world view - it feels more involving.
