Tavern Talk: Characters are several sprites in a trenchcoat

Today, we reveal a small secret: The characters have layers (literally). 

We are not talking about the ordinary layers artists usually have to render more easily, but about how secretly all the characters are just a bunch of body parts.

All characters have a main body with a blank face, different eye sprites and several separate facial expressions as well as some different arm positions. Additionally, to make it possible for our Artists to animate the characters as best as possible, we have to render most of the separately moving parts as their own sprites, f.ex. the several hair strands of Eleithyia or Fable’s Flower. 

You cannot just cut them out of the image, so you also have to make sure the parts “behind” the moving part also look cleanly rendered. Later the Artists also orders these parts correctly in a prefab in Unity. Just to visualize it better, here you can see all of Fable’s parts (looks like a decent amount now that all of it is on one heap):