February: "MEGA Fantasy Walking NPCs & Faces" Progress

February has arrived, and I'd like to report on my progress.

Lately, I've been focusing on creating assets, while using my spare time to work on porting "The Beginning Story" (my previous short RPG made in RPG Maker) and developing settings for original works - it feels like there's never enough time. I used to play quite a few games before, but recently I haven't had time to sit down and play properly. However, I also feel that if I don't take some rest, I might burn out. This is becoming concerning, as work has started following me into my dreams - I can't escape it even while sleeping. I'm literally working around the clock at this point.I consider this a yellow flag. I experienced a similar situation when I worked as an animator at an anime company in the past, and I ended up quitting the company a few months later. I think managing this aspect will be a challenge moving forward.

Now, getting to the main topic - January was quite productive, and I completed 15 characters. Unlike playable characters, these NPCs don't require as much design consideration, so the work progresses faster. Besides, the more plain/simple the design, the more NPC-like it feels.

While I'm still using the same color palette I used for playable characters for the NPCs, I came up with an idea during work to prevent them from becoming too colorful. Although I've removed the Sega Genesis's "4 palettes per screen" limitation, I thought it wouldn't be good to have unlimited colors either. So I decided to have NPCs in similar categories share a common palette. If every NPC had a different palette, the colors would become scattered and noisy, but this approach should create some cohesion. While this might exceed the "4 palettes per screen" limit, it should be easy to keep it within the TurboGrafx-16's "256 colors per screen" limit. This might help maintain that "retro feel."

That's how it looks.

So, I'll keep things going in February while maintaining a healthy balance between work and rest!