Every year for Ludum Dare, we try to put ourselves into a video game. Sometimes we do an FMV game by taking videos of ourselves and placing those videos in a game. Other times we do something more like the old mortal kombat games and digitize ourselves by taking and cutting photos into frames. Here is our process to get our human bodies in the game. It all starts with costumes, you can’t make a game of a guy in jeans and a t-shirt, so we have to get ourselves a bunch of thematic clothing. Luckily for us, the family of one of our members owns a costuming shop called Junk for Joy so this part is not expensive. This is when we design our main characters and pick out a bunch of genre specific items to make enemies later. Next up is the green screen. We’ve been doing this long enough that we both have a good green screen and are pretty good at setting and lighting it up. We then get to move on to shooting frames. By this point, we have compiled a list of actions that need frames, but it is up to the person to determine how exactly each action is going to look. Shooting took the better part of a day, but was interspersed with the other work we had to do. Here we have a single frame, but there is a whole lot of other nonsense around the character that we don’t want. Luckily, we have technology. By selecting and cutting the green screen around the character, we can go from this mess a different, fancier mess. There’s still a bunch of garbage on screen, so we select the character and copy it to a new document where we then put all of the frames for a specific character. As a note, I had to use a relatively low tolerance in my color select tool otherwise it would bleed into the character, and it had to be a contiguous area for a similar reason. That creates this fabulous monstrosity that we refer to as the abomination. These frames are then saved and labeled and then they are out of my personal hands and into unity. In unity, each frame is then resized, timed, and given hit boxes according to the image. Because each frame and character is unique, we couldn’t really automate or repeat any of the work. That combined with the fact that there are 351 frames that needed shooting, cutting, timing, and hitboxes, it totaled up to about 60 or so work hours to get this done split between 2 people, and that is for ONLY the sprite work. I hope you enjoyed this look into how we did what we did, and feel free to check out our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/fission-fight