I finally finished this indulgent project. Here is my mock-up up of a boss battle with my "titan" tree. To be clear, I didn't make the battle UI or Kris and their idle animation. All of that is from Deltarune and made by those talented artists. I yoinked the sprite rips from Spriters Resource instead of recreating them from scratch. Below the cut off is a write up about the progression of this project. There's a bunch of WIP images and GIFs and I'll be discussing scrapped ideas and what I referenced to make this. As far as spoiler warnings go, if you're caught up on ch. 4 you'll be fine.
Back when chapters 3 and 4 came out, I percolated this idea of a titan taking on a mangled form of the "egg" tree. The seed for this concept came from the hole behind the "star" from the ch. 4 Titan boss battle. To my Deltarune rotted brain, that hole reminded me of a gnarled knot in a tree. That knot swirled with the mystery behind the forgotten man is what created this. I like contrast between the straight lines and the curves in this version. While making it, I was going to have the same number of wings that the in-game Titan has, but I didn't want to obscure the tree more, and getting a wing shaped I liked was frustrating. Four ended up as the most I went for.
Flash forward to next year, Ch. 5 comes out and the annual Deltarune brain rot returns. I came back to this tree to come full circle with it. I was going to make an idle animation for the previous design but never got another to it. This time around I sought out to make a boss battle mock-up. I edited the original sprite and got it closer to the "weeping willow" style sketch. Also, I changed the back of the wings to match the square foliage on the "egg" tree. Then I took cues from the animation on the Titan boss and got to animating.
I thought I was about done working on the tree, that's when I brought it into the file I'd be making the environment in. The tree was too big. Way too big. I was basing my tree sprite on the sprite size of the Titan sprite and never compared it to the actual size of the game screen and its characters. I had to fit this hunk of timber in a 320 x 240 px box. To add insult to injury, Kris' battle idle is only 6 frames, I planned the tree's animation around 7 frames. I was keeping this all in Aseprite so I opted to go down to 6 frames, redo the animation, and shrink the tree. The final animation looks much cleaner.
I didn't make the environment with a clear vision of what I wanted it look like. I had fragments of ideals and some noodling in my physical sketch book of some concepts. I wanted this dark world to be a state park. I knew I wanted a lake, some kind of forest element, and the crying eyes in the sky. I clung on to the eyes in part because of the book that talks about a "fallen star crying." But more so because of the packaging art from the Fangamer Deltarune playing cards made by Kanotynes. That art rocks. At first, I was between doing a low saturation foggy sort of colors and going straight grayscale (monochrome). Having such a gray dark world felt off and I couldn't get the fog looking how I wanted it. I also dropped the monochrome idea. I knew I wanted to incorporate "scribbles" of highly saturated red, green, blue, and yellow for the monochrome concept. I was thinking it would look like a child colored in this dark world with care. But in the end, that idea didn't gel with the tree. Maybe I could run with that another time.
After messing with the color and what not I got to this. Grass that looked like a frozen blank canvas waiting for the inky rain. These colors were a breath of fresh air compared to the grays. Keen eyed viewers may also notice that I didn't render the right side as much. The size of the tree had some upsides after all. I also have to bring up the sprite work I referenced for this. I wanted this to feel like it fit into Deltarune. With the grass, I was looking between the scarlet forest tiles and the hometown grass tiles. I leaned way into the hometown style of grass, clean, simple, and with a little AA. The dark fountain in the background was made from scratch. I was comparing it with the castle town dark fountain sprite to get it to look right. Prior the highlight on the fountain was closer to cyan, turns out darkness is more indigo.
This final step wasn't hard, more annoying. The battle UI on Spriters Resource fits 640 x 480 px. Double the size I was working it. Conversely, the font was half that size. This was a lot of resizing and a little eyeballing. The worst part was remaking the battle line animation. The actual animation I think is done in engine so instead of six frames it was closer to 60. I made a simple three frame version for this instead. I could spend more time refining this to death. In the end I'm happy with how this turned out and the skills it forced me to work on. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And of course, Thanks to everyone on the Deltarune team for making a rad game!
