Neon Trigger Week 10: How to end a Game

Hello all!

JaL here.

This week I'll be walking through a bit of my process in creating the cutscenes for Neon Trigger.

Last week marked the release of Neon Trigger - Gold.  Leading up to that date we were optimistic that the game would be fun and engaging to play, but there was still something missing in to the final hours of development: A narrative element.

The team decided that we would include a cutscene at game start to explain the rules of the game, the protagonist's motivation, and a bit about the world's setting. The ending cutscene would simply conclude the story.

With a little less than 2 weeks to complete a few scenes from start to finish, I tried to find tools and techniques that would allow us to hit the beats we needed to, while sticking with the established visual theming.

The  software used for our cutscenes are Photoshop and Unity. Unity's UI, Animation, and Timeline features did most of the heavy lifting.

Today's post will focus on the first shot of our ending cutscene.

• The first step was planning out each shot with sketches.

• Next, I moved the camera around the environment in Unity to capture the backgrounds.

• The backgrounds are then cut and arranged so that each component can be manipulated individually when imported to Unity.

• Final art is illustrated, with all of the most important elements separated into their own layer. 

• Each layer of the illustration is sorted by shot and exported to Unity as a PNG with transparency.

• All of the images can be placed into the scene using a UI Canvas and an image component to hold the PNG. (The images should automatically place correctly)

• With Unity's animation tool you can assign animation controller to the shot(parent) then scale, move, and activate each image component(child).

• Create a Timeline asset and drag your shots into the timeline as an activation track.

• From there you can cut and edit your cutscene until it's looking awesome. 

Unity can be a powerful tool for 2d animation.

Thank you for keeping up with the development of Neon Trigger! 

~JaL