Animated Cutscenes?

[AwkwardHooman]

Erm, I'm kinda new to this, but I'm wondering if it's possible to import animated cutscenes? Like, to personalize the story at points it has full on animated cutscenes. Just lemmie know if it's possible and what program to use if it is.

Thanks!
Sincerely, The most awkward hooman in existance

 

[mlogan]

Hi there and welcome! It will help to know which engine you are using, so if you could let us know, you can get a more specific answer.

 

[AwkwardHooman]

Hi there and welcome! It will help to know which engine you are using, so if you could let us know, you can get a more specific answer.

Not quite sure, like I said, I'm pretty new to this. I know it's a dumb question, but mind elaborating on engine?

 

[mlogan]

What specific program are you using? RPG Maker VX Ace, MV, XP? Something else?

 

[AwkwardHooman]

What specific program are you using? RPG Maker VX Ace, MV, XP? Something else?

Ah, okay. I haven't bought one yet, I'm trying to do research into each program, but MV seems like the best so far.

 

[Andar]

MV is the newests, XP was programmed when Windows XP was state of the art almost twenty years ago...

All RPG-Makers have an event command "play movie", but the movie needs to be in a format that the engine can handle - and that is different for different makers.

I suggest downloading the MV trial (20 day full functionality, then you need to purchase the full version) or VXAce Lite (only available through steam, no time limit but an object limit to max of 10 maps, 10 enemies and so on).
There is little difference between VXA and MV on the eventing and mapping sides, so both of those programs can give you time to experiment with their capacities.

 

[onipunk]

I'm assuming you mean fully hand- or digitally-animated cutscenes made in a program like Flash, ToonBoom or Dragonframe here. As said above, you could use "play movie" but there are a few things to consider. Animations can end up being huge files if you don't know how to render and compress them properly, but more importantly is that animation takes a huge amount of time, especially if you're working on it alone. Game development is already a very lengthy process and adding an animation will extend that time even further. My final film for my most recent year of college took about twelve weeks, half of that time researching, planning and storyboarding and the other six weeks purely animating by myself. It ended up being a minute long. You should ask yourself whether a couple of minutes of animation is worth adding on months to your development time, and whether what you want to convey in the animation is better conveyed in-engine.

 

[Conflictx3]

I'm assuming you mean fully hand- or digitally-animated cutscenes made in a program like Flash, ToonBoom or Dragonframe here. As said above, you could use "play movie" but there are a few things to consider. Animations can end up being huge files if you don't know how to render and compress them properly, but more importantly is that animation takes a huge amount of time, especially if you're working on it alone. Game development is already a very lengthy process and adding an animation will extend that time even further. My final film for my most recent year of college took about twelve weeks, half of that time researching, planning and storyboarding and the other six weeks purely animating by myself. It ended up being a minute long. You should ask yourself whether a couple of minutes of animation is worth adding on months to your development time, and whether what you want to convey in the animation is better conveyed in-engine.

While this is true, we live in a wonderful era where TC can easily hire someone to do the job for him, sure it may not be the cheapest option around but it wouldnt necessarily add any dev time to the game's creation, although I would personally hold out on doing that until the games 95% done and your just going back to clean up things anyway.

 

[VisitorsFromDreams]

My game Flatwoods was made in MV and featured around 4 minutes of limited frame by frame animation. That 4 minutes of animation took up 75% of the games development time (and I have been professionally animating for almost 20 years now). MV can certainly playback the videos but its sort of awkward, you need to take into account frame counts for the video lengths (at 60fps as well) and at the time I couldn't find a good way of making cutscenes skippable on repeat playthroughs though it has been a few years so maybe its easier with plugins now.

I usually charge about $1500 USD per minute of finished animation, although that price goes up if it becomes more complex in terms of aesthetics.

 

[onipunk]

They could pay someone but it would be prohibitively expensive. 99.9 percent of RPG Maker devs don't have thousands to throw at their game. I just ran some numbers and six weeks of work, forty hours a week, at Scottish Living Wage rates amounts to roughly between £2500-2700. Animation is two things - time consuming and expensive, and neither are luxuries most devs can afford. OP said they're new to this whole thing so my advice would be ignore animation for now, focus on learning the basics and making good games without any need for animated cutscenes and then tackle this question again in a few years with more experience under your belt.

 

[Conflictx3]

definitely agree with all, out of RPG maker and My day job at the airport, my main passion for the best 12 years is music, i ended up started a business and becoming an event planner/music manager, trust i make no major money, but i have always amassed a good amount of $$ for things i needed done because i get passionate about it, as u all probably know making music is as expensive and time consuming as making games, but in different capacities. getting a minute of animation is, effictively the equivalent of getting a custom instrumental/beat made of quality that you own the rights to, you can get really nice quality in the low thousands or you can look at cheaper, less savory looking/sounding options where you wont have the rights to use it as freely as originally intended in the low hundreds. its all a means to an end.

if TC did want animation for a personal game im sure he could get something for even as low as 300-400 for 30-seconds if you look in the right places, theres tons of no-name animators in the world with 13 views on their "goku vs silver surfer" animation they released 7 months ago that didn't look too bad but clearly wont be that Chrono trigger Remastered Steam cutscene you were imagining in your head for MV.

like i said i agree with others that you should skip animation right now, but if you can't sleep at night without having a cutscene in the works for your game then from my experience on the music end, if you really want that animated cutscene then do this:

imagine what you want in your dream scene best case scenarion, then imagine it with just the bare basics that you NEED it to have to get the point across then google/youtube amatuer animators and watch their stuff to see if any fit your bare basics needs, using the search words "animator" "animation" & "commission" should get you started if your dead set on doing this.