Team Aurora Test Animation

SURPRISE! It's not Rimea-Marre or Warrior Cats! It's Pokemon! While lying in bed about a week ago, I was suddenly struck by the intense urge to see if I could replicate a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon style cutscene in Opentoonz. I'm not sure why, exactly (especially since I realized halfway through that it would've just been easier to make a modified cut scene via Skytemple), but the urge proved so strong that I slapped this bad boy together in two days. It's more of a personal project than anything especially flashy, but, well. I wanted to share it with my friends. And the file was too big to send via Discord. So here it is. Making this was more compositing than it was true animation, which was a nice change of pace. I drew very little in this video: I did Lilith's portraits and did some background and sprite tweaking here and there (and ripped a few assets from Explorers of Sky myself -- curse you, sweat emote, for being impossible to find anywhere online), but aside from that, I have other people to thank for all these resources: chief among them being the SkyTemple Discord, which has put together an absolutely fantastic PMD sprite repository (https://sprites.pmdcollab.org/) with fully drawn sprites and portraits for almost all of the post gen 4 'mons (those gorgeous Alolan vulpix assets were made by NeroIntruder and baronessfaron, while the Hisuian zorua overworld sprites were made by Ichor). That discord was also responsible for the ExplorerScript Boundary Test generator (https://textbox.skytemple.org/), which I used to convert my text to the good 'ol PMD font. I'd also like to thank Parakoopa of Project Pokemon (for ripping all vanilla EOS maps I used) and PMD Gang on Youtube (for compiling all EOS sound effects). Beyond that, the music and backgrounds is all Gamefreak and Chunsoft's handiwork (the songs used are "Escape Through the Snow" from PMD RBRT and "Heartwarming" from PMD TDS). If you're able, pick up a PMD game. You will not regret it. They are wild rides. The little snippet of a story I used here is the meeting between Lilith (the shiny Hisuian zorua) and Eirys (the Alolan vulpix), who later form Team Aurora. Lilith has vague memories of being perused by some mysterious forces, but for whatever reason, a bad night in a blizzard seems to have wiped her memory clean. Eirys just wants to help out -- and, maybe, form a exploration team at some point, and Lilith might just be the perfect partner. I have lots of characters that sit around in my head and never actually get put down on paper (or, uh, screen), and these two were previously among that group, so it's nice to see them in action! I think it turned out pretty nice, overall: the one issue is that I only doubled the sizes of all the sprites, so the resolution is still only a measly 512 x 384. This was fun to work with in the moment, but it makes the export quality look pretty bad, especially if you try to zoom in. Something to think about if I ever do this again! Let me know if you like this sort of thing. It was fun, so I wouldn't mind making more if I can find the time!