Part of the fun of these videos is reverse-engineering and reusing all the old-school cel rigs from the original Hotel Mario game. Exporting these to layers of PNG sequences and then assembling them in Vegas is actually a pretty streamlined process with the help of some scripting. A PNG sequence becomes effectively a "video" when imported into Vegas, which means I can take an animated movement and easy play it, reverse it, hold it on a certain frame, etc. This is more or less the way the original game's developers would've put together these animations.

While working with the Hotel Mario style I've noticed a lot of errant pixels and very dark grays which sort of clue me into how the cutscenes were originally drawn. It seems to have been a traditional cel animation project, drawn by hand and then downsampled later on to fit on the disc. You'll notice a lot of variance in the line widths, little leftovers from sketch lines, etc. This game is frequently described as having a "pixel art" style in its cutscenes, but I think the reason the style is so hard to capture is that it's NOT pixel art, it's regular 90s cel animation that is forcibly scaled down and posterized. When you replicate that process (with a digital drawing tablet, of course, since it's not 1990 anymore) you get a much more convincing result.

I've been doing this in Photoshop for the few custom frames I've drawn so far, but unfortunately Photoshop is just bad for animation. So I'm trying to figure out OpenToonz, which is just good for animation!

The plan is to still lean on existing rigs as much as possible, especially for simple close-up shots of the Bros talking. It's sort of a Sealab 2021 production style where the vast majority of the work was done by somebody else years ago, and they did it haphazardly in the first place, so it's alright if it looks a little goofy. But by introducing some quick shots of custom animations, hopefully I can add a lot more unique charm.

If you're interested in this type of production update, consider subscribing to the $5 tier! I'll post more updates like this, but most will not be publicly-viewable.