A short movie for testing 2D sprite with 3D lighting effects

I have no idea what to call this, because it is ultimately just a test to see how things would look.

The animation is made with Godot 4 movie maker. The quality isn't great, but I am using low res artwork in the first place.

I might be able to make it look better by doubling the size, but the file size is already too big for something this short.

Making a 3D environment has been attractive to me for a while now, I just don't think I can muster enough assets to do it properly.  Thinking about it now, simple box room with 2D textures is probably doable, out door environment on the other hand is a whole another beast.

That lead me to making this test movie, which I'm glad I did, because it taught me a thing.

Perspective turns out to be quite a problem. Objects don't line up properly if you even shift the camera a bit. That is obvious to people who work in 3D often, but I didn't even thought about it when I started the test project.

So if I have character interacting with something, it is often better to just animate both character/object together as a single image/animation. Otherwise, if the player took a side step during the scene, everything will look bad.

I could get around this by locking player's camera during cut scenes, but half the fun of doing stuff in 3D would be letting players look around freely and maybe discover new things in different angle. At least, that's how I feel about it.

I want to poke at this sort of thing more after I finish The Hour In Festivity. 

Now, onto the content of the animation itself.

You may notice a few Pokemon references in the dialogue. The POV character's design reminded me of Ash Ketchum, which prompted me to include the references. If I thought of it earlier, I would had redesign the employee into a Jenny or Joy. Oh well, lost opportunity.

I still have to think up a name for this when I post it to public next week. I don't know if I want to directly reference Pokemon in the title. The connection is way too thin but there aren't any strong narrative elements to go into the title otherwise. Maybe I'll go for the light novel naming route of just describe the entire plot in the title.

Well, it is a problem for next week to solve.