ZLG's Majora's Mask-themed Stream Layout
This is a stream layout inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, one of my all-time favorite games. It's a game about friendship, loss, forgiveness, and finding courage to heal.
Early in the game is a scene that punched me in the gut, and has stuck with me over the years. It depicts the Skull Kid shivering in the rain under a log in Termina Field, with the fairy duo, Tatl and Tael.
That scene touched my heart because of the idyllic nature of how we sometimes meet friends in life. Skull Kid met the fairies after causing trouble in Clock Town and being cast out. Although the Skull Kid was still was overtaken by the mask he stole, his friendship with the fairies is ultimately what brings him back from the brink of Majora's total control. Tael stuck by him despite what he had become, and Tatl joined forces with Link to save him from the mask. Despite it all, they stayed friends and went back to Hyrule together.
Planning
Accuracy was important to me in composing the scene. I played through the game until I was able to exit to Termina Field, then moved Link around until things looked close to what I wanted.
Both exits (Southern Swamp, Romani Ranch) are obscured, to not take away from other elements in the scene. The perspective is ideal because it shows the height of the posts leading southward at good perspective, and makes the hollow log appear larger. I wanted to emphasize depth while filling space on the canvas. A lower vanishing point will do that.
What started as a fun "what if" sketch has become the coolest overlay I've made thus far. I've leaned on my OBS knowledge, plugin knowledge with Elomeno_'s help, pixel art knowledge, HTML and CSS, general programming, and color design. Knowing how to make each asset in a way that can be mixed with other assets to remix them is important, too. I leaned on a tiling trick to make the backgrounds seamless so they can scroll, too.
The layout as it stands is every single idea that was both feasible and workable. At first, I only wanted an overcast sky and some rain. The idea ran wild in my head for a few weeks while I was producing the base, and eventually it hit me to have day and night. Then I needed a way to shade the entire scene for the clouds. During the tweaking of that, it hit me that I could also swap clouds, and rain, in and out! I could vastly increase the number of states that the layout could be in (increasing the visual appeal) while only messing around with a handful of layers.
Building
I decided to use GIMP as my editor, mostly because I was already familiar with it, and I wanted to gain more mastery, such as making or using custom brushes, learning texturing techniques, and so on. My tablet was already picked up by it and had a number of preset dynamics that seemed Good Enough, so work started on it.
Automation
Once I completed the initial scene for the layout, I wanted to add some dynamism to it. Rain and a night/day cycle would be ideal for this, because they can fade a source in and out.
That's when I began workshopping with Elomeno_ on motion and transitions. Between the Move plugin and Advanced Scene Switcher, we arranged something that creates the "weather script" for lack of better phrasing.
To do it, I put together a spreadsheet acting as a sort of Gantt chart to represent the 'tracks' of transitions, similar to a video editing program. That helped me visualize what the script should be like in numeric terms, since each column represented a single minute. Aligning the script requires precise delays and durations, so it took a lot of experimentation to get things lining up.
After an hour or so of thorough checking and re-checking, and watching the sequence, I'm really satisfied with what has been put together.
Result
Perfectionism is something I struggle with. I spent over a month working on this layout, partly for the vision, but also to challenge myself. It feels really weird to say I'm happy -- truly happy -- about something I've made. I can stand next to this and boldly say, "It's good." That matters to me.
Looking back, there are still things I could include or improve, but that's true of any creative process. They're simply lessons to apply in the next project.