Vanillaware Ripping Project

[tombmonkey]

Message me on discord (tombmonkey#9816) if you want to talk more about modern sprites, I have worked with skeletal animation for nearly a decade by now, and Vanillaware games were what got me interested in it originally.

I looked at the game for a while and I didn't spot anything that could be using a third blending mode, but if I had to guess what that third byte blending mode is from own experience, it's probably subtractive blending (for shadows instead of lights). If you see the flag on on anything post it and I can take a look and see if I can tell what it's doing.

The data for coloring the black and white images probably is, again talking from own experience, somewhere in each character's controller code, not on the animation information, the color range could even be hardcoded instead of using a palette file. Often when drawing these kind of sprites you can add interrupts via code to achieve special effects or modifications beyond what's in the animation data, a common example would be intercepting the rotation of an image and changing it on the fly so a character can look (or aim a gun) towards an specific point (in the spine examples I linked above you can see several ways you can tweak stuff in real time, these changes wouldn't be in the animation data).

And yes if you want to assemble the sprites as faithfully as possible while preserving the special effects it would have to be done in a non destructive way that supports blending modes, like html.