While play-testing the Character Creator system, I realized that there was an issue with the female character’s art. I was already aware that the female head was wider than the male’s head. The more I looked at it, the more glaringly obvious it became to me that it needed to be fixed.
Female Character Art Improvements
I moved the female character’s head over by a pixel and adjusted all facial elements accordingly. It’s a subtle change, but it looks better, I think. While I was at it, I updated the inner portion of the breast art to be a lighter shade so it’s not quite so pronounced. I’m not sure I’m satisfied with the lightness of the shade, but for now, it’ll do.
Finally, An Avatar
With everything added and functional in the Character Creator, it was time to implement the character in its first form in the game: the character avatar.
For 4 months of development, a random ‘character’ named Tedd served as the placeholder for the character avatar. Why Tedd? It just popped into my head as an easy character name, and that’s the character that’s been made and re-made for testing likely thousands of times.
With character avaters added into the game, Tedd finally gets to take a well-deserved and permanent break from being the avatar placeholder!
Character Creator Not Quite Finished
I was pretty happy, thinking that the Character Creator was pretty much done. All that was left to do, I thought, was to add the character avatar, and embed the code inside the game in order to provide the ingame functionality for a player to edit their character.
Boy, was I wrong. I realized I’d only added one accessory slot. This was supposed to cover hats, glasses, earrings, and accessories in other facial locations. It occurred to me that 1 slot was just not going to cut it. So, I’ve decided that I’m going to add 3 additional accessory slots.
There will be 1 accessory slot for the head (for hats and stuff that sits atop the player’s head), 1 slot for eyewear (including glasses, eye patches, goggles, stuff like that), 1 slot for earrings and ear wear, and finally, 1 slot for miscellaneous accessories (like a clown nose or necklace.)
So, this is going to make it take longer to finish the system, but that’s not a big deal. I had planned for it to take about a week to complete the whole system. We’re on day 5 of collective days of development, so we’re well within the projected time frame and working at a pace where the system should be finished by the expected time. 🙂