Yep, you read that right; the final development log of 2025 – and what a year it’s been!
After twelve long months of hard work, we are now (finally) nearing completion of the character creation screen and, by extension, the character system as a whole. All the main foundations have been laid, most of the hard work has been done, and now it’s just the final stretch of work that remains.
Let’s dive in and see where things are at.
Underwear Now Mandatory For All Crew (Fines Apply)
First off, I am happy to report that the default underwear is now fully implemented and fully functional, across all body types and parts, with 100% less visual bugs. Turns out the winning solution was just a matter of adding pixel bleed, since the sprite bounds in Photoshop don’t fully match up with Unity (and I couldn’t figure out why) so I ended up just adding some padding around the edges of each sprite and voilà, issue solved. It is a bit hacky, yes, but if it works it works, right?
Witness this quick lil’ demo to see for yourself:
(No idea why, but my cursor is invisible in this week’s recordings lol)
As you can see though, the underwear now seamlessly adapts to each gender and body type, as well as each bulge and bust size (for immersion of course), and this is how all future clothing in the game will behave. There isn’t really much else to say since, well, it is just underwear lol, but the key thing to note is….. the clothing system is now DONE. All the background code is finished and all the logic is sound. Awesome.
Now then, with this foundational system out of the way, all future clothing, headgear, armour, accessories, and so on, will all be much quicker and easier to add into the game, and so you can expect to see an increase in production speed going forwards for all-things-inventory. That being said, I do still have to draw them all by hand, which is time-consuming, and certain things will still take longer when tied to in-game functionality, but you get the idea.
Faces, but BETTER
Alrighty, so now it’s time for the best bit of news we have today, and that is the fact that we are now upto the ‘Appearance’ panel; the final part of the character screen.
This panel is centred around cosmetics, and is the final roadblock before reaching actual gameplay. Luckily for me, and you, this section will be FAR simpler than the rest – since it’s mostly just a matter of refactoring existing logic and functions to implement the remaining fields.
This is because all the things that are included in this panel, such as skin details, makeup, tattoos, and piercings, are all essentially just ‘overlays’ on the existing body parts of the character, meaning they are far easier to draw, import, rig, and implement, than all the previous categories.
I’ve already had quite the running start on the head details field, which took less than an hour from start to finish, and I’ve attached the following GIF to give you an idea of what some of these cosmetics entail:
Note: Upon seeing this GIF now, I realise that perhaps the parts are perhaps a bit too subtle and hard to see (particularly the moles and freckles) and so I’ll definitely be going back and editing their sprites at some point.
But yes, as you can see these fields basically just re-use all the existing code, functionality, and logic, from all the prior fields – perfect. One other cool thing about this section is that all the tattoos will work off a masking system, meaning that they will ‘adapt’ to each body type automatically, meaning instead of having to draw each tattoo six times (rip) I now only have to draw them once per tat and the mask component will do all the heavy lifting in adapting them to each character’s silhouette.
This is not only great for me, since it means a lot less asset grind, but also for the game’s future modding scene too, as it eliminates much of the tedium that would have otherwise been involved, and therefore will hopefully lead to a lot more custom tattoo mods being made.
As of writing this log, there is one slight backtrack that I have decided to take, and that is to remove the ‘head shape’ variations and instead implement ‘eyelid type’ instead. This is because, as you can imagine, having multiple different head shapes in a 2D character system is actually going to create a huge future headache in trying to get headgear and face-wear to adapt to all head shapes – meaning that both vanilla content and modded content will become a MASSIVE slog to create (as each item will need to be drawn multiple times to account for all types of heads).
Furthermore, the lack of eyelid variation basically makes every character caucasian, and so I think the ROI from having ethnicity variation (via eyelids) is far greater than just ‘slightly modified’ jawlines. Especially since, realistically, for the head shape variation to have any tangible effect visually, it means I’d need to have at least +30% variation in shape between heads, and that alone would create a big old can of worms for compatibility with other facial sprites.
Luckily though, this shouldn’t be too much of a sidetrack, and I will definitely have it implemented by the next log.
So yeah. That’s where things are at. The finish line is finally near and, with a bit of luck, I’m hoping to reach actual gameplay by the end of January next year. That being said, we have seen numerous examples of my time estimates being…. a little less than precise, but fingers crossed for this time ’round!
There we have it, the final log of 2025. It’s been a hard road, and I’m still quite amazed at just how long it’s taken to get this character system ready, but at the same time I think that just means it’s gunna be freakin’ awesome when it is.
Over the coming weeks, with Christmas fast approaching and the holiday season upon us, work will definitely slow down a little, which is why I decided to make this the final log of the year. I do still expect some development to happen here and there, but at a much more relaxed pace.
Anyway, as always, thanks for tuning in.
I hope you all have a great holiday season, spend time with loved ones, enjoy some time off, and celebrate the coming of a new year full of new possibilities.
Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!
– from me and Luna
