Back again with more juicy updates – and this week, I can finally say the left-side panel of the character customisation screen is DONE! In this dev log, I’ll be showing off all the cool (and functional) buttons, sliders, grids, and features of the panel, along with some brand new parts. I’ll also give a quick rundown of what’s planned for the next few weeks.
Hard Part is Ogre
Here we are, finally, with the full left side panel of the character customisation screen finished! It’s been quite the long road, building out the logic for part indexing, part cycling, pop-up grids, colour sliders, and basically all the foundational code for the systems that (now) can be re-used many times over.
It might sound funny that I’m celebrating the completion of what’s technically only half of the overall screen, but it’s a big milestone, because from here on out it’s basically just smooth sailing. The hardest part (the logic) is done; everything else is now just a matter of applying that same framework to new categories, instead of building it from scratch.
So, with all that being said, I think it’s about time we bust out the flashy new GIFs to show off all the cool new stuff, so enough of my rambling – take a look for yourself:
1. Head and Facial Hair:
(Note: The hairstyles are basically just placeholders at the moment, I will be revising them to be more in-line with the overall art style, and less cartooney, fairly soon – I just had to throw them together fairly quick the other week so that I could test a bunch of logic.)
2. Facial Features:
3. Body Hair Presets (more on this below):
4. Character Rotation (and Asymmetrical part swapping):
To sum up all the new features – we now have full part customisation for every single field on the left side (yes, including those last few – but I’ll leave them for you to discover in-game). The system now supports dynamic pop-up grids (which automatically sort and include any mod-added content), dynamic preview generation (which can either create previews automatically to match vanilla parts or display custom thumbnails provided by mod authors), full body hair presets for both genders, and simple character rotation that accounts for asymmetrical sprite swapping, with left/right part swapping for asymmetrical tattoos, piercings, and details coming soon.
The grid functionality and preview generator were a real challenge to get right, but I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. One of the trickiest aspects of the grid was deciding how it should actually look. I tried a bunch of variations: pop-out windows, full-panel swaps, multi-column layouts, and more, before landing on the version you see here. Animations for the slide-out grid will be added later as part of the final polish pass before wrapping up this screen.
The body hair presets were another unique case, since they controls multiple parts at once (eight for female, ten for male). This required special logic to tie them all together. I’ll be honest – drawing, importing, rigging, and setting up all those variations across six body types was… painful to say the least. But it’s done now, and the results look great. The only small limitation is that this system doesn’t support custom mod-added lengths, due to how it had to be implemented – which is a bit of a shame, but not a major loss in the grand scheme of modding flexibility (at least I hope? lol).
Finally, the last few gender-specific anatomy fields are also fully functional, with multiple selectable parts – but I haven’t included them as GIFs since…. well I think you can pretty easily figure out what they do lol. One minor fix still pending: switching genders doesn’t yet auto-swap those fields to match the current gender, but that’ll be patched in very soon.
The Road Ahead
So now with that all out of the way – what’s next?
Well, now I can finally – FINALLY – start adding clothing for the characters. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this, because it’s been nigh-impossible to show off my project to anyone thus far without first explaining why there’s suddenly a massive hand-drawn dong staring them in the face lol.
Beyond finally giving the characters some decency, the next major step is the right-side panel of the customisation screen – which, as mentioned earlier, should be a breeze compared to the left side. From here, progress speed will mostly come down to how quickly I can draw new parts rather than any coding bottlenecks. Luckily, things like tattoos and piercings should be relatively quick to produce, since they don’t require the same balance of realism and stylisation that the anatomy work did.
Once that’s all wrapped up, I’ll work through a final polish pass – creating smooth animations for the UI, adding zoom/pan functionality, changing the anatomy fields to sliders, adding a proper background scene for the character, and completely revamping the GUI (no more ugly plain grey). I’ll also implement randomisation functionality and save/load support in general (pretty important step lol).
After that, I’ll be taking a brief sidestep into systems work to implement a universal mod loader that runs before the main menu. This will centralise all my currently scattered mod scripts, let me properly test mod-added parts, and add preliminary localisation support for future implementation. Once that’s in place… it’s finally time to move on to the stat screen. Woohoo!
Exciting stuff is coming over the next few logs, especially as I inch closer to real gameplay. It’s been a long and brutal journey through all this character-related groundwork, and I know you’re just as eager to see the gameplay as I am, but all this foundational work will pay off massively, especially for a character-driven game like this.
So that’s about it for this round! Not much to share on the personal side this time as I’ve mostly just been buried in dev work. I will say, though, that my new job schedule has been wayyyyyy better for productivity than when I was at the bar – though I doubt that surprises anyone lol.
One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how to keep these dev logs as detailed and (hopefully) enjoyable to read as they are now, but without them taking quite so long to write – as it’s usually like a 3-5 hour affair. Aaaand yeah – that’s definitely a bit too time-consuming lol. So, even though I enjoy writing them, I’m trying to find a way to streamline the process a bit, maybe by fitting them into an actual workday instead of my Sunday (?), but then I’d lose actual game-dev time instead… rip.
I’ll have to think about it some more it seems.
Anyway, as always thanks for tuning in and see ya in the next one!
