Character Customization in Project: Omni
If Artix Entertainment was a Halmark-style Greetings Card company... we would definately be putting these adorable new characters on all of our cards. Their highly customizable face, eyes, hair, mouth and expression are perfect for "Happy Birthday", "Get Well Soon", "Happy Anniversary", and "Sorry you fell through a time Vortex and were eaten by a T-Rex." Maybe we should make that part of the game... "Dear player, we are not one of those lame games that tries to get you to post something to your Facebook wall every 10 seconds, but.... we were browsing your friends profiles and saw that your dear Aunt Sally is sick! Would you like to wear this silly hat and pose with a Necromancer's undead army to make her a get well soon or else picture? We recommend posting it to her wall every 10 seconds."
"Hue" do you want to be?
When you are not playing the game, the our male hero character does a lots of situps. Just look at that 4-pack! Yesterday, we worked on making the skin tone color customizable. Back in Flash, we actually broke every color into it's own layer, then put some code on it to change the color. (It is a lot of work to make a color customizable armor in AQWorlds.) It got even trickier in Project Omni. We want players to be able to pick any skin color they want from tan to Homestuck Blue to Hulk green. After playing with some options we found we could change the Hue, Saturation and Brightness levels to do this pretty effectively. But a closer examination of the picture below and you will see that changing the brightness is causing the hair and shorts to change color too! (Ack! The evil wash fairy washed my shorts too many times and now they are all faded!!!!!)
So Minimal did something really cool. He created a custom Hue/Sat/Bright filter than only changes areas that are in color (no whites, grays or black are changed.) So now we can set your skin color, hair color, eye color, etc to any color we want without messing up the outlines or underpants. Your armor will be drawn on top of the character and then the weapon will be placed in your hand. Whether you are a future game maker, an established game maker, or just love seeing what we are doign behind the scenes I hope you have been finding these posts interesting.
