Hi! Welcome to our first developer update, or feature showcase - call it what you want, in reality it's just us rambling on what we've been recently working on.
In this post, we're going to focus on our in-game workshop editor, which will allow you to create your own custom cosmetics. Needless to say - everything in here is still early in development, and may change before release.
A Little History
Since conception, we knew we wanted to include modding support of any kind. We love the idea of giving players the tools to customize the game - but the issue was figuring out what kind of modding support we can allow.
We didn't want to commit to the idea of creating an entire SDK right away, as that might prove a task slightly too big when we have so many other things to worry about. So the next idea was custom players models - but even that simple idea seemed to have issues. Although back then we did not have a concrete design, we already knew what we were looking for in our character - short and slightly silly with its animations. Proportions that wouldn't really fit for most player models, and if you did somehow still try to - chances are your model would end up looking really, really out of place.
So I easily figured - hats! Hats are cool, easier to make and add that extra bit of spice to your customization. We ended up expanding on that idea to more than just hats and allow players to create cosmetics for any body part. In the future, we'd like to figure out how we can expand upon modding even further.
How Does It Work?
The workshop editor is built to be as simple as possible - even a baby can do it. For this example, I've created a quick, crude model of an ice cream hat, and used tiffanyChu's ice cream material to paint it.
First, you need to select an item to work on. You can choose to create a new item (in which you'll be prompted to import a 3D model), or update an item you've already published.
Once an item is loaded, all your editing tools will be revealed before you:
- Transform
- Materials
- Animations
- Thumbnail
- Publish
Transform and Materials are your two main editing tools - Transform allows you to move, rotate, or scale your object, as well as pick the body part attachment. Materials will allow you to edit the material properties of the model, including texture importing.
Animations is a simple dropdown list that allows you to play different animations on the preview model to test out whether your item looks good with different animations.
Thumbnail is another simple utility to help you quickly generate a cropped screenshot of your item to use as a thumbnail for the workshop page. You can still upload your own, custom thumbnail - but we thought we'd add this little utility to make things easier on some people.
And lastly, Publish will allow you to fill in all the details for your workshop page and upload it.
And bam! Now your workshop item is public and people can download it and use it. If enabled in their settings, players who join a server with you and don't have the item you're currently wearing will automatically download it. It's this easy.
Aside from custom cosmetics, players can also customize their character by coloring different parts of it, and we're always looking for new ways to allow for customization - not just in the player model department. But first - we have the game itself to finish. :)
That being said, I'm excited to see what kind of things people will create for the game - I'm sure there will be amazing, creative submissions, and not just memes. Right..?