It's hard enough to focus during these troublesome times we live in, let alone sound cheerful about an upcoming... game patch. But hardships remind me of the opportunities I've been given, even the small everyday ones, the ease with which they can vanish in thin air and help me cherish them a tad more. Games have always been my small isle of serenity. Games allow us to communicate from afar, generating positivity, appreciation, and... hope.
Character Customization
With that being said, what I want to talk about in this dev log is the upcoming Character Customization feature.
A lot of people love to create a custom character in RPGs. It's quite common to say that in gamebooks YOU are the hero and it echoes the desire to make it feel your own experience. It feels only logical it was one of the most heavily requested features ever since the first demo of Fabled Lands went online.
So, I am pleased to announce that with the upcoming patch 0.17.0, the first character customization feature will go live.
How it started and how it went...
Whoever said it's hard, nay extremely difficult to make a hand-painted 2D game have a character customization... was damn right. And I am not talking that 2D vector thing used in web or mobile games! The artist and I both had to overcome various difficulties.
I had to change the game logic without touching my architecture which proved challenging initially but I had a breakthrough 7 days into the task. Afterwards it was clear sky and calm waters, and I was even satisfied with the produced code.
I had to update my layer ordering scripts to support multi-layer isometric objects. Which was tedious but not that hard. Changing the UI to display the character, however, was quite the head scratcher. In the end I turned to what 3D games do, spawn my character somewhere off screen, make a dedicated camera to look at it and project its image to a texture. It was then possible to display this in the UI and maintain all animations and objects as is.
Shaders went into play too in order to achieve highlighting and the illusion effects. This helped me to reduce the amount of pre-generated images and save some memory.
Bernar on the other hand nailed it with various hair styles, beards, clothing pieces, equipment, pets, and weapons. It was important to maintain the ratio and looks of the original characters while updating their model a little bit to support subtle changes.
Make it your own
The first part of this task is done and currently being tested. Expect it live in the near future. To complete the character customisation, I want to do one more iteration, which is to adjust your abilities (I am planning a point-buy system), skills & spells (any of combination of two from the ones accessible for the six professions at the start) and equipped weapons (out of the common weapons' list within the same pricing) when you create your character.
But for now I want to focus more on the addition of content for Uttaku, to make sure everything is on track for the premier in May. I will look forward to your feedback when you are able to play test it but I am glad the foundations built are solid and should support changes.
Hope to see you around next time!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1299620/Fabled_Lands/