The tattoo system in Sombionic gives you even more freedom to customize your character with support for up to 8 tattoo slots across each body region:
Head
Torso
Arms
Legs
Tattoo sets can be mixed and matched between regions. For example you could combine Nature Tattoos on the torso with Body Writing on the arms.
Placement & Customization
Each tattoo comes with customization properties to giving you control over how it appears on Melany. Since each region supports up to 8 tattoos you can turn off the ones you don’t like by using the Visibility slider and in the future I may give options to scale, rotate and position the tattoos.
Implementation
The tattoo system was redesigned to support tattoos in any color not just limited to black. While researching how to make such a system, I used two RGBA textures per body region, but this approach had a major limitation, because the tattoos could only be displayed in black.
The new system uses a different approach and instead of dedicating a texture to each body region, I create a single 2048×2048 texture and divide it into four separate areas:
Top Left
Top Right
Bottom Left
Bottom Right
The shader identifies each area of the texture and maps it to the appropriate body region. By using two of these mask textures, the system can support up to 8 tattoos per body region. I also made a new lightweight game project, where I test and create the tattoos before transferring them to the main game, because I can iterate faster on a new project.
What’s next?
The next build of Sombionic is planned for release in approximately two weeks and it will introduce 3 tattoo sets to the customization system, if you have an idea about a tattoo set, then leave a comment.
I already have more sets planned for future updates, including:
Monster-bait
Wholesome
Birthday girl
Christmas
I’ve also added support for loading custom tattoos directly from your local PC. More details on custom tattoos will be shared in a future devlog.