Work over the past few months has been ongoing on a variety of systems we need for this years demo and one that is almost done is the visual part of character creation.
When I first started working on Lair of the Leviathan I had originally planned for a main character with limited customisation and a party of premade npcs. Working solo I was really careful about overscoping and I felt that this system would be something easily achievable by myself.
After teaming up with Oliver things however have changed. Oliver and I grew up playing the SSI DnD Goldbox games and being able to customise the way your party looked was a huge part of those games. I remember spending literally hours trying to get everyone looking exactly the way I wanted before even starting each of them. I guess most readers aren't old enough to remember those games but at the time they were groundbreaking, having open worlds and tactical turn based combat that up until then I hadn't experience before.
Bikini Chainmail - always a classic
A big part of those games was also the ability to customise your party. You could choose from various body parts and colours for your battle sprites and in the first game, Pool of Radiance, they even had character portraits. Recently Oliver and I had been discussing character creation and and we were thinking, if we are really going to try to be a 'Goldbox' inspired game, why don't we just go all in on customisation? So we are now at the point where we are trying to maximise the visual options for players as much as we can, allowing them to try and visually create exactly the party they want.
As it stands, for our own system your combat sprites you will be able to choose from a variety of animation archtypes such as 1handed fighter, 2 handed magic user, etc and then further customise that sprites appearance, choosing from their weapon, armour set, hairstyles, etc. As you go through the game more weapons and armour sets will also be unlocked giving people something to 'collect' for people who like that kind of stuff and give party member that sense of growing in power.
We also discussed whether we want to lock appearances to gear but we decided in classic Goldbox style you can change each characters appearance at any time to whatever you want.
Keep in mind, the ui is for testing and we will most likely have drop down menus to make it easier to just choose the parts you want.
These are some of the combat sprites I was able to come up with playing around with the parts we currently have.
Furthermore in a nod to Pool of Radiance we are also creating portraits that you will be able to customise. There should be a fair variety of different parts such as eyebrows, beards, hairstyles to play around with once we get to the demo and this will further expand as we get closer to release. The portraits will be the main representation of your characters outside of battle on the world screen too.
Excuse the lack of body types for now. There will be way more available by the time the demo is ready.
We feel this will (hopefully!) give players enough options to represent their parties and make adventuring in the world a lot more personalised and fun.
