Character creator - Githubissues

melanie commented 3 years ago

It's everyone's favorite part of any game - the character creation screen! Implementing this will be a bit of a hassle, but will offer huge benefits:

We think it'll make kids feel more connected to their characters and thus more invested in the game
We won't be contributing to a default assumption that everyone is white
Letting kids pick between Melody and whats-his-face without explicitly specifying their genders will make kids feel more at home with the character (and won't give little boys a reason to reject the game out-of-hand)
We'll learn how to make a character select screen!

This screen will replace the current "select a character" screen that comes after the title screen.

It should look kind of like this Stardew Valley character creator screen, albeit simpler:

OV1WILMtNTJYTjY78VUJOXPlwCFhFrWYtDwh1ZtJDY8

Some notes:

We don't need any of those text fields
Instead of the gender icons, players should just be able to select Melody or Octavius without a specific mention of gender
We'll need to manually create variations of skin tones for the two players' sprites AND Mother, Father, and Uncle
In addition to normal skin tones, we should also offer a couple fun ones like green or purple
Hair color and maybe outfit could be a slider, controlling the tint of a masked part of the image, or a layer

melanie commented 3 years ago

Here's a nifty tutorial video that talks about using RGB sliders to tint a character: