New Character screen - Githubissues

clintbellanger / flare

Free Libre Action Roleplaying Engine

http://clintbellanger.net/rpg/

GNU General Public License v3.0

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New Character screen #9

Closed clintbellanger closed 13 years ago

clintbellanger commented 13 years ago

When starting a new game, display a New Character screen.

This will be a new GameState.

Type your character's name (use the unicode input text gathered via InputState)
Choose a base body type (currently the only option is Human Male)
Choose a portrait
Possibly show the character's sprite
Buttons to accept, or go back to the Load Game screen

Assigning this to myself because it requires reworking lots of existing assets.

Each base body type requires the full set of weapon and armor layer renders. Also the armors need to be re-rendered without a head. Change the head into a new layer, and make a unique head layer to correspond to each player portrait.

Possible future Base Body types:

Human Female (this will be a high priority)
Dwarf Male
Elf Androgynous
Human Brute (very bulky male body type)
or whatever makes sense in various game worlds

clintbellanger commented 13 years ago

Observe the power of my ASCII sketch!

clintbellanger commented 13 years ago

The New Character screen requires that the hero sprites are customizable (at least the head to match a chosen portrait). I've re-rendered the base armor sprites to have no head. I've added three head layer options.

Now the engine loads the hero sprites depending on the "base" defined in the save file (default base is "male", as in the avatar images are in /images/avatar/male/). The engine also loads the head in a separate layer based on the "look" defined in the save file (default "option1").

The base and look (head) options will be chosen during the New Character GameState.

ghost commented 13 years ago

How is this coming along?

Really looking forward to trying it out :)

clintbellanger commented 13 years ago

You can see a preview of the different heads by changing the look=option1 in the save file. The portrait artist Justin is finishing up the associated portraits, hopefully this week.

Meanwhile I've been working on the base female animations. But if that takes too long I might put off adding the base female until after v0.14

One of these nights I'll get a burst of inspiration and I'll do this screen justice. Hopefully soon.

pennomi commented 13 years ago

It would probably be best to release with at least two base types, just to show that the engine can handle them. Now's definitely the right time to do it, since this is the 'character creation' milestone. Naturally, it may take a bit longer than a usual release, since it requires new art assets, but the impact would be much, much greater upon release.

Of course, since I'm not the one doing the animating, it's certainly not my call!

clintbellanger commented 13 years ago

I don't mind doing it now. It'll add a few weeks to v0.14's release time.

To get the base female working I'll need to:

Finish animating the female armature
See how it feels in the engine, make any animation tweaks
Create clothes, leather, steel armor for the female in 3D. These can mostly look like the male versions.
Create three hair variations in 3D
Render the three heads, three armors, and fourteen basic weapons as sprite layers (about 5,000 images to render, good thing I have scripts)
The portrait artist needs to finish the three female heroine portraits

It's a lot of tedious work. Of course it will be well worth it when it's done.

clintbellanger commented 13 years ago

Very simple version of this screen added.