Game Devlog #3 - Character Creation

Hey everyone! Hope we're all ready for a brand new game dev update! It's an exciting one today

Wow, it's been quite a long time since we last had one of these! A whole lot of stuff happened in between updates so let's get right into it

Let's start with the most obvious thing here. We got a character creation prototype working! It doesn't have a lot of content in it yet, but that's what the next part of developing will be about

So far I've focused my efforts into developing all the coding baseline I'll need moving forward. I'm talking about the boring stuff like data management, HLSL shader coding, menu organizing and rendering, dealing with the general structure of all the parts of the code and etc

Speaking of developing code, we've completely revamped all of it since the last devlog. Some gml changes now allow for much cleaner and better organized code so it made a lot of things much easier to implement. I even rewrote the old shader I was using in order to make it much more flexible

That stuff does have a downside however, I was planning to have much more content for the release of the character creation prototype for you guys to play with. But working on some optimizations in the rendering code has caused me to be a bit late on that front

So right now the character creator only allows for the selection of your body palettes and importing/exporting your character code. The code for selecting different body parts and clothes, as well as the character's default pose is already finished, but I'll need a bit more time to make more assets that you can swap around

Speaking of importing/exporting character codes, that's one of the things I'm really happy with for this creator. Characters in this game can be shared with other players just by using the code that the creator generates for you, it's just a matter of having it in your clipboard and pressing export in the menu, it even works with modded characters

Aaaand speaking of mods, another thing I've spent some time working out is the modding capabilities of the game. I want it to be as easy as possible for people to make new assets for the game, be it new body parts, costumes, npcs and etc. The way that it works right now is that all the content I've made and will distribute with the game will use the same formats that mods can make use of. The files themselves are also made to be easily readable both by humans and other programs, as I want to make modding as clear and easy as possible for people

I really want to work a bit more on the character creator, mainly making more assets that you guys can play around with, so I'll delay releasing it to everyone for a little bit. This early prototype I'm showcasing here will be available for boar patrons, mainly so we can see if the game runs ok for other people or if it already has any issues we gotta work on

I got a whole lot of stuff to discuss btw! In the meantime between devlogs I've come up with a much more solid idea on how the game will play, and I've already started working on the details for that. I've also actually studied game design and development and I've learned a lot that'll be implementing here, so do expect prototypes to start coming out in the future

For now though, this post has already turned out way longer than I was expecting so I'll leave that for next time!

Thanks for reading, I'll see you next time! ❤️