Updates for July 2022! (Part 1)

Morningstar has been hard at work upgrading prototypes to full production tools and implemented features. 

Morningstar has been hard at work upgrading prototypes to full production tools and implimented features. 

First up are the Character Elements that make up our procedural characters. This has been a 2 year long effort by Allegra and I, but this is the final implementation for our long term development. Allegra spent countless hours perfecting the head parts from our initial pass, resulting in character who look like real people while maintaining a stylized aesthetic.

As you can see above, this layering system is now at its most efficient, and still produces wildly diverse characters, all procedurally. 

Our character generation also has a newly robust UI that will help players to create whomever they like with tons of options for details. This UI is also extremely extensible, so we can later add new color swatches for different addon parts (such as aliens with multiple skin colors) and we won't need to overhaul the entire systems. Everything is organized in neat lists that can expand to fit any kind of content we need.

With RGB color masking, we can mask off details on eyebrows, irises, and skin for all kinds of details. 

To arrive at this UI, I went through dozens of other comparable games and distilled out the cleanest, most efficient way to display the information a player might ant out of our system. And the power of mods should allow all kids of creativity to extend it even further would needing to edit the UI, just plug in the XML symbols for each head part and body type, and enable the Species switcher in the tags. 

We also have a UI attached to our health trait / condition system that lets you change body type, from bodyfat to muscle tone. This will be mildly influential in game, as your body's condition is affected by starvation and work with lasting consequences that take time to recover, and benefit for staying in peak condition. 

Getting this to working is proving a little tricky, as it involves modifying the mesh our sprites display on as well as editing the art. The art is easy, but we don't want to make many different sprites for everything clothing item, so instead we modify the mesh to expand and contract. 

We'll keep this feature as a solid "might get axed" situation until it proves itself. May be more trouble than it's worth, but it's a big nice-to-have goal in the meantime.