Happy Halloween Everyone!
If you’ve been watching our TikToks and Instagram feed, you’ve probably seen our character creator previews this month. So I thought it’d be fun to give you all a first look at our character creator in-game for our October newsletter! We’ve been working on this feature for a year now, and it feels great to show it off finally. I knew from the start that I wanted Witchy Life Story to have a character creator, so planning started early in the development process. Every member of our four-person team contributed to this feature, just to give an idea of just how much work and love went into it. So keep reading for a behind-the-scenes look into the creation of our character creator and how it all looks in-game!
Yes, before we get into it, I realize the “Moles” checkbox is not aligned with the rest of the checkboxes. I said we’re still working on it, right??
Anyways! As I mentioned above, we’ve been working on the character creator for about a year now. We started with figuring out the key customization options we wanted to support. We decided on different body types and skin colors relatively quickly. The other big one was making sure all hats worked with every hairstyle, which meant we’d need a system where certain hairstyles would need “alts” that would turn on if the player selected a hat.
After that, Aubrey, our programmer, got to work on all the tech behind the character creator. I worked with Sara to start figuring out how many options per customizable option we should have… We very quickly realized just how much art we were going to need to make this thing work. We wanted 18 skin tones and nine outfits for each of the five body types, which meant Sara would have to draw all these options. Fortunately, we figured out how to tint skin tones in Unity (and then used this tech for all the hair, eyebrows, and lips, too), which significantly cut down the workload. However, even though different colors got taken care of, for the most part, there was still a ton of assets to draw.
Inclusivity was super important to us, so even though it meant there was a lot to draw, we would go ahead with it. Sara spent about seven months working on the assets for the character creator. They worked on other parts of the games (all our beautiful backgrounds and villagers!) during this time too, but the character creator was the bulk of the work. It’s hard to show off just how many options we’ve put into this feature because there are just so many! But I think that’s a good problem to have.
But if you want a rundown of all the customizable features…
- 5 body types + 18 skin tones
- 30 hairstyles + 27 colors
- 11 eyebrows + 27 colors
- 13 eyes + 7 colors
- 9 noses
- 10 mouths + lip option in 8 colors
- 16 hats and hair accessories
- 9 outfits
- Plus things like blush, freckles, moles, body hair, etc.
We’ve implemented most of the options into the game, but we’re still working on lips... Lips are oddly a unique feature and need some special programming magic to work…! We’re also planning to add hat colors and a few more outfits. And of course, there’s still some ironing out to do to make sure everything looks and works the way it’s supposed to.
So what’s left?
Other than odds and ends, honestly probably the most exciting part of the character creator. Right now, Aubrey is working on getting the character expressions up and running. This means the witch you create will be a full-fledged character with a range of emotions. We’re also trying to figure out a way for you to change your appearance (and names and pronouns) mid-game if you feel like switching things up a bit.
That’s all we have for now! But since it’s Halloween, here’s a little nightmare fuel for you. This is a screenshot from the character creator prototype while we figured out how to tint colors in unity. I think Lianne’s UI looks much better!!!
