Introduction

Hi everyone, it's time for another Blood Lines devlog. This fortnight I worked on character customisation, terrain, and UI design.

Character Customisation

The most important part of any roleplaying game is the ability to express yourself, starting with your character. The new character creator lets you customise your name, blood type, sex, skin, hair and eyes. Cosmetics such as clothing are purchased as items in game.

Making the creator was as simple as overlaying textures. The character generator I'm using has a single mesh and outputs a texture. So for each layer (skin, hair, eyes) I generate a texture, and use a shader to merge them into one. (Originally I merged the textures pixel by pixel, but this was too slow. Shaders are super duper fast because they use the graphics card.)

When customising colours, such as hair colour, my original plan was to recolour the texture dynamically. But if you take a closer look, the hair textures aren't just a single colour, and the sclera doesn't even change colour. Fortunately, there needn't be that many combinations. If there's 6 hair types and 6 colours, that's only 36 textures.

After creating your character, you can choose a member of your cast to play as:

Notice how the characters are neatly displayed inside the UI. That's because they use a viewport, which is like a mini game world with its own camera.

UI

Another thing I changed is the UI style. Previously, the font was pixel and the UI was retro. It was functional, but lacked creativity. I took some inspiration and chose a sketchy font with a toony UI direction. Even though I'm not a UI designer, I think it looks more expressive. To help the toony look, I added a saw transition which comes in from the side when you press a button.

Terrain

I stumbled across a nifty tool called TerraBrush, and realised the terrain could do with some work. Rather than having flat, boring terrain, I added some hills and mountains. Here's an early preview of what it will look like:

That's the sinkhole in Nakano City. It looks quite gloomy because of the night sky, but it's not always like that in Nakano. The game has a day/night cycle that lasts one real hour, and it happened to be midnight when I took the shot.

Discord

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