I have been working on my character creator, which has been  exciting as another step in removing prototype assets. This system is probably not groundbreaking. I wouldn't be surprised if other games with pixel character creators (Like Terriara) have done similar. It functions by overlaying a bunch of subsprites: body, hair, accessories, etc, and then flattening them onto a sprite sheet PNG that is then sliced for use with animation. The result is a very flexible sheet creator that is very lean programmatically, creating ~8kb sprite files. These will probably increase in size slightly as I add more poses, but they will always be very lean and also provide the player the ability to maintain their sprite sheets for their characters if they wanted to for some other project. 

One of the other interesting notes  is that there are a number of RGB values that are earmarked for work with shaders, while a number of RGB values are specifically exempted. This allows me to have dedicated values for materials like leather, wood, and steel, while creating layers that can specifically be colorized.