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Dev log: Improving the character editor
🕑 Added 2025-07-07 20:03:39 +0000 UTCHi everyone! For the past week I've been working on getting the character editor updated with new capabilities.
I started with the intent of switching from using predefined sets of colors (limited, no preview available) to allowing the player to pick any color they want, everywhere. I did have a problem when it came to the eyes, since their color was basically defined by their texture. I ended up fixing this too, and the result is that now the game supports various eye designs as well as arbitrarily picked colors. Whereas before the eye slider was picking between various colors, now the slider is used to select between the available designs (currently two - the original one, and another one with a larger pupil). There is a limitation when it comes to design - the iris cannot get any bigger than it currently is. Well, maybe a bit.
Colors are chosen using a color picker (it's available out of the box with Godot, so it helped cut down on development time) - you can see it in some of the screenshots above.
Then, since I was already deep in character editor code, I decided it might be a good moment to do another thing that I kept putting off for quite a while now. I wanted to improve wearables a bit, since frankly they were quite boring (I'm very much aware of that - I'm a programmer, not an artist). What I wanted to do was to define various surfaces on the wearables, and allow the player to customize all of them, both in terms of color, but also in terms of material properties (e.g. roughness, clearcoat, clearcoat roughness). Long story short, what you see in the attached screenshots is exactly that. You will probably notice that I also expanded the customization possibilities to the head and back accessories (e.g. horns, wings, etc.).
There is a downside to the whole thing though. The colors you have picked for all clothes? They'll be gone. The clothes you selected will be kept, but the colors will revert to the default ones. Keeping backwards compatibility is painful in this instance, and while everything else will be carried forward normally (character look, skin color, eye color, wardrobe, etc.), the color of the clothing is the sacrifice I need to make.
EDIT: I just thought of something that might allow me to keep the old colors. Will have to try it, so there is some hope there :)
EDIT 2: Disregard the above, I found an elegant way to keep backwards compatibility without sacrificing anything :)
Finally, I moved the physics sliders to the bottom of the second controls column (I didn't feel they needed to be so center-stage after all), and removed the third one. Makes for a cleaner / less cluttered UI (well, adding all those customization options made the UI quite cluttered anyway). The added space makes for a slightly better Android experience too. Unfortunately I haven't found a way (yet) to make the color picker bigger on mobile, so for the moment it will be pretty awkward to use some QOL options (such as defining swatches / saving a palette).
The new editor will come with the next release, which is probably going to happen towards the weekend.
The next step for improving the character editor will be to review the character parts selection process. Right now everything is on sliders. Except for the morphs and anything else that is basically a number, the current way to select things might not be the best one. I need to think on it (so any change here won't happen very soon).
Well, that's about it for now. As usual, thoughts and feedback are welcome.
Comments
Andrei D
I agree, got it on my list :) Will get to it eventually
Wanderer
I find that I bypass the clothing altogether as there isn't a way to strip it off. Could add a new layer of gameplay if they have to be torn away before direct fingering and the like can occur.
Andrei D
Heh, I thought someone might notice :) That pair of pants was created mostly to allow sfw screenshots. It's been in the games for a while but disabled in the release. The reason it's not enabled is that there are certain penetration actions where things look completely wrong. I might leave them in if I manage to implement conditions to avoid this. Re: tearing clothes off - I will probably add support for it in the future, but it's not been high on the priority list so far.
Alexander Winn
Always nice to see UI getting refined and cleaned up. And for a game this early in development we probably shouldn't get too attached to the characters we make. I noticed the pants are not all crotchless anymore, which I kind of appreciate. I don't know why I prefer it that, either having dry sex through the clothes or taking them all the way off? It's not uncommon, I think, to find partial clothing sexier than full nudity. On that note, do you think you would ever implement a system of tearing clothes off during a match? I've seen a couple games do it where you animate the characters pulling on each other and then the clothing pieces just vanish. It's funny how much time you can spend putting together little outfits just so they can get ripped off or destroyed.
