Character Rigs 2.0, In-Progress

A screenshot of Photoshop as I go through and re-do the character rigs.

"But I like the characters? Why are you redoing them?" you might say.

Two main reasons:

1.) We want male/female bodies* as well as different poses & builds for different classes.
2.) We want a lot of the gear they wear to have auto-generated colors
3.) We want rigs that can swap put an arm or a leg for an eldritch ghost-tentacle or werewolf claws or whatever.

This level of granularity means that the Photoshop file you see above has over 250 layers right now, one for each part that I'll want to save out or edit separately from the others. Not gonna lie, my brain is not great at remembering things that aren't right in front of it, so I've had multiple screw-ups where I just start drawing a cool suit of armor and forget that I'm supposed to break out out each limb and each different layer of color separately.

The idea is that each class will have 3 basic "levels" of outfit throughout the game- Newb, Journeyman, and Mad Pimp (terminology not final). Each of those levels will have some basic color customization that can happen, and then you add on pieces (sashes, cloaks, necklaces, giant skull pauldrons, etc.) to make each character more unique. Er, I mean, maybe YOU don't add them on. We don't have a full-on Character Customizer interface specced out right now.

The point is, your guys will look more differenter from each other! Yay!

Other things:

I'm testing how Nate will auto-generate colors for now with masked Solid Color layers set to Multiply on top of sections. That's the most straightforward way to color things dynamically, and it allows me to see what a character might actually look like in-game. For those who aren't Photoshop junkies, this means that the character pieces I actually save out will be mostly flat white or grayscale, but I'm hacking in some easily-changeable colors for testing purposes.

Everybody shares the same male/female head, faces, and hair right now, which is why our Warrior guy looks like a tiny-headed beefcake next to the Mystic. I still have to mess around with stylistic things like how big I want the heads to be in relation to the bodies, but we're getting there. I didn't actually want to veer too far from the original characters, since they make me happy every time I look at them, and I don't want to screw that up too badly.


*- I have enough to say about body types and diversity in Legacy that I'll make a separate rambling post for that.