Character Creator: makeup & UI polishing (Patreon)

Hello friends,

I've begun more thorough development on some of the character creation aspects, which are coming along quite nicely. I've added some make-up options, which let the player have control over the color and material of various makeup parts. 

Currently it's possible to separately change the color, glossiness and metallic of the eye shadow, lipstick and cheek blush, and I'll probably add one more "misc" part which I haven't decided yet.

This isn't implemented yet, but I've had some success with importing texture files at runtime - my plan is to allow the player to create and share their own makeup maps, which simply look like this:

I'll of course be including a few preset makeup styles, but I think it should be easy enough to provide a template and brief tutorial for people who are comfortable to experiment with creating custom maps. The red, green and blue areas represent where the makeup will be applied for the blush, eyeshadow and lipstick on the character, so it would be possible for players to create / download some unofficial makeup maps. I thought this was a cool idea for people who want to create characters based on video games or whatever else, for when the creator is a little more robust enough to start achieving good likenesses of existing characters.

(The custom maps thing likely won't be in the next demo - but maybe it will, more on an ETA at the bottom of the post)

I also added the ability for players to create iris heterochromia, which was an interesting challenge to implement. For iris color, there's a link icon which can be toggled on and off. Selecting either of the two eye color buttons will change both eye colors, and the link can be turned off at any time to begin editing specifically the color of the eye that you initially selected. If it's turned back on, the color of the eye that you edited last will be applied to the other.

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I've also been giving some love to the UI, since it looked pretty terribad before. As well as sorting the customization parameters into logical categories, the UI panels, buttons and color scheme have been unified in a way that I hope make it look consistent and nice to use.

I've added a few color themes, and I'll likely be adding a few more since they're easy to create - and these themes will apply to every UI element in the game. I thought this was worthwhile to implement since people have quite a varying preference for background and text color combinations, whether it's just aesthetic, for easier reading / dyslexia, or for headsets which display certain colors in better clarity.

Here's some examples of the current themes - 

There will be another post tomorrow about face proportions and where I'm hoping to take the customization, for now check out this Tweet for a longer clip of the above gif, which includes some messing around with face proportion sliders - 

https://twitter.com/NaughtySandbox/status/1238457062037823489?s=20 

I'm hoping to release an updated demo next week, with all these inclusions. Would like to take a moment to apologise to supporters of the project at higher tiers, it's difficult at the moment to include bonus content while I'm still working on the bare bones stuff. Please rest assured that you will be thanked properly for contributions to the project, once I can include more sexy content!

Thanks & have faptastic weekend