Face adjustments & the future of the character creator (Patreon)

Heya, wanted to make a brief post about the face customization and where I plan to take it.

I would like Naughty Sandbox to have a very competitive face creation feature, and the eventual possibility for peeps to make recognizable likenesses with their characters. This is probably going to be a slow buildup while I learn about faces and their variations, how best to implement so much variation in a performant manner, and probably some unforseen difficulties along the way.

For now, the creator will allow for some simple adjustment of the position and size of facial features, and will probably after a few iterations allow quite a substantial amount of control over the general face shape. The header clip shows more or less what's currently possible, which players can test next week when I plan to release the next update. 

After I've squeezed all I can out of the larger shape adjustments, I'll be adding in some controls for finer shape adjustment. These may be represented by sliders such as "Asian Eyes" or "Finnish Nose" etc unless this turns out to be too limiting, I need to learn some theory about facial phenotypes and how much variation there is before deciding on the technical approach.

In whatever case, the goal is to make the creator robust and flexible so that it's not limiting, and it's possible that for more advanced users there will be the opportunity to create their own texture maps for the face itself, in a sort of soft-moddable way.

Also planned is a feature of importing images into the game to use as reference. There won't be much point to a feature like this for now, but I'll probably add it within a few iterations anyway, so that it's in place for when the creator becomes flexible enough for people to start creating fairly recgonizeable likenesses. 

I'm currently looking into every mediocre-to-impressive character creator I can find for inspiration, so if people have some specific ones they'd like me to check out, or specific features they think will be good to include, let me know here or on the Discord!

Oh and some probably bad news, there is no save system for character creations yet! I'll begin work on it as soon as the next demo build is released. I was holding off since I didn't want to begin development on it until I knew what kind of data I'd need to be storing and recovering for a character creation system, but now I have a pretty good idea on the best way to implement this. Along with the save system for characters, will likely come a save system for player settings and unlocks, so that people don't have to enter the unlock codes each time they run.

Will keep the Discord updated on the status of the new demo build, and will post up here when it's ready to roll out :)

Thanks for the continued support everyone :) :)