Developer Diary 26 - Hair Code (Patreon)

One thing I’ve been trying to fix for a while is my the problem with my hair colors. Right now, every hair has a sprite for every different possible hair color. With 10 hair colors and 10 hair styles, we already have 100 sprites for hair. And since some hairstyles have multiple parts it actually is even worse. This is horrible as the file size will exponentially increase as more styles and colors get added. The solution to this problem is to use code. Using a basic grey scale sprite and giving it the correct colors using a lookup table. To give you an example:

As you can see, we use this color graphic sprite as our reference to tint the hair. This makes it so I only need one pair of sprites per hairstyle, just the grey. This reduces the size of those files within the game by 10, and cut the build size from 125MB to 100MB, which is a very good result in my opinion. Not only that, I am now able to add far more hair colors than before, and even start looking into using overlays to color only the roots or the tips of the hairstyle. This is something to look into later.

The next step is to slice up my hairstyle sprites. As I explained in an older devlog, the sprite size limit for Android in GameMaker is 1024, and all the long hairstyles are bigger. To solve this I need to slice up these files into 2 so they do not get scaled down by GameMaker. This will be a time consuming and slightly annoying process, but the result will be that we have high resolution textures on screen.

One final thing to fix is looking at how I will solve hair details. Some hairstyles have hair ties which have a different color from the hair color. Before I colored them in Photoshop and everything was fine, but now things are not so easy. I need to somehow separate those parts of the hairstyle, layer them correctly, and use code to give them color as well. A very complicated task! I will have to put this one on the back burner for a bit while I think about it.

Here is a side-by-side of the old version you have, and the new version I’m working on. As you can see, the result of the hair color is identical, except for the little detailing on the hair ties. Oh, and she has that hair salon apron on now, as well :)

This week I will continue building on the buying menu, as I am still not satisfied with it. As always, thank you very much for the support!

~Albatross