Create Yourself with This Character Customizer! | Godot Devlog

have you ever played stardew Valley or Sun Haven or other games like such and saw these epic character portraits and thought wait a minute how come my character doesn't get one well I did which is why I made a promise to myself that if I ever made my dream game any player can make a portrait of their character but my dream game is still just a dream I am what you call a beginner in the game de space I mean my previous video was of me making my first ever game so let's not get ahead of ourselves but I do want to start working on things that I'm a little bit more passionate about which is why I want to start making prototypes for my dream game I think it's a good way to get my feet wet with bigger projects without the need to actually complete like a whole game and for this video as you can tell by the title I want to make a character creation screen prototype So the plan is I want to make a character creator where you not only make your like little mini pixel art character that like most games have but also a matching character portrait for when you like do dialogue and stuff and obviously I'll be doing this in my usual pixel art style here's some stuff that I've posted in the past this one is a animation I made for like a mockup of a cutscene I wanted to add one day um I didn't know how to code so instead of learning how to code I just made a fake one with animation and I'll actually be reusing some assets because because I still like them and I want to use them in my future game anyway so so the first thing I did was actually mess around in gdo like trying to see how I can modulate multiple things at once figuring out the Color Picker cuz it's a very new thing for me oh also shout out to this person for commenting this on my last video um it actually inspired me to read up on the documentation anyways this is what I ended up making it's like a very rudimentary proof of concept and yeah as you can tell so when you press on the different colors on the Color Picker it'll actually change the Mini U but also the portrait U also just for testing purposes I did this thing where if you press space the face features will change I just wanted to see the best course of action for like how to go about changing facial features and I think the best way is to actually just make a Sprite sheet where each horizontal frame is like a new eye option or nose option because when you modulate that one Sprite it'll modulate the whole Sprite sheet if that make sense okay so after that I got my notebook out and I just started sketching in around just like different placements and different ideas for like the screen because UI design is something that I am very insecure about it's just something I struggle with as you can tell from my last um game like bro so I wanted to spend my time making sure it's user friendly but also aesthetically pleasing I ended up with this like rough placement and then I brought it to procreate to flush it out so for some reason I've been really into this like purple orange yellow color te which brought me to the idea of like a folder which I thought really fit a character creator screen cuz I feel like you see a lot of those like victim or suspect folders in cop shows um so I don't know I thought that was fitting and as usual I am using the resurrect 64 palette from lospec this palette has been with me my whole pixel art Journey so if you're somebody who struggles with palettes I really recommend this one and once I was done I imported it all into gdau slapped on a Shader to the background to make it move diagonally and there is a link in the description if you want to see where I got the code for that cuz I don't know anything about shaders okay and yeah the reason why I chose this like checkered pattern with a diagonal movement is because um the games that Inspire my dream game are like Wario Weare or cooking mama or tagoi Corner shop and I feel like this background is kind of giving that and yeah after that we're pretty much done with the base of the main screen UI so the next thing I had to tackle was creating the actual assets I would need this includes like the face the hair the clothes but just to keep myself on track here are three things that are going to be important to me number one is cohesiveness in art style a lot of people think pixel art is an art style but technically things can look very different just from a difference in resolution in color palette in personto person so I'm going to try to prioritize consistency of art style over realism number two is quality over quantity because technically it would be super easy for me to make like 10 different eyebrows that are all just like a straight line on your forehead that are different in thickness but that doesn't look good does it and lastly inclusivity so growing up I played a lot of dress up games like on those like shady game websites and I knew that a lot of people had a hard time seeing themselves in those games and that is so unfair so I wanted to make sure that at least in my game I can provide a lot of options for everybody but I am still learning so I will be using references from Pinterest and stuff um I'll try to include them on the screen and please please please if you have any feedback or anything you want to add anything you want to change just so you can see yourself in this character creator let me know in the comments down below and I will try to add them ASAP so getting into the creation of the assets the first thing I did was make the face shapes or I guess it was more so like the jaw shapes I tried to add some variety just so you can get that base right you know and then I made the eye shapes the way I did this was actually made a base for like the eyeball and the pupil which um the pupil or I guess the iris you can like modulate and then over that is a layer for like the eyelids and surrounding areas after that I made the noses and for this one I tried to make sure that I stick with my usual art style um so I Tred to not go too realistic but just enough so that hopefully everybody has an option for their nose and lastly I made the lips so I saw that some of my previous characters had their lips like slightly open even though they weren't smiling so like you can still see their teeth kind of like Debbie Ryan style so I wanted to add that as an option as well and the way I did this was similar to how I did the eyes um actually just like put teeth and then drew the lips over it and so whenever I wanted to make one of those lips that's like a little bit like I would just leave that part open at this point I was kind of tired of drawing so I put a pause on that so for now I imported all of that into K dough and started figuring out like putting all that on the screen oh and originally I made all of these with like this skin tone color um just so it's like easier for me to see The Vision but that won't work with like self modulation and stuff what you need to do is make it black and white and so what I did was I brought it into Photoshop first laid them all out next to each other to make a Sprite sheet and then I added this effect group that kind of had like a gradient map effect on it and as you can tell it's not really black and white it has a little like hint of blue in the shading and the reason for that is Hu shifting this is a game changer if you are new to pixelr or anything please look into Hue shifting it just gives a lot of pixel art like more Dimension and I don't know for me personally nine times out of 10 it makes things look better anyways now that I have all of those assets in I can start figuring out like the buttons and stuff so I figured that I wanted to have the Color Picker and also some color presets always available to you on the right side and then the left side will be where your options are so I had to watch a couple the tutorials and read up on some documentation on the scroll container and then getting into the buttons or the options the first thing I did were the faces and the faces are quite large so if I just had them the same size it would kind of take up the whole scroller so what I ended up doing was I made it like half the size just so when you scroll it doesn't take a bazillion hours to get to the bottom and at first I was kind of annoyed by it because it ruined the whole pixel art resolution but then I realized nobody cares like who cares like if you care maybe you should tell me and like spam in the comments or something like at least give me the engagement you know anyways here's what it looks like and let's just say I may have abused this little thing called signals um so signals are great they're usually like a very easy way to make buttons work and stuff but like I said I'm a beginner so I did not know anything about button groups which meant that I at this point at least was connecting each button by hand one by one yeah and although I figured out I could actually utilize chat gbt to like repeat some code so I didn't have to type like button one button two Buton three I still had to press the signals and connect and everything and um this was when I realized there has to be a better way but I was just kind of like in the group so I like didn't really think about it and after that I started working on the eyes and for the eyes specifically I wanted to put them in like little boxes I thought it made more sense than to have like the eyes kind of just like floating there and this is when I decided I also wanted people to be able to change the height of certain features but I didn't want people to be able to like put their eyes like above their forehead so I added this in the code just to make sure that the eyes were in between a certain area on the face and then I made this up and down button that will show up when you press the eyes other than that I pretty much did the same thing for the noses and the lips as well but since the nose will always follow the skin color I kind of got rid of the color options for that one and for the lip color originally it will always follow your skin tone but I wanted the option for like if you wanted like lipstick or something I added some presets of different lip colors and also a Color Picker but I wanted to give the option for you to get rid of the lipstick so I added this one with a cross that will bring you back to your skin tone you know if you want the more natural look and now that I've made buttons for all the assets I've already made it is time to go onto the next thing which is the hair and I guess also the eyebrows but mostly the hair anyways the way I drew the hair was as three separate layers so the first one is the top layer kind of like the parts that will show up in front of your shirt so for example like these bangs over here and the next layer is the bottom layer of the hair so it's the ones that are going to like show up behind your shirt kind of like the ones here and lastly just like the outline that's going to show up on the outside of your hair and then I made a bunch of eyebrows which took me like 5 minutes so oh and since the hair Sprites were huge I thought that it'd be better if the buttons were of the Mini version of the hair Sprites which brings us to the next part which is drawing the assets for the mini character I can't believe we just left this man standing cold naked let's fix that shall we first I drew all the hair assets to match the ones I made for the portrait version and I PL them into the button slots voila next I made some tops just some simple ones and I wanted the ability to layer stuff so I also made these outers and then I made the bottoms a little scirt a little shorty shorts some jeggings perhaps and before I plopped them all in as buttons I made the portrait versions of the tops and the outers as well but not the bottom cuz you can't see it and now I plop them into gdo and here's what we have next we will tackle the accessories so these are like additionals that includes like glasses eyes Shadow beards wrinkles and most importantly the bual fat removal and some of these are toggleable so you can stack them on top of each other and for those ones I added like little check marks so that you know which ones you have on and which ones you have off and also here are the facial hair options oh and I forgot to mention that for the eyebrows and also the facial hair you can change the color so that it doesn't match your hair um I do give the option to like cancel anything you did and make it go back to your original hair color and then I made the mini versions of those and while working on these accessories aka the last thing I did this is where I found out about button groups just let me show you what it looks like before when I had to do it all by hand and now this is what it looks like with button groups so yeah yeah okay moving on um I had this little like calendar thingy on the bottom um cuz I wanted people to be able to put their birthdays in and since the game is going to be following Seasons kind of like Harvest Moon or stard Valley instead of months your options are the seasons so like spring summer and fall and winter and there will only be a maximum of 28 days because the way the calendar Works um in those games and it actually makes more sense is that it like goes to 28 so sorry people BN after the 29 I'm kidding I'm kidding actually fun fact it's my birthday while shooting this so oh and before I forget um I also added like a place where you can type your name in and speaking of names I added a little Easter egg where if you type Shrek with a capital S um his little ears are going to show up on your character and it's going to stay there even if you change your name um but to get rid of it you just have to type no Shrek next I added some sounds I got these simple button pressing sounds on zapsplat and it's not really a Mino game without some Mino music so I quickly went on to Ableton and I made this goofy little background [Music] music okay so I'm going to play you what I have it's kind of kind of simple I mean it feels like a lot but there's not a lot in it um [Music] enjoy speaking of Music my main job is actually singer songwriter so if you guys want to check out my music it is Stephanie poetry on any music platforms and I actually have some music coming out this year that I'm super excited about so yeah and then I added this like randomized button um and at first it was just to provide randomization but then I realized it was actually a great way to test up like the way different assets matched up and I found places where like the pixels were just like not lining up so I went and fixed that also I added the code for the randomization if the hair that was randomized were one of the hijab ones the randomized item of clothing would be an appropriate one for that and at this point the main screen was done but you know we all know a game can't just be its main screen so the first thing I did was actually make a results screen I wanted a screen that would show your character and its like mini version almost like in a dialogue so your character would say like hi my name is my birthday is on nice to meet you but to get the information from one scene to another I had to use this thing called autol loads or Singleton and it's this Nifty thing that keeps information throughout all of your scenes and then I made the starting screen just so when you load the game you don't get jump scared by a randomized person staring into your soul and for the starting screen I made this like title and I added a floaty and also a glare animation to it which I really liked I thought that it was very reminiscent of those old Nintendo games I was talking about and to match that I wanted to add transition scenes that also had that like retro Vibe so I followed this tutorial um and I added a as a shape and I thought that it looked really cute and that's how I made Min mino's character creator prototype this is my first ever personal Dev Vlog project and my second ever game and it took way longer than I thought approximately about like a month and a half but I learned so much and I had a great time making this one thing that was kind of concerning was I realized I was doing everything on like one main script which I don't think is the best idea also once again if you have have any ideas or requests for um features to add please let me know in the comments below like I said I'm trying to be inclusive so if you see anything that I messed up or didn't include please understand it comes from a place of incompetence and not malice so please if you see anything I need to change or add please comment them down below and I will try to fix them or add them ASAP but anyways let's get into the gam play shall we so here's a speedy video of me trying to make myself um it's kind of hard making yourself sometimes cuz I don't really know what I really look like um but I just Tred to base off of myself from the video so I tried to match my shirt and my hair and stuff and here are some attempts of me making my fiance Shrek Timothy shal a cute grandma and last but not least my favorite marriage candidate from stardy Valley sorry not sorry anyways if you want to try this character creator out the link is going to be in the description it is uploaded on my itch.io page and once again warning if you are on a Mac please do not open this on Google Chrome because it will like crash your browser basically and it's not my fault okay it's G know or Google's fault okay so don't blame me I gave you a warning please open it on Safari but if you're on Windows it's fine do whatever you want and if you end up making a character please take a screenshot and tag me um I'm manimo on most social medias but if you can't find me I made sure to add my accounts in the description below anyways I hope you all have a super amazing day and I hope to see you in the next video bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: MeniMeno

Views: 89,672

Keywords: gamedev, menimeno, Game Development, video gaming, coding, Stephanie Poetri, gamedev tutorials, tutorials, coding tutorials, stardew valley, godot devlog, Character development, character design, character coding, Create Yourself with This Character Creator!, Create Yourself with This Character Creator! | Godot Devlog, menimeno youtube, stephanie poetri menimeno, poetri, devlog, 2024, video game coding, game dev, game dev log, game jam, game jam devlog, pixel art, pixel art game

Id: WKr3DXSZdc8

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2024