Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Player Character Customization and Persistence

Last week, I reported that I had started player customization for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project by allowing the player to change their character’s name.

I continued the effort this week.

Sprint 6: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and complete:

• Create save file
• Create player character

Now that I can rename a character, I could save the game to persist that rename, which meant revisiting the save file work I had started. I changed the main menu to allow me to either start a new game with initialized default data or load an existing game so I can continue where I left off. More directly, it allowed me to test that saving and loading works while also giving me a way to reset and try again.

Next up was letting the player customize their character’s pronouns and their appearance.

Ultimately, I want the player to be able to put themselves into the game. I want more pronoun options, but for now and to get something quickly into the game, the player can choose between he/him/his, she/her/hers, and they/them/theirs. Scripts and dialogues will use those pronouns to know how to refer to you and your party members. I have to brush up on my grammar and language rules, specifically for possessive pronouns.

The most exciting part was getting to finally put some graphics into the game. I wanted the player character on the screen, especially when customizing, and so I experimented with one of my pencil and paper doodles, scanned it in, and created a digital form with highlights and shadows. Here’s a mock-up:

I like the hand-drawn look of it.

Creating a bunch of different face shapes and facial features for the player to choose from seemed a bit daunting, so I thought it might be easier if I made it very modular. I started with creating a handful of face shapes to choose from, as well as skin colors. Again, like with the pronouns, I want to provide more options, but this initial start lets me get a feel for how intuitive this selection process can be.

The simple facial features are just meant to make it clear that these are faces and not just weird shapes. I want to eventually put in eyes, ears, noses, mouths, hairstyles, and accessories, as well as bodies and clothing, so this customization feature will get revisited.

Even now, I have plans to replace these face shapes. I made them quickly to put together this menu to allow the player to choose between them, but I think I lost the hand-drawn look that I liked so much.

If you wanted to customize your character in a game, what would you want as an option?

Thanks for reading!

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