Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Expanding Color Options

In my last report, I was trying to create an Android port for play testers to try my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I continued working on it, especially after discovering a defect that I wanted to address first.

Sprints 2024-22: Color options

Completed:

• Create skin color options

The ability to customize colors for everything was put into the game quite early. While I have been spending time adding plenty of hair, nose, and make-up options, I haven’t address the placeholder colors until now.

So I added options for skin color.

Meanwhile, since the placeholder colors were quite saturated and limited, it made it difficult to create clowns that didn’t come off as a bit too intense, which is not my intention at all!

Here’s the same clown but with some more subdued colors:

It is subtle, and maybe there are more extreme examples I could show, but the bigger point is that more colors means more options for player creativity.

Adding more color options seems like such an easy thing to do at first, but updating the color picking interface to allow for pagination hasn’t been so straightforward. I don’t want to give the player infinite options because that could be overwhelming and hard to navigate, but I also don’t want to give too few options.

I shrank the buttons so that more can appear on the menu at a time, but I still need to add menu page navigation controls. Figuring out the order in which I lay out the colors is also something I’ve never had to do before. While I am sure that there might be examples from other games or apps to look at, it seems like thing kind of thing to be more thoughtful about.

Meanwhile, I thought I had addressed it already, but I discovered a defect in which the menu buttons all seem to disappear if you navigate the creator mode menus in just the right way, so I want to fix that issue before handing it off to testers.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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