Well… maybe not infinite, but if you do the math… we’ve currently got two genders, nine hair types per gender, nine eye types per gender, fifteen skin tones, and twenty seven hair tones, why… that means we’ve got 65,610 possible combinations at the moment that could come out of our Bruiser Generator. Not a bad starting place, in my opinion.
Some health issues kept me from focusing as strongly as I’d liked this week. Kidney stones are not fun. But when I wasn’t either keeling over with pain, or unconscious from painkillers I was trying to expand the options available for our female character:
Aside from the above additions to the facial features (hair had actually been done last week), we’ve got a slightly simplified 4 tone palette for her skin as opposed to the 5 that I used for the first male bruiser. I had originally been inspired by the DOTA 2 Character Art Guide when I had created him, and decided to give different tones for his flesh lower on the body than higher on the body. This doesn’t come off as particularly beneficial though as I don’t really have a gradient for the rest of his features… and in fact I’m still unsure whether to leave it as is or not. I’ll make that decision down the road though as to whether to add more tones to this character, or to remove ones from the original guy character. I want to see it all behaving in game for a bit before I make any sort of corrective decision. I think it may help a little having the extra tone on the guy. And since the girl is wearing long socks, it’s probably fine to leave them both alone.
I will admit I’m not 100% happy with how the dark skin palettes (particularly the last, darkest one) are working at the moment… I may need to spend more time getting them to look a bit better down the road as it’s so low contrast that it gets hard to even tell that there is a nose. The problem is that I used a shadow color for the nose, and thus it kind of just blends in with the dark color. Maybe a highlight could work, but I can’t easily switch it without just introducing a new piece to the palette for her for those like… three pixels. I think the guy suffers from this too to an extent, but maybe because of the difference in the mouth it didn’t bug me as much. At any rate, tweaks to the palette can wait. I’ve still got lots of animation to do, but I did get another five done this week along with some small revisions to the last batch.
