The Power of Morphs
We decided to share part of an internal developer video from about a month ago, using the standard male model as an example. You’ll hear our lead coder speaking to our development team about the state of the morphs, sliders and art work (in September). Most developer teams would not share a video like this, but we’re not troubled.
Yes, we do cut a confident pose, don’t we?
As you’ll see this video is focused on faces, bodies, hair, skin colors (there are a lot of them), and not on costumes. The randomizer video, in contrast had a lot on costumes and not so much on this stuff. Our character creation tool is a complicated system, and so one video cannot cover all of its capabilities. Also, we want to leave some of the discovery, especially about costumes, for the CCT Beta itself.
Yes, he’s got a cool cape on. But look at the shape of his cheekbones and the blue of his cybernetic eyes! These are the subtle details that can be achieved with the power of our CCT.
The morphs and sliders are organized into commonsense areas. These are: Face, Hair, Torso, Arms and Legs. Within the Face area you have sub-categories for shape of the face (34 shapes to choose from), eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth jaw and ears. For those who don’t want to customize this much, you can just make a few choices to alter the default settings, or use the randomizers and find something you like. Skin Tone (for normal human skin colors) and Skin Color (for extra-terrestrial colors) are separate sliders, but you’ll see that they interact giving enormous possibilities.
Aliens and humans alike come in all kinds of colors!
In this video we have utilized multiple muscularity sliders and shown a single male character as big as he can be, and as slim as he can be. Remember, this is the regular male character model. We also have a big guy with a different set of skeletal proportions, and this same process could be employed with either the big guy model or the female model. As a player, you have an enormous range of character silhouettes that can be created in the CCT.
Even in the future, people still come in different shapes and sizes.
We’ve added in facial hair for the male character models, and we’re giving players the ability to color eyebrows separately from beards and mustaches. These options are explained in the video, and coder art has been checked and approved by the art department since this was recorded.
In the future, beards are still popular
Once again, we will advise anyone who is using the CCT to write down some ideas for what they want their character to look like before they begin. We have delivered so many options that playing with the character creator could easily cause a player to lose track of their original idea. Of course, that can be a feature, and not a bug in some circumstances.
This is a blank canvas. How will you turn it into a hero?
Technical Notes
- This is an internal developer video that we cut down from its original size (over an hour) to show how the morphs and sliders work. As such, it was recorded in the Editor. However, everything in this video works in the real game.
- Multiple issues were identified in this video, including several “this is coder art” alerts. All coder art has been reviewed and upgraded (or approved as-is) by at least one of our artists. For those who are wondering, a “uni-brow” is not a supported art style element.
- We’ve added four costumes since this video was recorded, but since the purpose of the video was to showcase non-costume features, we did not add these new costumes to the video.
- Keen observers will note a couple of things that fall under a general philosophy. Changing any element of your character can also change current elements. Changing the shape of the face can change the expression, for example, and changing the hair style may require a player to adjust the coloring to get back to exactly what they had previously.