THEME
Play and Object
Interactive game -> Please feel free to get creative with colour and make than character your own~
https://hiyokaygames.itch.io/colour-me
(pwd: magi)
Context
When I think of an object, I imagine a shapeshifting ‘thing’ I can touch and form into different elements. Therefore, for this week I wanted to try thinking of objects as different parts that make up a character, such as their hair or clothes. My initial idea was making a cute character that anyone could colour however they want.
I was inspired by Pastel Girl, Lily Story and other similar games that have the concept of dressing up simple ‘chibi’ characters. What I found interesting about these games were than they stuck to a rather limited palette of colours that the developers probably picked out carefully to be appealing and suit the game’s aesthetic. This is probably because they used individual sprites for each object, but I wanted to try giving people more control with the colour and give them the freedom to play around with it.
Method
So I found this magical piece of code that lets the player colour any object. Although I couldn’t figure out how to apply the same colour box to multiple objects and I couldn’t figure out how to get the colour box to appear when the object is clicked, because the it doesn’t work unless the object is a child of the colour box.
Once I figured out how the code worked, and its limitations, I set to create the objects! I made the base of the character, hair and clothes as colourable objects and the highlights and speech bubbles and other extra elements in separate layers. First, I had the outlines and shading of the colourable objects in greyscale because I thought it would change to different shades of the colour picked by the player. However, I changed it to more pinkish tones later, because having them in greyscale muddied the picked colours. Pink allowed for a softer and cleaner look.
Response
I had a lot of fun making and playing this as well as letting others try it out as well. Although I do regret not being able to provide multiple styles of hair and clothes. I did try to incorporate different things but I couldn’t figure out the logic behind the code.
Although I didn’t conduct playtesting in the proper sense, I did encourage my course mates to play and share their own versions. Their feedback was that they would like to have more options of things to colour such as the shadows and makeup.
I did come to a realization as to why many pre-existing games of this nature make separate colour sprites instead of giving the player the freedom to choose. The colour schemes and choices the players picked went against my own personal tastes and aesthetics. However, that was the point, to give players something that was truly customizable in terms of colour, and not having to choose from regulated pre-sets.
References
Creating Appealing Color Palettes
#kaykay #kkapdwk3
