Color Palettes and Menus in Character Generation

So, just like most of you, I've played around with the Character Creation a good amount. There are a few things I've noticed that I personally did not like in Terraria (things that felt cheap and limited and were not easy to use) and in other games such as Skyrim that unfortunately is being implemented in Starbound:

The Problem: You have to click individually between every single color, hairstyle, and the shirts/pants. It's not easy to use, and it makes character creation a pain and too time-consuming, I feel. The constant clicking to find something you like, narrowing down some choices, and clicking like mad to compare and decide is no good!

The Solution: Get rid of the left/right buttons, totally gone. Instead, you click a button to choose what you want from all of the choices in a pop-up menu. So, when picking a Human, for example, you can click on Skin and it will open up a color palette or a picker/swatches of some sort. Like this:




There, you can choose to be any of the skin colors. OR, we could have the best of both worlds, and the left/right arrows can be in the selection window so that we can cycle through ALL the choices if we want to see them all on the character, and then if we so choose, move the mouse to a choice. "See ALL the choices!"

Then, when clicking on Hair Style, a large menu could open to the left perhaps that will list every "hairstyle" available (and every style will reflect the currently picked color). The same could go for pants and shirts. No more annoying rotating around in circles trying to find something - just an easy, streamlined selection process.

The color selection window can even be limited in color choices by specific colors, or by omitting out certain color ranges for each section if the devs want to keep to a certain style/realism/plausibility so people don't have pink-skinned people with green hair - so, for example, only let us choose from the peach and brown spectrums for skin, where we can then pick the specific hue/brightness, or from certain pre-made colors like in the picture above of skin-color swatches.

Also, side thought: Post-character creation, it would be awesome if we can change our hair color and style any time we want, maybe with a kit or something on our space hub!

I hope I'm not the only one who thinks that this would work well. Thoughts?

 

Would be useful, customization seems ample enough to require this (especially if some of the fan-sprites from the hairstyles thread will make it into the game), and hopefully it won't ruin any plans for the character creation screen since it doesn't occupy the whole screen or anything like that. Having both would be the best thing I guess.

 

I suppose it wouldn't have to take up much from the screen, a selection window could just pop up over the character creation screen, or on the left and/or right of it and use a scroll bar to not take up too much space. Ah, bad puns...I should probably stop.

Two more good color picker examples (though, naturally, to illustrate the idea, not to look like this exactly):

 

Very nice idea.

 

I was thinking this while using the Character Creator just a few minutes ago, I decide to hop around the forums and find this.
Glad I'm not the only one thinking this.

 

Does anyone have any other suggestions? I just had to get that thought out, because I felt so limited in the creator.

 

Hovering your cursor over the color you're interested in would automatically change your char's hair to correspond,and to confirm that you want that color as your hair color you simply left-click it. That would be nice,no?

 

Great idea! That would be nice, actually. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

I would rather have this in all honestly it does not feel so limiting with picking the colors.

It seemed pretty open compared to Terraria's the only real difference is the RGB slider and the fact there's races as well. They could make some more options for clothing, hair styles, and colors. Especially the Hyloti there was really only one hair style i liked on them i wish there was more option to it.

 

Would doing something like this be difficult?
Not that I would hold it against them if they didn't put it in.

 

I really don't think it would be hard, the devs are implementing much trickier things in the game anyway. It's just some extra UI, I really hope they see this or something like this and decide to improve the Character Creator.

 

I am sure this is not possible.If you look at the guns,at characters dresses their palette is the same.bright color,middle color,dark color and edge color.You can't put a palette like that in a color picker because:
There should be an algorithm to get other colors from the one you choose
There will be so many colors that procedural generated monsters will go to hell,you will always see the same monsters with a minimal colour change.

 

Wait, but this is just for clothing and hair color selection in the Character Creator, it has nothing to do with monsters or guns. But perhaps I just didn't catch what you meant?

 

The game uses its own palette,when you see a purple tree,is going to be the same purple of another tree you've found on a different planet.You can't just put a color picker because there are too many colors that are not in the palette.

 

Gotcha. Yeah, perhaps that "unlimited colors" picker idea wouldn't work. But all the same, the original idea would work and they could lay out the color choices like a swatch or like the picture I attached before:

Where, depending on race or clothing or hair or whatever, the colors would be limited so that there aren't green men and purple monkeys.

 

Also it will be more cool if we can also input hex code or RGB code

 

I do agree doing something like that would be better.

 

Was thinking something similar and found this post searching the forums.

I agree that clicking left and right arrows to select colors and/or make selections is more difficult than it would need to be. The pop-up window with options within is the most logical efficient solution.
Also, realizing the Character Creator is not necessarily the same system that will be utilized in-game to create a character, I'm hoping for a few things to be possible in the actual game:

1) Ability to change colors of more than just one aspect of each body part. For instance, the shirt and jacket option on a male human only allows you to change the color of the shirt, but not the jacket. Certain pants options only allow you to change the color of the pants, but the shoes are always brown. Will it be possible to change colors of all of these items individually (and of course is it truly necessary to limit the colors to such a narrow number of selections?)

2) Ability to select hairstyles for Human and Apex separately from beards. It would be nice to select a desired hairstyle and then additionally select a desired type of facial hair. This is similar to a post I read asking if Robot head mods could be selected separately from the Robot face mods (the same concept at work here!)

3) Robot race: It appears that many people kinda like the Robot race sans clothing. Maybe they need some options to change the look of their torsos, arms and legs? That way all our "naked" Robots will have some individuality. Although I imagine with the proper armor selections, our Robots will look vastly different while still not appearing to drape themselves in flimsy cloth!

Since Starbound is a game that THRIVES on its shear amount of variety, I'm hoping that our ability to customize our characters will be right on par! Simply giving more ability to colorize individual parts of our characters will go a long way in achieving that.

Keep up the good work, Tiy and crew! Can't express how much I'm looking forward to playing your game.

 

Did you hear this from a developer somewhere? I would doubt a game which revels in its variety would limit itself to finite number of colors for all the planets, creatures and such in the entire universe!

 

I totally agree with you. Your ideas are even more helpful than mine since mine mostly tackle the issue of convenience and customization efficiency, whereas your three points tackle actually expanding customization. I hope they see this and consider implementing it - because being able to choose hair and beards separately, head mods and face mods separately, and different robot bodies would be great (I personally only like the "naked" version myself, not a fan of the clothing... just looks like a poor blacksmith's rags).