Modding Help The Ikuul: A project underway. Need Help!

Heya. I have found someone to help me code this mod now.

The Ikuul are a race of purple-skinned beings with smooth organic crystal horns and neon green eyes. The horns and eyes of these creatures glow, but their bodies remain devoid of any such markings. Their hair color is grey scale, from white to black, and their skin is a pale shade of purple. Their origin was a desert planet with lush underground jungles full of these organic crystals that grew in abundance like any plant. But this planet collapsed in upon itself, and they fled using their best technology, to establish colonies on other worlds. Being underground dwellers, you would think them blind, no? But the crystals are bio-luminescent, and many of the flora and fauna were as well, thus they could see with ease. Their mount of choice is the Arderscend, an original beast of mine that could perhaps be used as a tech spawn some time along the road.

I have done quite a bit of art in their honor, and even a starbound-style sprite, which i will upload below.

They also do have genders though my art is mainly of the males. When i can I will draw and post more pictures if need be.

 

Oh wow thanks, i will get started on that right away.

if anyone still wants to help however, i am glad to have it

 

I'll help you out with this. I'm currently working on my own race mod, but it's been put on hold seeing as my sprite artist is busy with finals.

 

Alright, what i really need to know now is how to alter skin colors, and clothing colors, and add horn styles for starters.

If you like, i could link the basic 'Daim's Dummies' mod i have so far just renamed to 'ikuul_mod', and you could set it up for me to sprite things? unless it is ready. O:
I think the basic human hairstyles will work and i just need to set it up so the only colors are greyscale, the skin colors are all variants of purple, and then add horn styles and there we go! basic race mod ready for action. then we can get to the extensive weapon creation and crystal themed ship. and armor.
I'm also thinking about adding vestigial wings to them? They had them before, i just omitted them sort of. but we can worry about that later.

But yeah, i dont know how to edit the ship. I'd like to make it a little bigger than average, maybe slightly different dimensions, and tall-ways rather than long-ways. Like, composed entirely of crystal and metal. The outside would look like a giant crystal, while the inside cabin is a thin layer of metal. I just dont know where to start.
I want the transporter on the bottom floor, and the captain's chair on the top. I should draw a rough reference i suppose?

 

Skin colors are altered through palettes in the .species file in the species folder. Basically you have a placeholder/base color palette then the code switches the specified colors in the sprite with the colors specified in the file.

 

Thank you, we decided to leave the skin color as just one color though ^^

 

The more variants for character creation you have, the more enjoyable a mod can be. If all the characters look the same it gets sorta old quick if they want to go to a server running it or want to play multiple playthroughs.

 

We substituted skin & hair color for different horns and eye colors. It may change, though

 

While changing the horns and eye color is cool and all they are small parts with little impact. Different skin tones/colors is probably one of the most important character customization options in a game and I would heavily advise you not to skip over such an aspect.

 

Their skin color would have been all shades of purple anyway, so there was really no point to it.

I don't see skin color as a huge part of it anyway.

They look pretty awesome without skin color variants as is. ^^

Their hair color will also have variants too, just from black/grey/white.

My original species doesn't have much of a skin tone variant anyway. There might be like, 6 minutely different colors involved
And perhaps in the future we will add them but for now, nah.

 

Well let me ask this then, is it simply because you find it to complicated to do? Or you just are trying to keep the race to your exact vision? If it's the later, while I do understand how you feel, you will get lots of requests and such about it. The only suggestions/opinions I've even gotten so far is skin/fur colors for my race so be prepared too hear about it from people. It's always good to give the people what they want, unless your strictly making it for yourself. Good design is all about what pleases others. I would love to see the race with a variance of purples, blues, and blacks, maybe a bit of red. If it's the difficulty I could do it for you, it's actually really a light work load and I could probably get it done for you in less then an hour. Either way it's whatever. I like the concept and hope all goes smoothly. I'll be sure to check it out upon release.

 

It's a combination of difficulty and vision. I could most likely get it to work but I just want to get everything coded in right now. Skin variance may be a future update, but because it isn't completely necessary and I haven't had the time or patience to do it, it isn't in yet.

 

Yeah, and i want it to stay purple. This mod is more for me anyway, though i am happy to share my vision with others, i dont mind people asking me to add things of course, but I'm gonna play the crap outta them when the mod is fully functional. They are my original race after all, and my vision says that their skin stays purple, and their eyecolor stays neon green, and their horn color remains blue.


Ofcourse later on, there may well be variants of those specific colors. but those colors are the way its gonna stay

 

And the difficulty isn't coming from the skin vs. horns. The difficulty is hair color + horns, which I've decided to drop their hair color instead. I'll work on it later when I don't have to get up at 6am, then get back home at 7pm

 

I also had a thought-- I could have the author of colorbound+ add my species for those who want a more colorful Ikuul.

 

Good idea. Btw, do you have an approximate release date in this project? New race mods are my favorite kind and for whatever reason this one caught my eye and now I'm excited to see it released. If you need a test dummy for anything lemme know, I wish I could offer more help but my knowledge of coding/spriting (essentially anything useful) is still underdeveloped. But consider me a fan of the race!

 

It just depends on if FlyingAnonymoose gets done tomorrow with the alpha release or not.

If so, expect to see it out by tomorrow. but if not, then just hold on cause we can only do these things so fast.

 

Alpha Release is out! Go check it out here: http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?resources/the-ikuul.1942/