Selection, variable, playable character?

Hey everyone, I have been piecing together ideas for a holiday construct project. Here is one piece I need to be sure of before committing 100%... I'm dreaming a small character design studio where the user can edit base parts of a sprite (pixelart).eg: taking the head and customising it by adding new bits to it...

Then, the altered characters are saved then the parts are assigned to pre-animated bones (pre animated using invisible objects). I guess it would be similar to a "drawn to life" concept... Onlythe characters will be controllable pixel puppets for manipulation... Not a platform game.

I'm guessing it may be complex... However, I noticed an "image editing" icon and am hoping it may be possible.

Any help, advice or guidence is greatly appreciated!

Especially in the area of image editing and saving within an app/game.

Thanx in advance!

Yeah, I'd say that's possible. How you do it though, well there's probably a bunch of different ways.

If it's adding premade parts, then that would be relatively easy (each piece having a unique id number, and if you save those id numbers, then it knows what to change it to look like later.. heck even use a codeword type system or something eg: 924519281 would create a character (hey random character building! lol). You'd have your base character as the collision boxes and invisible and go from there, just attaching your custom character to it.

If there's more going on, like allowing them to actually draw the parts themselves. Well again I don't see that being too complicated really considering it would be pixel art, so you'd basically have a small grid with each piece being on or off and the color being decided by whatever they've selected in the games UI (can reference RGB info) then I dunno, similar method to above for storing the information or even saving the parts out. Not entirely sure about that bit, I've really not looked into the whole saving and loading thing beyond seeing the loading having problems (don't know if those are fixed yet).

I don't think the image editing object will be useful for this though.

For a drawn to life-like system you'd need:

• Canvas, to do the drawing and hold the drawn image
• Image manipulator, to extract the image from the canvas, save it into the player's profile/savegame
• Bones behavior, for animating the default character
• Sprites for holding the images used in-game. You can use either image manipulator to put the image directly on a sprite's frame or load from a file. Keep in mind you can't alter the number of frames in an animation.

Definitely doable.

Thanx heaps everyone!

I havnt done too much with any of these thingsbut sounds very doable. Am I right in assuming you can have multiple animation sets in bones, then "trigger" them as required?

Thanx again!

yes and you can specify blending time in the animation, though I think you can't decide when triggering.