Dev Diary #312 Let's make it colorable

[Nikki Severin 1146]

Ahoy Ylanders,

In today's dev diary, we will look at a significant change in the history of Ylands development that fundamentally influenced the creation of new assets and significantly improved players' ability to personalize their game creations and equipment.

In the initial stages of game development, it was essential for us to design a specific visual style that would be unique and have great potential to not visually age soon. This key aspect was further influenced by other particular requirements, such as the need for a smooth change in the time of day, weather, and editable terrain.

With an increasing number of players and the amount of time they spent in the game, there came a need for a more significant variability in-game assets, even though the game already contained thousands of unique objects. After testing various options for solving this problem, we decided to make all game objects colorable. On the one hand, this decision was great because it potentially created infinite variations of current assets without negatively impacting the data size. However, on the other hand, it brought a tremendous amount of work for the entire graphics team.


 

To preserve the original visual style, we designed a system that would keep the artistically stylized shading of the model while also adding the possibility to colorize this model with three different colors. We achieved this effect by adding a second UV set to each model, which contains information about which part of the model is colored with one of these three colors. The original shading of the model remained stored in the first UV set, which now only contains different shades of gray. The final visual of the model is created inside the game engine using a custom shader, where the black-and-white shading is multiplied by the defined colors. In the game, there is a database where each object has its base colors stored, so the resulting visual corresponds to the original one, with the new option to change this coloration anytime.

This new feature allowed us to create even more beautiful and diverse game environments, and more importantly, it allowed you, our players, to unlimitedly customize your creations, such as building your dream house and coloring it according to your preferences at any time in the future. 

Do you use this option in the game? What is your favorite way to use it? Let us know! 

Stay Classy! 

[Miguel Preguisa 443]

I must have spilled some of my experimental potions on the statue. Because now, it's very much alive!