I tried this first, but found it really hard to recognize/remember [random-glyph] as "hello". Better if it's readable, even if unrelated, to make looking it up in the blab-o-dex easier. I may add a letter to separate conversations, so "H2" instead of "31". Still figuring it out.
1. I have a really hard time using the crank for rewinding. Would much prefer that to be on the B button, with the current popup menu options just stuck in the system menu.
2. Paging through all the dialog notes when retrying is a bit of a drag. It'd be nice if the B button could immediately dismiss without paging through like A. Or maybe put the notes above Elena's head so you'd need to jump to read them in the first place.
Cool idea. The generator is a means to an end though - to create a diverse martian population for the game's mechanics and settings. I'd do things differently if the focus was on build-a-face. Not that it couldn't work but it'd be a different game.
For the mouths, you're on point. I haven't shown it yet but each mouth has 3 versions: em/oh/eh, which is just barely enough for animating speech.
If it was fast enough to generate them all at once then it'd be fast enough to generate as-needed, so there's no real advantage to doing everything up front. My plan is to include a few thousand faces, so hopefully it still feels random enough without having to port everything to the runtime.
I had another game idea specifically targeting the Playdate's 1-bit screen and the crank but not really the physical screen size. Mars was a followup idea trying to hit all 3.
Thanks! There's a fairly simple "collision" system that I use to snug the parts together and I think that helps with making the fit feel natural. Also because everything is low resolution 1-bit, it's easier to forgive some mismatching.
I worked on things for a long time knowing it wasn't enough but having no idea what to add. Some of the best ideas come while spinning my wheels, so even procrastinating can be productive.
I didn't know about that and it's almost exactly what I want. When did that get added? Clever hiding it under a single-option "Generate" submenu.
It even supports svg shapes and exporting sub-layers alongside containing groups. Definitely the best way to do multi layer exporting.
I still need the positions and structural hierarchy so it's not quite enough for the Mars case but I'll put it in the toolbox for other projects. Thanks for pointing it out :)
I recently started testing ArtStudio Pro out (maybe from one of your earlier recommendations) and you're right, it's excellent. For patterns I prefer using layer effects, which it supports just like Photoshop so all happy here.
The system itself does support species like that but I haven't loaded it up with much yet. It's more-or-less based on some ideas from Papers Please, where what you really want is to define some criteria, then generate papers (or a face) that explicitly matches or does not match in interesting, non-confusing ways.
Interesting. For Obra Dinn I felt the outlines were key to legibility and wanted them to be as clean as possible. Which meant the relatively art-heavy burden of marking each object with a special color to define how it should generate edges. You wouldn't get that with realtime video of a live scene, so you'd need to tease it out of depth&color. That's how most 3D edge detection works anyways so it's not really a problem, just a little less precise than what I wanted.
I like to be surprised by what an algorithm can generate from the pieces I feed it. Designing all the martians by hand would probably look better but be a lot less fun to work on. Also I don't know how many I'll need yet. Probably in the hundreds/thousands.
