Hi! I just have a small question I've been wondering about games for awhile if you are okay answering.
Why a color menu with set colors instead of a color slider or wheel where you can pick any color?
For my game specifically, the set color menu has a few advantages, backend wise.
it let's me more easily pick random colors that go together (if I make a set of colors that start somewhere and then jump around the grid in certain small steps for the others in the set, the random colors look much nicer)
it establishes a nice cohesive color palette for the game, and I also use it to help me when picking color for ui that will match the vibes
I can turn the colors into enums, 1-130, and use those numbers as a map to set traits in the Creature Codes that give a shorter footprint then a full 6 or 8 character hex color code - making my QRs shorter so I can eventually pack more traits in it when needed
but also, there is a custom color slider in the color grid menu - at the bottom right there's a '🔧 custom' button :3
eventually I'll make it so you can pick existing custom colors that are already on your creature, so you don't have to reslider them every time
for other games, I couldn't say for sure. but I have a few guesses!
coding a custom color slider is hard! I use a library someone kindly provided for free. much easier to just slap some select buttons or an arrow back and forth
aforementioned cohesive art look!
I've also always wondered why games sometimes let you choose colors for like, a whole outfit that seem to be just a hue shifted version of the base colors. turns out that having multiple custom color channels for one texture is insanely complicated. most shaders/materials are built to have the base texture and maybe a color overlay. but choosing custom colors for each part of a texture would require re-writing the texture in code, pixel by pixel, while knowing which pixels get which custom color, or layering materials, or other complicated solutions like coding a custom shader. these solutions will either eat into the memory budget Really Fast, or require a specific skill set to pull off, for a very small part of most games.
for this reason I probably won't be doing patterns per body part with more then a base color and 2 layers of patterns. after that it will be way more performant to just have y'all draw the custom textures yourself! then in order to save and share those custom patterns like animal crossing does, it will be necessary to restrict the palette to groups of around 16 colors, and I can go more into the reasons why that's necessary if someone's curious!
I hope that all makes sense! let me know if you have further/follow up questions :3
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