“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation.”
– J. Wooden This area of my portfolio highlights Best Practices.
Character Customizations
Character customization (avatars) is a powerful feature that allows players to personalize their in-game avatars, enhancing engagement and immersion. From simple adjustments like changing clothes to more complex features like facial adjustments and rigging, games provides numerous tools to bring character customization to life.
Benefits
- Enhances player immersion by allowing personal expression
- Encourages replayability through multiple customizations
- Increases player engagement, especially in RPGs, MMOs, and multiplayer games
Common Areas
- Body shape and size
- Skin color (including scars, tattoos)
- Facial features (eyes, nose, mouth)
- Hair style and color
- Clothing and accessories
- Eye color and shape
- Facial hair (beards, mustaches)
- Voice (different voice tones)
- Tattoos or body art
- Makeup (eyeliner, lipstick)
3rd Party Tooling
The community has some great resources for adding character customization to your games.
- Community
- VRChat For Unity
- ReadyPlayerMe For Unity
- Asset Store
- Character Customizer (3D)
- Chacterer Creator (2D)
Customization Portfolio
In a classic example of customization, I led the design and development of the “Customize Neopet” functionality for Neopets.com. I served as Director of Multimedia on the founding team from 2000 through 2008.
Neopets is a grandfather in the online gaming industry. By May 2005, a Neopets cited about 35 million unique users, 11 million unique IP addresses per month, and 4 billion web page views per month.
Gameplay
- Input: This allowed for the physical traits and personality traits of each Neopets to be customized. The customization process included manual customization and earned customization.
- Output: Players share the manual customization (cosmetics) of their character everywhere that their character appears throughout the game world; Navigation, exploration, profile, conversations with friends, and more
Types
- Manual Customization – “I’ll put on this hat I bought”
- Earned Customization – “After playing Meerca Chase, the agility attribute is +2.”
Customization Sample Project
For a recent talk about “Managing Complexity” in games, I created a demo on top of my Unity Mini Mvcs architecture.
GitHub Repo
- GitHub.com/SamuelAsherRivello/rmc-mini-mvcs – This library includes an “Advanced Examples” demo and showcases character customization
Customization Presentation
What’s Next?
I’m passionate about learning, creating, and contributing to meaningful projects.Contact me to discuss opportunities that align with my experience, skills, and interests.