Introduction To Dyes

Dyes / in-game coloring of equipment is almost here! This post will briefly go over how it works.

Let's talk a bit about the design goals for the coloring system. I think the following characteristics are important:

• The color picking process must be preview-able, which means the player should immediately have feedback on what the new color looks like  before finalizing the decision.
• The system must provide means to "cancel" changes and "remove/restore" to default "color."
• A better way to present the color choices would be ideal. The effects of adjusting slider values may not be intuitive.
• Internal implementation wise, I want a heuristic/algorithmic system to determine which slot/material on an item is color-able, to play well with custom items and reducing manual labor required to assign which slot/material are colorable-able in the game data files.
• Finally, this may be a bit controversial, but I want there to be some cost associated with coloring. The reason is "dyes" is a very "safe" reward to give out to the players that doesn't influence balancing for future content. It's the same reason why the level is currently softcapped at ~20 or so, so people don't get to insane levels and I would have to add higher and higher level enemies to compensate. (HR had that problem with the challenge fights have to have insane level opponents as some people grinded to insane character levels.)

Here is how it works:

There will be an new item type, "dyes." That currently cost 200 each. You do not use it directly, but rather, it is consumed when applying new color:

In the equipment window, right click on an equipped item to bring up the coloring UI:

This window, along with most other UI windows, are moveable via dragging. To do so, click down near the top of the UI window, hold and move, and release the mouse button in a more desirable location:

The slot1, slot2... buttons represents the different slots on an item that is colorable. A item may have anywhere from 0 to 5 colorable slots. This coloring window will only show the adjustable ones.

Click on the color icons to change the color.

The "Cancel" button restores the color state for that slot to the state it was at the previous "commit."

The "Default" button removes the dye and restores the color for that slot to the default.

If a different color is picked, then when the coloring window is closed (via X button or Esc key) or when a different slot is picked, then it meant that the player intent to commit the color change. Coloring a slot in a item to a different color will consume 1 dye, which is taken from the player's inventory.

Note, that clicking on different color slots, without committing, do not consume dyes. There is a notification message on the bottom right whenever dyes are consumed. 

You can dye outfits on allies with the same method:

Note that dyes is a property on the item, and not on the character (like it was on HR), and the items can be swapped around:

P.S.

The color table is generated via HSL values. Going down the rows changes the Hue, and going across the columns changes the Lightness. Saturation is always at 100% as different colors of gray isn't that interesting imo. The top row is a special black to white row. 

I haven't researched a better way to generate the color tables so I am more or less winging it. I can definitely increase the resolution, meaning more rows or columns but even just it is currently, I feel most of the interesting colors are represented there already.