Hi everyone!

Simple question: I'm wondering how to handle armor or appearance upgrades in-game specifically relating to the sprite's appearance. Say the player gets a new helmet! How do I reflect that on the character? What if I have 50+ different combinations of armor/clothing for each type of character in the game? Would I need to have a separate sprite image for each combination? Or does the character sprite have a base model and you overlay images onto that? What about animation for shirts or pants or weapons... Gosh, this seems quite overwhelming.

Anyway, hopefully I've gotten my question across in an understandable way. I'm sure that there's an easy solution for this but I can't imagine what that might be.

Thanks for any advice or help!

Scott.

Drawing sprites with transparency on top of your character should do the trick. Conceptually it's like this:

I have not had to do this yet, but I agree that using transparent images on top of eachother sounds like the way to do it. I think there would be two main important points to watch out for:

1) I would probably create all the armor pieces in such a way that certain pieces would ALWAYS be drawn over the other. The draw order would probably be as follows:

Feet > Waist > Legs > Hands > Legs > Torso > Head

(assuming you used those pieces). In this way, long pants will always overlap boots, a long torso item (robe, long coat, etc) will always overlap almost everything.

2) Ensuring all your armor uses positioning relative to the character. Obviously you don't want your character to move and leave your armor floating in the air!

I realize as I type this all this may be obvious to you (or I'm just blatantly wrong), so before I insult your intelligence I'll just stop :)

Keep in mind animations come into play with how you display armor too, if your character is 2d and can move 8 directional or something you'll have to have many different versions of each piece of armor and make sure that animations either move the sprites slightly to make it look "sensible" or sometimes even use yet another sprite of the armor.

In the end, depending on the game every single piece of armor ends up needing many sprites and they all have to be tested for consistancy, a big task.

A good way to think about it though is how 3d games do the same thing, generally they model the armor by itself and then each character body has sort of "mounting points" like invisible clothes hooks, the armor is often supported by that position and then scaled a bit to try and make it look fluid. It's basically the same thing with 2d, you want to make a very simple base for the character and then match the armor pieces to it depending on your needs. There's no real "one way fits all" of doing it, you just have to come up with the easiest way to do it with the least art and tweak it till it looks right.

Aligning those equipments with your character animations is probably going to be the majority source of your headaches. If you haven't got a tool to help you out with this, I'd suggest you create one, or start looking for one (unfortunately, I don't have a suggestion).

What I have used in the past before, we would set up an anchor point in the character, and this anchor point will be adjusted per frame for each animation. For example, imagine a character that jumps up with his arms stretched out sideways. You want your character to hold a sword in this animation. You want the sword to stick to the hands, as your character jumps, and rotate, as he rotates his hands. None of this can be reasonably programmed by hands in a settings file. You need a tool that can help you out with this.

Keep in mind animations come into play with how you display armor too, if your character is 2d and can move 8 directional or something you'll have to have many different versions of each piece of armor...

Isn't it possible to assign a changable color palette to each armor piece though? Consider the following:

1. Make 8 versions of Chest Armor (one per direction). Each piece has a novel, unused color, e.g. "grey".

2. Create an algorithm for drawing specific colors onto specific pixels for each of the eight armor pieces. E.g. a switch statement(?)

3. Tell the game to switch color based on what kind of armor of that same texture that you got.

I'm thinking about Zelda III and the 3 armors available to Link. I've only ever found sprite sheets with the green armor, which possibly implies that those other 2 armors don't exist as separate sprites but are rather color modifications of a single set of armor sprites.

Honestly unless the number and shape of the armors vary a lot it would actually be easiest to just incorporate the armor into the sprite and just duplicate the sprite. You only really want to bother with layered rendering when you're talking about like being able to swap out dozens of armor pieces and weapons. I'm not sure what Zelda III did really.

But you could write some kind of colorizer to recolor pieces of equipment, sure. Just another solution in a bag of many. The real trick is to pick what suits your needs.