I’m currently doing a (super hot) art commission so I have no progress to report on House Dominae. Instead I’ve decided to post some pics and details on the game’s character creator.

House Dominae is very much a game that revolves around named characters and one of my goals is to elevate them from more than just a bunch of jpegs. I’ve cooked up all kinds of systems to hopefully enable that but they all add to the complexity of the characters and a good character creator is paramount to make that work.

The creator is written as a separate application, using modern C++. Compared to the game itself it makes for pretty ugly screenshots so please bear with me here.

Admittedly, I rushed this initial version because at this point I only need it to create a small stable of test characters and I didn’t want it to steal too much time from working on the game. That said, the creator still needed to do a lot.

The most important thing is to make it easy (and fast) to add, configure and tag event images. Additionally, because images are cropped in the game it’s important to give the author full control over how each image is cropped and panned, without introducing tedium.

Tags are ordered by category and assigning tags is straight-forward but this is one part of the creator where I need to spend some more time before I can call it good. There are a lot of improvements I still need to do, and I cringe a little looking at these early screenshots, but all in good time.