I’ve spent most of the last week revisiting the levels from the vertical slice milestone, rebuilding bits and polishing up things that got missed the first time around. But that’s not super interesting to write about, so I won’t.

I also finally implemented a skin tone randomizer which had been on my task list for months. I kept procrastinating because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to implement it. I was considering making a 1D skin tone gradient texture and sampling randomly from it, but first I decided to just try it using the same random color generator code I had already written for outfit randomization. The results (shown above) are surprisingly usable. There’s a few odd-looking outliers, but I think it’s good enough to keep.

The trick I use to randomly generate colors is to use HSV space instead of RGB. Randomly generated colors in RGB space tend to have a broader range of hues than is desired. By using HSV space and constraining the hue to a narrow band, I can produce a plausible range of skin tones by varying the saturation and value.

For reference, the ranges I’m using are:
H: 14.4° – 21.6°
S: 20% – 70%
V: 40% – 100%

Another long neglected task I finally got done this week was a proper treatment for conversation portraits. My original plan was to have stylized illustrations in glowing neon colors, probably traced over stock photo portraits; but I wasn’t satisfied with the effect. Recently, I had the idea to render the characters as neon signs. The line art by itself is unremarkable, but bumping up its value and applying the usual post effects chain (bloom, chromatic aberration, film grain, and color grading) makes it pop like a neon sign should.