Creating Lab rats

[WorldEdit]

Hi, I'm making a game in which a player has, among other things, a cage of laboratory mice. The mice have different fur colors, eye colors, personalities and other genetic traits. How do i make a sprite that changes according to a variable within an object? I don't feel like making over a 100 mice sprites manually.

 

[jackhigh24]

so how can they have all those different things if you have not created a sprite for them, the only way to do it would be to have all your parts as separate sprite in a grey scale colours so that just shades of white, then use draw set colour and draw them all in the right order from within the mice objects based of the vars you make for those conditions, so you have the mouse with it fur in white, then you have eyes in white and any other things you need to colour and draw each with its own colour value

EDIT
ooops i said use draw set colour there, forgetting that you cant use that in sprites so yo have to use the colour argument in draw_sprite_ext for that.

 

[zircher]

Another way might be to have a few basic fur colors and then add a transparent sprite on top for different stripes, spots, and markings. So, your mouse genetics would have fur, markings, tails, ears, and eyes as your genetic bits that they can inherit or mutate. Add in scaling factors and you create even more variety.

 

[ConsolCWBY]

Exactly what zircher said. But I would propose you could also change the HSV values based on the genetic variables as well. As long as each part of the mouse is a separate sprite, you could 'build-it-up' as you wish. I would make sure to have enough sprites to make the mice less samey though!

(I like zircher, he's got great ideas! And he participates sooo well! ;D Good job on the jam, man!)

 

[jackhigh24]

that basically what i mentioned but limiting him self at the same time with less variation, so not so good but still another way to do it.

 

[zircher]

Depending on the amount of variation desired, they're all valid ways of approaching the problem.