How would I go about designing cosmetic skins for different characters?

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#1

So to keep this simple, my game has 5 different characters with different abilities. When you’re fighting other players, you need to know what character they are in order to know how to fight back against them, because of their difference in abilities.

I’m also trying to monetize my game and I don’t want to create pets or skins, so I’ve decided that I’m going to allow players to buy cosmetic packs for these characters.

For example, Character 1 has the ability to break down doors really easily, so I decided that I want to allow players to buy a Werewolf skin for ~75 Robux. I feel though that some players could get confused especially when I release new skins and they don’t know who the skin is for (in other words they don’t know which of the 5 characters has the skin, so they don’t know what their abilities/weakenesses are).

So the question is, how can I realistically go about creating skins for these characters while also making sure the player doesn’t forget who the character is so nobody will be at a disadvantage?

I’ve already considered having a “disable skins” setting and that will be implemented, but it will not be enabled by default because I want players to want to buy the skins and having it disabled by default defeats the purpose.

Edit: I’ll also be having each character have a different set of animations. However this won’t be enough in my opinion to differentiate between two characters, so any suggestions are appreciated.

Any solutions or possible suggestions would really help. I also should add that I don’t want each character to be locked to a color. (ex. Character 1 has a red Werewolf while Character 2 has a green one.)

Here’s a list of things that won’t work unfortunately: (Editing this list when needed)

  • Overhead titles
  • Any UI indicator (viewportframes, etc)
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#2

You could show the character’s skin in a viewport frame alongside a text label with the name.

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#3

I don’t think this would work out. I’d have to be showing a ton of viewport frames since the max player count is ~20. Probably not the best for performance or user experience (because of UI clutter). Thank you though.

#4

A simple over the head character name Gui? (which would be parented to the head upon spawn, the server then writes down the name based off the given information when the character is selected)

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#5

I thought of this but it wouldn’t work either. Since it’s a fighting game I don’t want players locations to be easily revealed (if they’re hiding or around a corner and the GUI would clip through the part or whatever)

Do you have any non-UI suggestions?

#6

Parts related ways of identifying the character? Let’s say, a neon block with different colors, and other things like that.

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#7

I originally stated I didn’t want to have characters locked to colors, but I might have to.

I’m also going to have different animation sets for all the characters so that should help as well. Maybe even have unique identifiers like particles/consistencies within all characters regardless of their cosmetic pack. For example maybe Character A will always have black smoke coming from it.

It sounds random, I know, but it’s just cause I didn’t go very in-depth about these characters. I’ll figure something out. Thank you for your help.

#8

You’re welcome and good luck, regarding GUIs, you could make them not visible through walls, but with lighting it’s a whole different headache, so yeah.

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