Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Character creator feedback
renge
Member, Alpha Two
Hello glorious devs and citizens of Verra! 
I've had so much fun testing the character creator - highly customizable character creation is something I always really look forward to in games! Here's my thoughts and feedback on the topic.
Overall:
- The idea of the transition animation is great, but a smoother and flowier texture of the red swirls would have a more "AAA game" -feel
- "Sculpt" could be a menu on the left under "Appearance" - it's part of creating the appearance of the character, so having it be part of that would feel more natural
- Characters have very proportionally long backs/torsos and short legs. Currently the upper-lower body proportion is approx. 6/5 (six over five) when 5/5 would be a balanced look and a generic baseline
- More time to create a character is needed before being thrown into the main menu
- Skin texture should be separate of the full body presets. Some of the textures for example have built in wrinkles or freckles which can't be adjusted after choosing a preset - if a player wanted a different skin texture, they'd have to start over with the character
Colors:
- Ideally all colors could be selected through an hsv color picker as is the current modern standard
- The hue and pigmentation sliders for skin are great. For base skintones, there should be a cooler toned option for each current shade (kaelar & empyrean). For current base skintones, the hue slider on the lower end gives an ashy result and on the higher end a yellow/orange result for the current bases. This is fine for a warm skintone, but creating a neutral cool toned skintone with a pink/red undertone is not possible
- Eyebrows need an option to choose color or use the hair color
- Secondary hair color contrast slider should have a wider range of control - at 0 no visibility, at 100 full opacity for more customizable looks. At the moment the contrast slider feels like a width slider; it sort of does the same as the length slider but on a smaller scale. It could be kept as is and renamed or replaced with an opacity/transparency slider
Body sculpting:
- I love how you've added a possibility to adjust the upper hip! Never seen this in a game before but it's great. For the lower hip, a bit more range to make the hip a little bit wider would be perfect
- A separate sculpting element for waist size, which doesn't affect chest and rib cage width, is needed
- Shoulder width should be adjustable, ideally also shoulder slope
- Neck length and hand size should be adjustable
Face sculpting:
- Sculpting the face is quite fun but there should be separate sliders to control some of the adjustments it does, because it's challenging to target a specific aspect through dragging with the mouse. A height and width slider is needed for everything - mouth, eyes etc.
- Dragging the eyes higher or lower sometimes creates strange texture clips, especially when the eyes are as low as possible - the results are not consistent
- Iris/pupil move upward when moving the eyes heigher - it looks like the character starts looking upwards
- Eyes should have more options - a rotation slider, generic eye size slider, eye height and width sliders, as well as iris size and placement sliders and pupil size
- A secondary slider for jaw height, which adjusts the height of the jaw below the mouth without changing chin length, would be great. This can be done through dragging, but it's easy to miss - all the dragging options should be available as sliders too
- Nose needs a height slider - height can be somewhat adjusted through dragging, but it also changes the shape of the nose
- Nasal bone, particularly the area of the nose between the eyes, needs protrusion and heigth sliders
- Mouth needs sliders for width and each lip for protrusion
- Eyebrows need more options for texture/style
- Ideally cheeks would have more than one cheek size slider for more customization - current slider works well but there's no option to fine tune chubbiness of the "front" part of the cheek
- Temple width and definition sliders need a wider range to adjust
- Forehead needs a height slider
Thanks for reading and have a great day!
I've had so much fun testing the character creator - highly customizable character creation is something I always really look forward to in games! Here's my thoughts and feedback on the topic.
Overall:
- The idea of the transition animation is great, but a smoother and flowier texture of the red swirls would have a more "AAA game" -feel
- "Sculpt" could be a menu on the left under "Appearance" - it's part of creating the appearance of the character, so having it be part of that would feel more natural
- Characters have very proportionally long backs/torsos and short legs. Currently the upper-lower body proportion is approx. 6/5 (six over five) when 5/5 would be a balanced look and a generic baseline
- More time to create a character is needed before being thrown into the main menu
- Skin texture should be separate of the full body presets. Some of the textures for example have built in wrinkles or freckles which can't be adjusted after choosing a preset - if a player wanted a different skin texture, they'd have to start over with the character
Colors:
- Ideally all colors could be selected through an hsv color picker as is the current modern standard
- The hue and pigmentation sliders for skin are great. For base skintones, there should be a cooler toned option for each current shade (kaelar & empyrean). For current base skintones, the hue slider on the lower end gives an ashy result and on the higher end a yellow/orange result for the current bases. This is fine for a warm skintone, but creating a neutral cool toned skintone with a pink/red undertone is not possible
- Eyebrows need an option to choose color or use the hair color
- Secondary hair color contrast slider should have a wider range of control - at 0 no visibility, at 100 full opacity for more customizable looks. At the moment the contrast slider feels like a width slider; it sort of does the same as the length slider but on a smaller scale. It could be kept as is and renamed or replaced with an opacity/transparency slider
Body sculpting:
- I love how you've added a possibility to adjust the upper hip! Never seen this in a game before but it's great. For the lower hip, a bit more range to make the hip a little bit wider would be perfect
- A separate sculpting element for waist size, which doesn't affect chest and rib cage width, is needed
- Shoulder width should be adjustable, ideally also shoulder slope
- Neck length and hand size should be adjustable
Face sculpting:
- Sculpting the face is quite fun but there should be separate sliders to control some of the adjustments it does, because it's challenging to target a specific aspect through dragging with the mouse. A height and width slider is needed for everything - mouth, eyes etc.
- Dragging the eyes higher or lower sometimes creates strange texture clips, especially when the eyes are as low as possible - the results are not consistent
- Iris/pupil move upward when moving the eyes heigher - it looks like the character starts looking upwards
- Eyes should have more options - a rotation slider, generic eye size slider, eye height and width sliders, as well as iris size and placement sliders and pupil size
- A secondary slider for jaw height, which adjusts the height of the jaw below the mouth without changing chin length, would be great. This can be done through dragging, but it's easy to miss - all the dragging options should be available as sliders too
- Nose needs a height slider - height can be somewhat adjusted through dragging, but it also changes the shape of the nose
- Nasal bone, particularly the area of the nose between the eyes, needs protrusion and heigth sliders
- Mouth needs sliders for width and each lip for protrusion
- Eyebrows need more options for texture/style
- Ideally cheeks would have more than one cheek size slider for more customization - current slider works well but there's no option to fine tune chubbiness of the "front" part of the cheek
- Temple width and definition sliders need a wider range to adjust
- Forehead needs a height slider
Thanks for reading and have a great day!
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