Hey all!

I hope you enjoyed last week’s devlog about the Ability System. Thank you for all of those you have provided feedback, we will certainly take those ideas into account as we continue to develop and fine tune the system. As for this week, we’re excited to share some insights into the development of our MetaHuman based Character Creation System. If you’ve been tinkering with MetaHumans or curious about character creation in general, this one’s for you.

State of the Character Creation System

The project started with a simple goal: bring a quality and accessible character customization system to indie devs. MetaHumans are amazing—right out of the box, they offer stunning realism and versatility. But we noticed a gap: while you can customize characters in MetaHuman Creator, there wasn’t a seamless way to let players do it directly in-game. So, we set out to bridge that gap with a system that’s both powerful and user-friendly.

The idea was to harness the power of MetaHumans while keeping everything as accessible as possible. We learned early on that MetaHumans, while incredibly detailed, are also quite resource-intensive. Keeping the system flexible yet performant has been a balancing act. As with all Hyper systems, there is an importance on modularity and built the character creator with the idea that devs might want to swap out components or add new customization options. By keeping the system modular, it’s more straightforward to extend or modify the feature you want.

The core of the system revolves around a modular UI that allows players to adjust facial features, skin tones, hairstyles, and even finer details like eye color and wrinkles, all with real-time feedback. While it still needs more features and performance tweaks, we think it is looking very promising and hope you think so as well.

One feature we’re particularly excited about is the “randomize” function. It’s a small thing, but it lets players generate random characters with the click of a button, using all available customization options. It’s perfect for those who like to dive right into the game without spending hours fine-tuning their avatar but still want a unique look. Of course, right now the randomization creates some interesting combinations, but those issues will be ironed out so there are clean generation outputs.

What’s Next?

We’re already brainstorming ways to expand the system and thinking about adding even more customization options to take the creator to the next level. We’ll be excited to see how other developers will use and update the system in their own projects. We can’t wait to see the characters you all create in the future.

As always, we’re always open to feedback and suggestions, so please feel free to leave a comment, question or chat with us directly in Discord. Thank you to our amazing Patreon supporters! If you would like to join them in the Patreon Club, and gain early access to these devlogs, head over to Patreon today! 

Next week, we will take a first look at the Day Night Cycle!

With kind regards,

Eric Ruts