Please put some polish into the character creator

[next oar]

The fact we can only be "Ambigious dinosaur" and no real dinosaur when were SURROUNDED by diff species is already upsetting but the fact that the ui is super unintuitive, and eye colors are super dull and if you have any sclera color besides white theres a HARD white line surrounding the pupil just really makes me struggle to enjoy this games main feature - Making your own paleofolk that you need to stare at for most of the time you play.

Theres also random hard white pixels around the sclera in general. Why do we get random floppy ears but cant have shorter arms, better spino frill, ect. Why does every npc get to be a actual species of dinosaur except the player? This has been heavily sucking the enjoyment out of this game for me. This was supposed to be a BIG part of this game and is one of the most under-thought, under-developed part of it. The brush off excuse of "the camera angles" is upsetting too - We where told wed have a diverse, solid character creation system in this game and we really dont. :/ We even only get 2 pattenrs - Randomly placed stripes or dots.

Please put some love and care into this system - You say this is not early access anymore but this feels like an early beta build with how clunky it is.

Like this is the closest you can get to a direwolf and it looks nowhere NEAR as good/accurate as the direwolf npc.. The npcs that we barely have to look at, or when we do its on the chance they wander in, but we ALWAYS have to stare at our pc.

[valid shore]

I feel like you need to watch the deep dive character creation video
https://youtu.be/3rXwOzOQhhI

[stray creek]

Just to weigh in here - the character creator is one of the cutest and customisable for this type of game - for example if you compare it to something like animal crossing, we are actually overwhelmed by choice! Plenty of love and care has been put in imo.

What I would love to see is easier to access colour choices, so a colour wheel and sliders for brightness or saturation, which would make it easier instead of me guessing what colour I want falls under which square 🙂

[clever vapor]

I kinda hate the character creation as it is. I haven't been able to make a single one of my sonas with it. I don't even have complex looking ocs. The system is too basic and it's a mess to use.

[next oar]

I have. Its just them trying to upplay and hype up their character creator. It doesnt change that it has a massive amount of options that do little to nothing and the character creator is beyond dissapointing.

They have this entire thing of saying youre a paleofolk, you fit in with this world - Then they do NOT give you the tools to do it. Youre telling me I can be a random, puppy dog eared deer but cant be given the tools to make a spino or rex properly?

Its insane.

[ripe kraken]

I will admit there’s plenty of unique categories, but when you break it down it was frustrating and limiting.
There’s a very large lack of markings, the eyes feel odd, and your size as an npc seems strange compared to the others.

[next oar]

Also them hyping it up doesnt change the weird, hard pixelly white outlines all over the eyes for no reason.

I chose to have black sclera on my character to try to make the orange show more and its legit all I see now because its so obvious, i dont know how it passed alpha testing.

But im not here to really argue on this. The character creator feels like it was REALLY rushed last minute so they could meet their launch deadline, it feels like something id fiddle with in the beta stages of a game, and my suggestion is it needs a lot more polish. I didnt make this to have people try to argue with me about this. I made it as a suggestion.

[ripe kraken]

Other games like stardew valley, animal crossing, or sun haven work because the player character actively fits in with the surrounding npcs,
Even animal crossing where the player is meant to be different still feels like you belong in the town, and there’s plenty of customization.

[next oar]

Yeah, and this game completely lacks that. Youre explicitly made to feel like you should fit in but then you can't even be an EXTREMELY basic dinosaur. You cannot accurately even replicate a anky even though theres anky npcs. They claim its so it doesnt clip but half the clothes clip already on random things, so its obvious thatsn ot their issue

[ripe kraken]

My character was intended to be a spino, didn’t do spino because there was just the small back fin.
Decided to do saber then, but then, not as happy but pretty okay with it. Happy to have spots, and the spots barely cover anything?
Then I see there IS a spino in game, and there IS a saber in game, and I can look nothing like either of them. It made me genuinely sad, and as silly as it sounds, left me with a bitter taste in my mouth over the characters.

[next oar]

Yeah it made me really upset. Same with pternaodons, theres birds, theres aquatic stuff like the krono and plesio

and we have NOTHING for those

[smoky oracle]

Hey folks, sorry you aren't having a great time with our character creator! There's definitely a few bugs we'd like to sort out regarding it, but the tone of this post is disappointing to read. I don't believe it is conducive to our development team (we have a grand total of 10 of us on the team, and roughly half that to contribute to this character creator) and when we read things like this that just seem to want to dunk on us as if we're lazy developers who don't care about our work, it makes us far less inclined to "fix any issues".

If we were to let you be any species in the game, that's 48 unique body types you would pick from and you would get no say in any of the clothes you wear, AND you wouldn't get the opportunity to pick your own horns or crests etc. Also, because the characters are SIGNIFICANTLY different sizes, the issue is not clipping, but with cameras - it isn't possible in our system to adjust cameras for scenes to include everyone at different heights. You may notice our character creator body types are all roughly the same size.

Other people have put similar suggestions in here in a very kind and thoughtful way, which I don't think this is. We have never told our players that they could be all of the NPC paleofolk, and our character creator deep dive showed off what we can do in a detailed manner. All I ask is that you keep your expectations more in line with the production budget and team size that we have and understand we've all worked incredibly hard to bring you what we have, warts and all.

I'm immensely proud of our character creator and our team, and the overwhelming feedback from our players is that even despite some minor visual bugs, the character creator is some of the best around. If it's not for you, that's totally okay! But coming into our discord and saying that we didn't put love and care into our game is incredibly unfair.

[latent thicket]

Hey Marc, I just wanted to let you know, I don’t agree with this poster. I think you and the rest of the team are doing a wonderful job. Character creation is probably my favorite thing in video games, as I am an artist and love creating things, Amber Isle character creation has a lot more options than most in these types of games, and I have had a lot of fun watching people customize (I can’t play until it’s on switch, but I am excited) thank you guys for the wonderful work you have done. ❤️ what everyone needs to understand is that it takes a lot of work to make a game, and even more work to make sure it functions. You guys have been so busy working trying to fix any issues, that you probably haven’t had any time to work on future stuff and improvements let alone probably even play the game and enjoy it yourselves. I do understand wanting more character options but within reason. We even heard in the video about the character creator that you guys want to try to give us more options and what we ask for, but you are trying to figure out how to implement things and have it work correctly. We all need to have patience and understand. I’ve seen the love the team has put into this, I know that if we are loving and supportive it helps a lot. So thank you so much for your hard work. I appreciate the care you all put into this. ❤️

[ripe kraken]

I apologize if this came off as harsh! I still very happy with the game as a whole and want nothing more than to see it grow and only wanted to also share my personal experiences with it. I didn’t notice my tone shift until I came back to reread and apologize again, as I typically use tone tags!
I really do appreciate the point about the size, I did not consider the camera followed the player model including the height, thank you

[smoky oracle]

Your criticisms were all fair, Beau, and don't worry it's all water under the bridge! It's MORE than okay that we get critical feedback so that we can try and make this game the best it can be!

This discord is like our development team's online home. I've watched every single member of the team stay late, work weekends, miss out on their personal life because of their dedication to making something we can stand beside, so I'm sure you can imagine why I was frustrated to find out we were "lazy devs because there was a white outline on the eyes". We love that everyone is passionate about the game and has strong feelings about what they want, but we physically aren't going to be able to get round to everything because of budget and team size, so this suggestion box is meant to help us find out the most common things that the community want prioritised. A little bit of understanding of how much work has went into this, and how difficult this sort of thing is goes a long way to figuring out why/how you got the end product you did (despite all the bugs which we're fixing that I personally don't believe is the development teams fault)