Info

hackrew is a framework for making character creator/dressup game applets a la picrew. You can check out an online demo here, or see a more complex version on Neocities. To make your own character creator, fork this repo or download the files and follow the instructions below.

This builder uses hackrew as a base, and implements some accessibility improvements to allow more users to interact with it.

Instructions

Step 1: start a web server

The applet won't run correctly unless it's launched from a server. To launch it from your own machine, cd into the hackrew folder, run ./serve.sh (you'll need Python 3 installed on your machine) from the command line and navigate to http://localhost:8000/ in your browser. Once you're done developing your character creator, you can host it on a remote server, like Neocities or Github Pages.

Step 2: specify your parts

The character creator applet's visual components are comprised of "parts" (ex: "body", "ears", "tail", "accessories"), which have varieties called "items" (ex: the items for ears are "small" and "big"). Each item is represented by a .png image with a transparent background. The applet allows the user to create different characters by layering different item .pngs on top of each other.

Parts are listed in parts.json in the order in which they're rendered: parts near the bottom are visually layered on top of parts near the top. Parts have the following fields:

• "folder": the name of the folder that will contain the part's visual assets
• "items": the names of the items belonging to the part
• "colorMode": Can be "fill", "multiply", "manual" or null. See Step 3 for details.
• "colors": 6-character strings containing the the hexcodes of colors.
• "noneAllowed": true if this part is optional, false otherwise

Ex:

{ "folder": "ears",
      "items": ["small", "big"],
      "colorMode": "manual",
      "colors": ["FFFFFF", "FFBD6C", "BBDE49"],
      "noneAllowed": true
    }

Step 3: create visual assets

All item .png files must have the same dimensions. To ensure that the items line up correctly when layered, I recommend drawing items on different layers of the same file in a digital art program like Gimp or Procreate, then saving each layer seperately as a .png.

Each part can come in multiple colors (ex: ears can be white, orange or green). For every part part and item item, the folder imagemakerAssets/part must contain a file named item.png. This file will represent the part in the part select menu. If the part has no color options, this file will also be used as an image for the character creator.

If a part has color options, then the "colorMode" field determines whether the item files for each color are manually or automatically generated.

To manually create color variants for each item of a part part, set "colorMode" to "manual" and for each item item and each color of hexcode "XXXXXX", create a .png imagemakerAssets/part/item_XXXXXX.png depicting item in color XXXXXX.

To generate color variants automatically, you'll need to run the Python script generate_colored_images.py. The script uses files of the form "imagemakerAssets/part/item.png" as templates to generate colored versions of each item. If a part has "colorMode" "fill", the script fills the template's pixels of RGB value (123, 123, 123) with the desired color, preserving alpha. If a part has "colorMode" "multiply", the script treats the template as an alpha-preserving multiply layer over the desired color.

To run the Python script, you'll need pipenv installed and on your $PATH. Then from within the hackrew directory:

pipenv install
pipenv run python3 generate_colored_images.py

The script will take a while to run, but at the end you'll have your color variant image files in the correct folders.

Step 4: edit the UI

To change the colors and graphics of the UI, edit the variables at the top of index.css.

Step 5: host your avatar builder

The only files that you need to host your applet are index.html, index.css imagemaker.js, and the imagemakerAssets folder. To host on Github pages, fork this repo, customize the files, and follow the intrucutions here.

Since this repo generates a static site, you can turn on Github Pages in the Settings of the Repo and it should automatically deploy for you, detecting the presence of an index.html file. It will host your builder at yourRepoName.github.io. You can change the name of your repository to get a URL you like.

Pushing your changes to main will trigger a deploy.