Weekly devlog #16 - Player size

Hi everyone! As promised, this week's devlog is about a possible big change (or should I say... small change) to Crystal Realms. Many players have given me the feedback that they feel that the player is too tall. And I kinda agree, so today I am proposing a new player size.

Origin of the current player size
But first I think it is important to understand why this player size was chosen in the first place. Many other sandbox mmo games have player characters that are the size of exactly one tile. This is fine, but it does make the character look a bit goofy in my opinion. And that makes sense! Humans are not square, we are more rectangular. So this was something that I wanted to differently. Because it felt more realistic, and could make my game stand out from the other ones.

So I decided to take inspiration from Minecraft and make my character 2 blocks tall. But something was off, I didn't feel like I had enough creative freedom with this block size. So I split the blocks up into 4 smaller blocks, and I was able to create way more detailed builds. That's when the 2 by 4 blocks character was born.

Player feedback
Fast forward a few years, and a few players started giving me the feedback that the player size was too tall. At this moment I responded that it was too late to change the player size to be 1 or 2 blocks tall. I would need to redo all the animations, redo all of the clothing items, redo all of the blocks, and the game would need to be reset. I didn't want to set back the development of the game, and delete all of the players world because some players prefer a smaller player size. And honestly, I still really disliked the idea of the player being in the shape of a square.

What has changed
So you might be wondering why I am now considering resizing the player after all of that. And the reason is that I was gonna start working on the jumping and death animations for the player. And then it hit me, maybe it isn't that much work to resize the player to be 3 blocks tall instead of 4. This is only a 25% decrease in size, so it is not like I need to reset the whole game for this change. In contrast to changing the player size to be 1 or 2 blocks tall. This would also give me the chance to improve the walking animation, since people have pointed out that the animation doesn't match how fast the player moves in the game.

How much work it is
So I started going through the list of items in the game, and estimating how much extra time I would need to spend to resize them. And I found out, it is actually not that much. Currently there are 47 different clothing items in the game. Which might sound like a lot, but it is actually not that bad. 22 of them are facial items, so these only have one frame. And will only take a few minutes each for me to modify. Then there are 5 pants, but only 3 of them have a unique animation. And the other 2 are recolors of other pants. 7 shoes, with 4 unique animations. And lastly 11 shirts, with 4 unique animations. One of them is not even animated! So that means in total, I would need to reanimate 11 unique clothing items. And the other ones are just slight tweaks of other clothing items. That sounds totally doable!

And for the blocks, I only had to resize 6 blocks to match the new player size. If I do decide to change the player size, existing worlds will still exist. The only thing that will change is the size of these 6 blocks. Because they are all shrinking in size this is very easy to do. I would also need to redesign the desert dungeons a bit to have these smaller beds, and smaller doors. I might even make all of the rooms one block smaller.

New player design
So here you can see the new design for the player. I will probably do some small tweaks here and there, but I really think it will make the game better. Terraria is another game that has proven a 2x3 player size could work, and I believe that this could be the perfect player size for Crystal Realms too.

But this decision is not final yet! I love to hear your thoughts about this, and there will also be a vote in the discord if I should actually do this change. If 50% or more of the players vote yes, then I will do this change, if not I will put this idea on the shelf for now.