Identity: Interiors, Exteriors

Here are the plans for my next steps with the Relationship/Identity prototype.

Character Creation
A small bit of preamble for the player to establish some preliminary settings before entering the sim.

Gender
Symbolic abstraction of gender. Circle or square, I'm thinking.

Preference
Sort of a sexual preference where you choose one of the genders that your character will be attracted to. This will tie into more advanced relationship modeling later where characters can perhaps fall in love, maybe even have offspring? Don't know if reproduction throws noise into the message or not yet.

Attitude/Color
This will be your starting color. It represents your starting attitude/worldview/personality, and will be more of a part of your character than in the current version. More on this in the next section.

Internal vs External Color
The point of this exercise is to explore the different facades we use when dealing with other people, as well as the bonds that form between people that share a certain outlook on life. Currently, the player is a totally free agent, exempt from any kind of grounding since he can change his color at will. I'm going to implement an 'internal color' in addition to an 'external color' to represent your real feelings vs those you're projecting to those around you.

The external color will be bound by the internal, so you can only stray a certain distance from your true feelings. If you express a color other than your internal color for a while, your internal color will begin to slide towards the external one. This might be a constant gradual process so there will still be alteration if you're frequently flitting between different external colors.

At some point I'd like to explore the concept of chroma representing the purity of someone's convictions. As they glide closer to grey,

Familiarity
When the player first sees a new character they'll appear gray, completely neutral and 'colorless'. The more the player stays within proximity of a character, the more the exterior color will begin to show. I'm thinking about doing this one channel at a time (R,G,B) instead of fading them all in at once, just to delay the hue reveal so the player won't be able to adapt his exterior color at the first faint sign of color. This might be ridiculous though, and I'll play around with the fade in to see what feels right.

After getting to know a character for longer, the interior color will begin to show itself. Matching color with the interior color of a character might result in stronger bonds of friendship or romance. Still thinking about how much complexity I want to include in the relationship model.

External Influences
Dramatic events shape our perspective on the world. Getting mugged, surviving a car crash, losing a loved one, these can all color the way we look at things. My first pass at implementing this sort of phenomenon will be colored projectiles that randomly fire into the scene, re-coloring the first character they collide with. This character is changed forever, both internally and externally.

I'm beginning to wonder if keeping a dev blog this detailed is going to diminish the impact of the final product, or if it's better to put details out in the open like this for critique and feedback. Anyone commenting, feel free to chime in on this topic. Curious what people think.

I'm also looking into a better way to make this available to people, as I'm currently coding in an XNA framework and using a 360 gamepad, which makes for a decidedly unportable experience.