That's awesome! I hope guys can make these multiple sprites idea work. I hated how *everybody* looked the same in the game.
Now, if we could also change that stupid helmet of the power suit and make it look like ... I don't know, a Cylon's helmet from battlestar galactica ... then I'm SOLD!
That's step five or six in terms of what I'm going to draw. I'm going to operate on the theory that if you build resources for it, someone will eventually get interested and code it. No point waiting!
Step two: Hair colours. I have already started this for the default haircuts, which multiplies the amount of work by up to four for the later steps, as I'm assuming hair is either blonde, brown, red, or black. I'm operating under the assumption that hair will be painted blonde and european first and can then be palette-shifted to get the other colours. This involves loading a palette three times onto the image and then resaving it, but that's not a huge problem as I only need to do eleven images for a hair-colour-hair-cut combination. Really the hardest part of this is choosing the right part of the palette for each colour, but it looks like there will be appropriate battlescape colours available.
Step three: Ethnicities. Essentially I'm going to index-shift the palettes of all of the arm graphics to a new pallete with darker skin colours, then match it back. The advantage is that the extra work only has to be done once per skin colour, then after that I just need to do faces for one or two hair colours per ethnicity. I'm thinking there will probably be three or four given the palette range I have, and as ethnicity covers only "skin colour" and not detailed facial appearance.
Once I've done that, I'll have an extra three to four palettes to apply to every haircut. (I'm assuming that one of these skintones will have brown and black hair, and the other one or two will just have black hair all the time, but may have additional haircuts)
Step four: Actually spriting new haircuts as above. Original artwork, yay! But then I have to go back to steps two and three up to eighty-eight times for each one, LOL. I'll see if I can fill out the other hair colours and ethnicities for Moriarty's sprites.
Step five (or six): Power armour customisation, which involves a lot of new drawing repeating several times. The tricky thing here is that if anything touches the arms or legs it has to be done a LOT, so I may cheat and give you a lot of breastplate artwork and helmet options to cut down on repetitive spritework.
Step six (or five): If I'm still not tired of it, I start working in sprites for power armour and flying armour that leave your head visible through some sort of cool safety glass, forcefield, or tinted material that lets us see something of your haircut and skin shade of your face. In a way that may be BETTER than step five from a coding perspective, as you'd already have to do all the work for steps one-through-four. If someone's really keen to get this feature in and not just sprited before I hit step five, this may jump up a step, as step five would require some sort of per-soldier armour customisation interface to be worthwhile implementing.
Then I can move onto spriting any extra interface buttons, UFO parts, new items, or new facilities people might want.
