Alright, can't just sit around waiting for the gloves to be approved, so on to the next project! It's time for heavy armor.
First up, I was toying around with re-doing the existing icons (and probably sprites) since we'll want a consistent starting ground to apply our colors to. Was speaking with an expert who suggested that using a fixed number of shades for an item allows for better consistency in recolouring, so figured I'd go ahead and try that with the iconic Warlord Plate and see how it looked. This may be entirely unneccessary, but it was a fun little project.
- New on the left
- New and Old Plate.png (7.25 KiB) Viewed 106 times
Next, colours. You know how we have all these metal ores in the game? Gold, silver, copper, bromenal... What if those were armor colours? We could even add some more if people know of some other cool-coloured metals we can slap in there. Golden Warlord Plate does already exist with some unique properties, so we'll have to consider how to handle that...
I did a quick 'n dirty version of recolouring the current Warlord Plate sprite. Here we have (from left to right) a standard warlord plate next to the first draft of copper-, silver-, and bromenal-alloyed armor.
- The fashion show (draft)
- Moar-Armors.png (18.66 KiB) Viewed 106 times
We'll need a new NPC - I'm thinkin a female smith in Nivalis - a craftsperson working on a new process of 'alloying' metals together for their aesthetic qualities. I'd love some name suggestions! And then I need to work out how NPCs work and how to add a parallel-but-separate dying system for the armor...
And as a teaser for what is (probably) the next project, I'd also love to find a way to bring older items into relevance - at the very least aesthetically. For example, I love the Knight's Helm, but you never see 'em anymore because they're just not worth making or wearing over other options... I have two main ideas: cosmetic outfits (an MMO staple) or an upgrade system so we can (at a cost) have lower-tier items mimic higher-tier stats... Neither idea appears simple to implement, so wish me luck! 
