In this fourth installment of the Avatar Dev Blog series, we’ll talk about the face of the full-body avatar option. The new face will look a lot like the floating bean’s face with a few noteworthy additions. Let’s take it from top to bottom.
The grid shows how the face is divided up under the hood.
Eyebrows
Eyebrows are a new optional addition to the full-body avatar. We added them to give your facial expressions more depth. They’ll be in the same drawn-on style we love with that charming wiggle like the eyes and the mouth. This brings them to life and lets us incorporate them into the facial animations when you emote.
A fun animation test (not actual gameplay) of an avatar emoting with its eyebrows.
At launch, you’ll get to pick from three different eyebrow shapes with the ability to adjust their size and position. We also want to give the customization option to go without eyebrows, since even though we feel like it expands the range of expression, we heard the feedback that some of you would prefer to express yourselves without them.
Thin, medium, and thick in three different styles.
Eyes
The full-body option will have many of the eye shapes you’re familiar with, along with a bunch of new options so you can really dial in your look. They work with all the emotes like the old ones do, so you’ll still be able to express your love 😍 or joy 😂 through your eyes.
We’ve also added an eye shine to all the eyes to bring a bit more life and gravity to the avatar’s face through added contrast between the eye and highlight. Without the eye highlights, the eyes felt duller in comparison to the newly upgraded body. You might notice below that we’ve turned down the shine a bit from what you saw in the last concepts. We too thought they were a bit too distracting at their original brightness level.
We love how each eye gives the face a different character.
Noses
Another new addition to the full-body avatar’s face is the nose. We found that one of the more effective ways to express yourself through your avatar is to have an identifiable silhouette. So we explored noses as a way to define your silhouette from the side. Even though it’s a relatively small part of the avatar, we found it to be surprisingly effective at giving each avatar a unique look.
This also explains why the nose isn’t in that drawn-on style like the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth. They are there to give you facial expressions, while the nose is there to define the form of your face.
In our iteration and experimentation, it became clear that overall the full-body design was more appealing with a nose than without, but we heard that some of you felt strongly that you wanted “no nose” as an option to express yourselves. With that in mind, at launch, you’ll get to pick from about eight nose styles and tweak their size and position, or choose to have no nose if you prefer to rock that Voldemort style.
You can see here how the nose dramatically changes the vibe of the silhouette.
And the Rest
The mouths are the same for the full body as they are for the floating bean, and they will work the same way. Your options for face/head shape will be similar as well. The color of the skin on the face will be a tiny bit different though. We’re adding more depth to the skin color. This lets us give faces a bit of a flush to make them feel more alive. It also lets us have lighter palms on the hands of darker skin tones for better representation.
Note the lighter palms.
What’s Next?
As you can see, we’ve already made several iterations to the face based on your feedback, so keep it coming. While we think it’s getting close, we plan on having a few more rounds of interaction before we add the full-body option to the game. Speaking of games, in the next blog, we’ll look closer at how the full body will affect gameplay, and see it in motion!