Dev Storytime #6: The Dress-Up Game!
[h3]Guns are great and all, but wouldn’t they be better if you could cover them in rhinestones and toy sharks? 🦈[/h3]
It’s Jane, the lead developer at Funny Fintan Softworks, and it’s time for our November…
✨Dev Storytime✨
Today, I’m going to be talking about the inspiration behind one of our game’s most unique features: the arm and gun dress-up game!
So you’re probably all wondering, where did the idea for the dress-up game originally come from?
At least, I hope you’re all wondering that, because I’m about to tell you!
In 2024, I went to GDC and there was this retro games exhibit on the floor. They had Bratz: Rock Angelz there in a collection about shovelware. Rude, right? I played it for the first time and absolutely loved it. I spent ages messing around and customizing my character. I thought it was just so much fun.
When I got home, I prototyped the dress-up game! I was only able to prototype it at the time because of the crazy bad model for the hands that I had made when I was 16/17 years old and which had 14 material slots instead of just being the normal 1 material slot. This allowed me to switch materials out onto the different slots and made prototyping very easy. It now uses vertex colours instead of 14 materials, so it’s a lot more optimised. This isn’t currently in the demo, but will be updated in the full game.
The original idea was just to allow players to dress-up their arms, but then I had the idea for gun ornaments later on. When we first designed the gun dress-up game, there were 5 slots on the gun where set ornaments would automatically get added on to. For example, the Butterflies ornament added only butterflies to 5 specific slots on the gun and that was it. The UI was also only in 2D, but I wanted to upgrade it to 3D to be stylistically in-line with the rest of our UI and to have that retro 2000s Xbox menu vibe. We overhauled the gun dress-up later this year to make it fully 3D and to add the ability to put whichever ornaments wherever you wanted to on the gun.
This overhaul though took a lot of work! The transforms and location rotation on the guns is really complicated. Finding a mesh spot to put it on and making sure it doesn’t clip into itself was very challenging. Making an optimised system and moving to vertex colours was difficult too. The system is still not perfect, but we’re getting there.
I’m really proud though that we made the design to move to 3D UI, because I really like how it looks. I wanted to go for a Barbie Fashion Designer in 2025 vibe and I think we succeeded. I also like the fact that you can put ornaments wherever you want now because it’s so stupid and fun.
In our last dev storytime about the guns of girlypop, you may remember I mentioned about how the guns actually expand and add more barrels the faster you go, as a visual cue to let you know that you’re doing more damage. This created a huge challenge when it came to the gun dress-up game! The ornaments now appear depending on where you put them on the gun. Some appear immediately, but some only appear as the gun evolves. It was really hard to make it work, but the final product looks really cool.
When I’m playing, my favourite fabric to use on the arms is definitely the leopard print. It just screams Y2K. In terms of the gun ornaments, I know you’ve probably seen a lot of footage where I’m adding the shark to the Magic Wand, so you may be surprised to hear that my favourite is actually the rhinestones. I don’t know what it is, but I just love rhinestoning my guns.
[h3]Thank you so much for taking the time to read this month’s dev diary and I hope you all enjoyed it!!!
What topic would you like me to talk about in next month’s dev diary?
Let me know in the comments![/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2610650/Dont_Stop_Girlypop/
[h3]Click the button below to join our Discord and use the buttons at the bottom of the announcement to follow us on social media ❤[/h3]
It’s Jane, the lead developer at Funny Fintan Softworks, and it’s time for our November…
✨Dev Storytime✨
Today, I’m going to be talking about the inspiration behind one of our game’s most unique features: the arm and gun dress-up game!
So you’re probably all wondering, where did the idea for the dress-up game originally come from?
At least, I hope you’re all wondering that, because I’m about to tell you!
In 2024, I went to GDC and there was this retro games exhibit on the floor. They had Bratz: Rock Angelz there in a collection about shovelware. Rude, right? I played it for the first time and absolutely loved it. I spent ages messing around and customizing my character. I thought it was just so much fun.
When I got home, I prototyped the dress-up game! I was only able to prototype it at the time because of the crazy bad model for the hands that I had made when I was 16/17 years old and which had 14 material slots instead of just being the normal 1 material slot. This allowed me to switch materials out onto the different slots and made prototyping very easy. It now uses vertex colours instead of 14 materials, so it’s a lot more optimised. This isn’t currently in the demo, but will be updated in the full game.
The original idea was just to allow players to dress-up their arms, but then I had the idea for gun ornaments later on. When we first designed the gun dress-up game, there were 5 slots on the gun where set ornaments would automatically get added on to. For example, the Butterflies ornament added only butterflies to 5 specific slots on the gun and that was it. The UI was also only in 2D, but I wanted to upgrade it to 3D to be stylistically in-line with the rest of our UI and to have that retro 2000s Xbox menu vibe. We overhauled the gun dress-up later this year to make it fully 3D and to add the ability to put whichever ornaments wherever you wanted to on the gun.
This overhaul though took a lot of work! The transforms and location rotation on the guns is really complicated. Finding a mesh spot to put it on and making sure it doesn’t clip into itself was very challenging. Making an optimised system and moving to vertex colours was difficult too. The system is still not perfect, but we’re getting there.
I’m really proud though that we made the design to move to 3D UI, because I really like how it looks. I wanted to go for a Barbie Fashion Designer in 2025 vibe and I think we succeeded. I also like the fact that you can put ornaments wherever you want now because it’s so stupid and fun.
In our last dev storytime about the guns of girlypop, you may remember I mentioned about how the guns actually expand and add more barrels the faster you go, as a visual cue to let you know that you’re doing more damage. This created a huge challenge when it came to the gun dress-up game! The ornaments now appear depending on where you put them on the gun. Some appear immediately, but some only appear as the gun evolves. It was really hard to make it work, but the final product looks really cool.
When I’m playing, my favourite fabric to use on the arms is definitely the leopard print. It just screams Y2K. In terms of the gun ornaments, I know you’ve probably seen a lot of footage where I’m adding the shark to the Magic Wand, so you may be surprised to hear that my favourite is actually the rhinestones. I don’t know what it is, but I just love rhinestoning my guns.
[h3]Thank you so much for taking the time to read this month’s dev diary and I hope you all enjoyed it!!!
What topic would you like me to talk about in next month’s dev diary?
Let me know in the comments![/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2610650/Dont_Stop_Girlypop/
[h3]Click the button below to join our Discord and use the buttons at the bottom of the announcement to follow us on social media ❤[/h3]