Character Creation Perfected: Perfect Glowing Bodies

I am so greedy. Whereas Alice musters great aesthetic appreciation for Strangethink's experimental gamettes, my mind hungrily inclines to how they can be turned to other purposes. Case in point, I want Perfect Glowing Bodies to be the basis of a character creator in the next XCOM game, or for it to be expanded into a Syndicatelike as some neon holo-dream.

Perfect Glowing Bodies is a toy, really, but I like to think of it as a fragment of code from another reality which somehow slipped into ours. It's the character creator tool for a game that doesn't exist in this world, which is a good thing - because instead I get to imagine that game. As I push sliders and pull nodes, and a lurid yet elegant colour scheme flows across a symmetrically mutated biped. my mind bubbles with half-thoughts of what this contextless hero might do. That's the moment I treasure.

Because it's followed by a rather more unimaginative thought: 'ooh, imagine having this much control of character creation in XCOM or WoW.' What a good thing that would be, even if it is unfairly pinning someone else's creation to something established. I don't mean simply in terms of having greater control over the proportions and hues of your fightmen and fightwomen, but of the clever, simple manner means of adjusting them in Perfect Glowing Bodies. The traditional UI for a character creator tool is click-click-clicking through lists of body parts and sizes, which can be laborious and will often encourage pursuing extremes because it's the quickest way to build something that seems 'yours'. Or, too often, I'll simply hit 'randomise' because I get bored of all the clicking and scrolling.

In Perfect Glowing Bodies, dramatic changes are achieved by minute adjustments of almost tactile graphs. It takes only the most fractional effort to create someone who looks completely different from the last guy-thing you made, but at the same time it feels very much as though I did it, rather than that PGB did it. Sure, the co-ordinated neon colour schemes are super-cool, but I'm into this because it feels far more like remixing DNA than picking from pre-fab parts.

It's a toy. A pretty, responsive toy that other games can learn an awful lot from.

Perfect Glowing Bodies is pay-what-you-want from Itch.io here. There's also an official description of what it's 'about' there, but I've not included that in this post because having no context for PGB meant I was able to imagine it was about/from a whole bunch of other things.