Using reskins. Why is content recoloring acceptable?
Hi! We at Donut Lab are developing the mobile shooter Donut Punks (formerly known as Kids vs Zombies). Whether it comes as a revelation to you or not, cosmetic content is one of the pillars of monetization in free-to-play projects. In order to regularly supply the game with new skins, items, and other attributes of a beautiful virtual life, content production frequently gets churned out.
While looking for a way to optimize this process, we’ve decided to keep to the well-trodden and familiar track — content recoloring. But in order to avoid the expected dissatisfaction, we decided to approach the issue in a creative way not only by recoloring content but looking for ways to make it unique. Now we will tell you what came of it.
Why do you need reskins?
First things first: How recolored skins came to be, and why players need them. Reskins in games are a long-standing thing designed to optimize costs and simplify production. The obvious benefit of this technique is that you can draw a certain game asset once and then change its color, reaching relative variety.
Mario from the 1995 classic Super Mario Bros. is an example. The character’s sprites are identical in shape, but different in color.
Or another classic — Shining Force II from 1993 on the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) and recolored enemies.
On older devices, reskins both accelerated the development process and saved system resources, which made their use more justified. As a result, not only protagonists and enemies were recolored but also objects in locations, special effects, items, and skill icons.
Players took exception to that approach, especially in large projects designed for a longplay. For example, in JRPGs, where, due to their high playthrough duration, recolored content is more conspicuous. In gamers’ opinions, reskins have become synonymous with developers’ laziness, lack of ideas, and an inability to create something unique.
If we compare modern games with the era of early consoles, we see how technical limitations have expanded significantly. Even a client who has several gigabytes of free space can afford mobile games, while computing power has increased a lot over the years. Therefore, the validity of reskins as a way to get around technical limitations has become questionable. And yet we still encounter recolored, remade, and duplicated content in many modern games. And in our own project, Donut Punks, we dared to opt for this trick.
Why? Because it’s still effective.
Effectiveness
The technical excellence of modern games requires a completely different approach to graphics. This is one of the reasons why old games were made so quickly, while the development of modern games can stretch out for years. Drawing takes a very long time, especially if you want to reach a high artistic level. This means that modern games again need an effective solution that will allow them to complete the development stage in an acceptable time frame without sacrificing quality.
For Donut Punks, reskins have become a solution and helped speed up the creation of new content.
Check out our task tracker to see how long it takes to create new skins. We take into account only the art component — that is, the image rendering.
We see a big range of timescales. Since making original skins is almost always about a new interpretation of a character, the amount of work depends entirely on the creative decision: How radically the character’s image and his attributes will change. Sometimes, the work involves merely stylistic changes, and sometimes vice versa — a completely new visual image has to be created on the basis of an existing character.
Searching for ideas also takes additional time: In some cases, ideas come instantly, while in others, it takes several days to comprehend sketches and work with them.
And now, let’s look at the terms needed to make a reskin.
We see that in 5 days’ time, not one, but 6 skins were made. This means the speed of content creation increases significantly. We can build up our inventory of content in a matter of days without any quality loss at the same time. The main thing is to pay attention to details.
How to avoid being trapped by laziness
What is a “lazy reskin?” This is when you simply recolor the model, use ready-made assets, replace some things, or resort to any other similar tricks. So it’s done a bit… lazily. If we did that, something like this would happen.
To avoid this, we approach reskin creation creatively but reasonably. In our case, we seek to keep the character’s basic silhouette, which saves the resources of animators and developers. But within the silhouette, there is absolute fun and freedom of creativity.
Take a look. The frozen guy’s fridge shelves became packed with food, and his woolen hat got turned into a sausage one. And the dude below has a totally new tank behind his back, with new details added to his face. In a direct comparison, it is interesting to find differences.
However, this approach saves time only in the short term. We can’t just crank out reskins and provide ourselves with content for years ahead within a couple of months. The reason is the quality of ideas. To make recoloring interesting and avoid lazy ones, you need to generate good ideas.
Where should I get ideas?
Reskins allow you to save money in this sense, too, especially in the beginning. You already have a character with an established image; you know a lot about him, which means you have something to build on. You just need to take the finished image and develop it.
In the picture below you see Sleepie. In his basic appearance, this is a guy suffering from insomnia. In the reskin, he’s a fan of Tim Burton’s aesthetics and gothic horror stories. It’s important that in a reskin, we don’t repeat the original character’s theme (“drowsiness”) but find a new one that rhymes with it and doesn’t conflict with it.
However, saving time on searching for ideas has a limited effect here. The character’s image, which opens the door to new interpretations, limits you at the same time. It’s impossible to exploit this approach endlessly; otherwise, the character’s uniqueness will lose its value. Once again, take Sleepie from the picture above: If we start randomly creating new images, making the character either a jerk, a brilliant scientist, or a pirate, we will lose touch with his original essence. The artistic and ideological quality of the game will suffer from this.
Therefore, we keep things within reason: Reskins allow you to save resources — and that’s more than enough. Use it, but don’t abuse it.
If not a reskin, then…
As tempting as the idea of content recoloring is, in some cases, it just doesn’t work. Look at the picture above — this is Nemo, and he lives inside a shark. Why? Well, for no apparent reason…
Nemo’s silhouette is more monolithic compared to other characters: There are almost no details, clothes, or accessories that could be transformed in such a way as to give the character a dramatically different image. Therefore, the previously adopted rules of the silhouette permanence are simply irrelevant in this case. We boldly abandoned them and did exactly the opposite: The whole concept of new Nemo skins is based on unique silhouettes. As you can see in the examples, we replaced the shark with an octopus and an anglerfish.
It certainly takes more time to develop such skins. But we significantly save time on searching for ideas, each time placing the character in a new sea creature. From an artistic point of view, such a solution is certainly more advantageous and interesting than a banal recoloring of a shark or attempts to remake an existing fish into a hypothetical herring or dolphin.
Where is the truth?
Reworking existing content doesn’t seem like a bad idea when it comes to the effective management of development resources. At the same time, this approach may seem controversial both to players (who obviously want something new) and artists who want to create, and not get into a rut. The good news is that it’s possible to strike a balance.
If we believe equally in the importance of optimizing development and in the need to invest in creativity, we will see a window of opportunity that will bring us the desired result.
Reskins help to significantly speed up content production, free up time for unique tasks, and maintain a high rate of updates. At the same time, having invested a little more time in creating reskins than required, we can greatly improve the result and get a really cool new look for the character rather than a lazy, odd job.
Saved resources can be invested in the creation of new, in this case, unique characters and images, thus maintaining the optimal development speed.
We believe that even mundane tasks can be tackled with ingenuity by encouraging creativity and inspiring developers. This means — and this is the main thing — our players will be able to receive the content that was made with love and attention, which is rare in the cynical world of mobile gaming.
