Hey all, this is Jesse "Loche" Benjamin, a designer on Star Wars Galaxies. In this dev diary, I will discuss the new colored props and instruments I added to the game in Game Update 2.

During our brainstorming for entertainer update, I saw that one of the top 5 issues entertainers listed was diversity. So I brainstormed ways to make entertainers more diverse.

The obvious and most likely way to do this was to allow the coloring of instruments and props. These items can help two bands or troupes of entertainers differentiate themselves even if they are using the same instruments or props.

The first step to achieving this goal was to attach color palettes to the instruments. I decided to use the same palette for all instruments.

Below is a screenshot of a nalargon before I added the coloring of instruments.

Here is a nalargon being crafted now.

Note that the instrument looks vastly different, and also note that there is a color picker on the side of the crafting interface. The color picker needed to be added via the scripts we use for crafting. They basically pull the palettes attached to the appearance template for the crafted instrument.

Whenever we add a palette to an existing item, invariably their base colors change. Since I wanted to impact existing instruments as little as possible, I decided to create entirely new draft schematics and objects for these new customizable versions. With that in mind, I re-named all the existing instruments to "Classical" to symbolize that these were the older versions.

The only existing instrument that was affected by the palette change was the xantha. This is because the xantha already had a palette associated with it; in fact, that is the palette I used for all instruments. Its base colors changed when I had the palette enlarged, to allow more colors.

Once instruments were tackled, I moved on to the task of adding customizable props. This was a lot more difficult. After doing much research into ways to customize props, I realized the most popular props (sparklers, ribbons, etc.) were actually particles. This means I could not attach a palette to them to allow players to customize them on the fly.

Our solution was to create as many new particles as I could, and make them their own draft schematics. I ended up with 64 new props -- that's 32 per hand.

Below is a screenshot of an entertainer using the previously existing set of sparkler ribbons.

This is now the same entertainer using the new blue and green sparkler ribbons.

And that, in a nutshell, is how I added colors to instruments and props in Game Update 2. I hope you enjoyed reading this dev diary.

Jesse "Loche" Benjamin
Designer, Star Wars Galaxies