Customize Colors for Sprites in Web Game
- by NateDSaint
So I'm working on an html5/javascript/css3-based game. Without going into too much detail, I'm thinking of having the characters be simple 8 or 16-bit style sprites, but I'd like to allow the user to customize the colors of their character.
Here are some examples of what I'm talking about :
http://jsfiddle.net/simurai/CGmCe/light/
http://www.splashnology.com/article/sprite-animation-in-css3/1485/
So the problem I'm having is two-fold:
1) Should I use something other than a sprite map for my characters, like actually draw them as shapes and animate them in a canvas element? That way I can fill the sprite with colors of the user's choosing? My fear there is that this would be inefficient as far as resources and also waste a lot of time hand-drawing everything, but could allow other customization (like height/width etc).
2) Are there potentially some web apis that would allow you to alter colors inside of a sprite? I suppose I could do it on the back-end with GD, but I'm trying to make it entirely in-browser (including local storage).
It's not a definitive one-answer only question, but I'm hoping someone can suggest something they've seen that approaches the same problem from another angle or gives us a way to customize the sprites or manipulate them in some manner. Or avoid them altogether, and use a different method.
