03 / NOV / 2024
Customization is Better When It's Hard
Oh yeah, you read that right: A title on one of my blog posts!
A while back, I mourned the death of the "Play, Create, Share" model of game design, wherein games (particularly on the PlayStation 3) were made with some sort of creative tool. LittleBigPlanet is the obvious example here, with the level designer being as prevalent as it was, but there were also games like ModNation Racers and Flipnote in addition to Minecraft's rise in popularity throughout that time period. This coalescence of popular games being creativity-driven, I believe, led to a growing culture of creativity in kids and gamers. But then, for whatever reason, creative tools left the picture. These days, the only customization someone has in a game is the ability to make the character look like themself so they can act out a self-insert power fantasy. Creative tools fell out of favor, and these days customization in any software -- let alone any game -- is locked behind knowledge of how to mod or program.
But you know what? You shouldn't let that stop you. On the contrary, I think that figuring out a way to customize an otherwise-uncustomizable software is a great way to improve your knowledge on computers, even if you never put that knowledge to work in the future. As an example, my knowledge of CSS, meager as it is, started with BetterDiscord (although I've since switched to Vencord). More specifically, it was born from the ClearVision theme, which prides itself as being "highly customizable." That it is, as the CSS editor taught me a thing or two about working with RGB and hex values, setting backgrounds, and changing fonts. Shortly afterwards, I would put that knowledge into the site that you're reading right now.
Later on, I had an interest in making a custom campaign for Hotline Miami 2, which would involve changing up the game's sprites, which in turn would involve decompiling the game and editing the assets in GIMP. In other words, home-grown WAD modding. In the end, the task proved too daunting for me to complete, but I still keep the files on my desktop for posterity's sake.
Much more recently, I started work on the YOMI HUSTLE Campaign series. Even from the start, decompiling the game to work with and edit sprintes -- not to mention finding a way to keep them looking pixelated in Sony Vegas -- has been the basis of the entire process. Further than that, I figured out how to hunt down workshop files in my PC and extract the assets from user-made stages to serve as the setting in each scene. Maybe it's not something worth bragging about in comparison to the hackermen who hammer out TF2 maps in their spare time, but God damn it, I'm proud of myself for knowing my PC's files better than I know myself.
My most recent escapade in customization adventures was changing up the colors in this Audacious player:
I wanted to change the blue in this player to magenta. That's it. That's all I wanted to do.
But here's the thing about the media player: It doesn't have any color swatches, or even any customization outside of changing the visualizer. I couldn't just scroll through a drop-down menu that says "Change color to..." because it doesn't exist.
But I did know about something that does exist: asset files. I knew that there had to be some set of image files constituting this player's appearance, so I sifted through the program files and found them. They were all seperated into individual assets instead of being on one large spritesheet, but I had a few hours to kill and was (perhaps too) determined to change that blue to magenta.
Of course, the color mode was indexed so that only the G and B values were active, which meant I had to change the color mode to full RGB. For anyone who thinks that sounds complicated, it just takes 2 clicks to do and wasted a total of 1 minute on the whole project. From there, I knew that everything besides the blue areas were greyscaled, so I could simply shift the hues without worrying about fucking up the entire window's colors.
An hour later, I did it.
An hour. 60 minutes. 60 minutes to change from blue to magenta.
And by God, it was fucking worth it.
This is what makes customization better when it's inacessible: The payoff always feels good. If I had just gone through a drop-down menu and clicked "pink" or "purple" or "magenta," I would have either been unfulfilled by such a trivial experience or else I'd be miffed that it's not in the exact shade I want. But when I put my knowledge to the test and managed to figure out how to find the sprite files, take them to GIMP, change the colors, and move every file to its proper place without fucking up the whole layout, I felt accomplished. I oversaw that thingamabob and made it work twice as efficiently. That, my friends, is why customization is better when it's hard. The accomplishment, no matter how small, feels so damn good in the end.
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