[PR] Contributor Rewards accessible to all

[github_bot]

PULL REQUEST DETAILS

About the PR
Those with the Contributor medal, in addition to being heroes of the community due to exceptional contributions to the game, are able to select any skin hue they want for humans and blattodeans, as well as access a silly-sounding scream. The additional character customization that this medal provides is highly coveted, obviously.

However, the current method of getting these is nebulous at best. You gain the medal by having an admin award it to you-- the criteria for awarding it is completely qualitative. You're not supposed to bug admins/devs about getting contributor, so all you can do is wait, and hope that one of the contributions you make reminds them that the medal exists.

Locking such a desired reward behind such a difficult and obfuscated path is frustrating, to say the least. Following a discussion on the matter in discord, this PR proposes one of many solutions to this frustration:

- Skin color freedom is now a one-point trait, "Dermachromatic." Skin colors are limited to a "Value" of at least 20%, and the sum of their "Saturation" and "Value" cannot exceed 140%.



Highlights from the discussion on Discord
I don't expect the solutions proposed in this PR to become the final product; many good ideas were floated during discussions, and I expect the discussion to continue for a long, long time, until we're all supremely sick and tired of it. Only a few ideas are highlighted here; feel free to expand on them, or mention ones I missed, in discussion either on GitHub or the forums.
# Suggested alternative ways to earn the rewards
- Instead, tie the skin color reward to a new medal, granted upon taking a bath in Colorful Reagent
- Instead, allow contributors to share the rewards with others, similar to the "unlike the director, I went to college" medal.
- Instead, make the medal much easier to get. Just one PR of any scale, or something along those lines.
- Instead, make the full color scale be locked behind 20 rounds played, like Captain.
# Concerns
- Making it available to everyone just turns it into "muppet station," e.g. bright magenta humans. There's value that should not be understated in having people still look like normal humans.
- "...it gets kind of tiring watching people use it just to make weird monsters at roundstart and try to mess with people." This happens already with normal skin tones, but would undoubtedly get worse with unlimited skin tones.

todo for this PR

Assuming all goes forward with this implementation, Dermachromatic will need a sprite for its trait icon. I don't have what it takes to make it, but if you're a spriter with an itchy drawing tablet, hold off for a bit, because I doubt these will be the final implementation.

Changelog

Code:

changelog
(u)Mintyphresh
(*)Added a new trait, Dermachromatic. This replaces the skin color reward that previously only Contributors could claim.

PULL REQUEST DETAILS

[babywrangler85]

merge it

[Cal]

I actually personally really hate the scream and would rather have it removed from the game tbh, idk how others feel about it though

[mintyphresh]

merge it

I actually think there does need to be some level of exclusivity (see the "concerns" section about abuse, and oversaturation of freekay-looking characters on station)

[Zamujasa]

comedy option: the screams should be tied to having some goofy reagent in you. lord knows we have a bunch of drinks, maybe some of them could have funny side effects


re: the pr as it is:
- removing the dialog box in favor of just presenting a custom color if the trait is picked is probably a bad idea. having the ability to reset back to a known good set of colors is useful
- there does not seem to be any brightness checks on this, though whatever those are would be debated later, surely
- spacebux for silly scream is probably a bad idea. i actually do like those being rare (in that i do not like them that much at all)

[Mordent]

Anything that tends towards more people picking non-skin-tone colors gets a thumbs down from me. Also, nuke the scream.

Copying the bulk of my post from the parallel admin discussion (and tweaking a bit for context), because of course this is happening now in: forums, forums (admin), Discord, Discord (admin), probably on the PR as well.

I disagree with people not having the same visual customization options as others, at least in part because it further makes impersonating them tricky, and a lot of the game is about social deduction and deception.

This extends to medal cosmetic awards in general, in my mind, but those aren't going away. Why not just bring it in line with those and let you do some cosmetic tweak of something? That way I can at least steal it off of them if I want to pretend to be them. I'd love if medals didn't mutate stuff you wore and was part of character setup, but whatever. Much bigger project, and this would just be "another one of those items" when that gets done. Some suggestions:

• Short-sleeve t-shirt and pants with some visual implication of writing/art on it, description along the lines of "I contributed my hardest and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".
  
• Pen that has an extra-mechanical sound when you click it, a la mechanical keyboards.
  
• Let you change a cup into a "World's #<4 random digits> Greatest Contributor" mug.
  

To me the above feel sufficiently viable as something that crew could have (non-immersion breaking) while still being a fourth-wall nod.

I'm incredibly iffy on humans getting a full hue gamut for skin color. I understand some people want to use the combo of skin color and carefully selected hairstyles to play weird "races". I do not think this is consistent with our setting and think it should not be available as a baseline crew member. I'm sure this view is contentious, but it is what it is.

I understand you can be changed to any color in the genetics scanners right now; if we want to go the route of opening up the palette, combine it with also setting that as the same range on the genetics scanners. That way the "in setting" reason can easily be "yeah, I had genetics change me to neon purple as soon as I joined NT" or whatever you need to.

With all of the above done, contributor medal as a simple "your name is on a merged PR and/or its changelog authors" (allowing for spriters/mappers/etc. to get stuff in without being technical). Incredibly low barrier to entry.

[Retrino]

big fan of this pr. ive had the contrib medal for years, and while there was novelty to making funny purple or red people initially, its mainly been useful to me in giving my characters specific skintones that are otherwise extremely difficult to make with the normal skintone slider in character setup, or just unobtainable. im not really sure How it could be gone about to prevent people from making themselves bright green, but as the pr stated, people make themselves weird monsters by just doing random hair combos anyway. i think giving people more freedom to adjust their skintone without it being locked behind a very difficult to acquire medal is great, and if the versatility has to be trimmed (preventing neon goobers from running around roundstart, etc) to allow it to be accessible to everyone, thats a fair tradeoff. no thoughts on the scream other than its silly, i like zamu's idea of tying to a reagent or something. maybe one of the weirder mutantrace custom scream

[mintyphresh]

the scream definitely would fit well with lizards or martians or frogs or something but for now I'm just moving it back to contrib and running away to my corner and holding out my crucifix and chanting "out of scope"

---

Played around with the sliders a bit and I think a fair solution to stop obnoxious colors would be a limit on both saturation and value-- the sum being less than or equal to 140. You can still get some pretty vibrant colors, but they're not loud or anything. Once I figure out how to code it I'll PR it in.

[Lord_earthfire]

I think the skin-colour medal rewards is mostly disruptive for visual cohesion of the crew and should be genetics-only.

This means giving the reward of the medal to everyone is the wrong direction to take, imo.

[meaow589]

Seem like good PR for contributor sound cool

[Glamurio]

Some visuals would go a long way with this. As someone who feels like customization is important, but actually feels like many aspects of the game already destroy immersion to some extend, I was actually quite happy with the version Zamu posted in Discord. It seems less of an eyesore and still allows some degree of customization that is ultimately a better version of what we have, namely limiting it to 20% V (aka #333333)

The other big issue is still that the medal should just receive a proper, ideally automatic streamlining. Maybe simply something that ties a contributor from GitHub or via Discord to the in-game username. There shouldn't be any more criteria than that, simply any PR that is liked and gets merged should make you a contributor for fairness sake.

[Silent Majority]

Could we make it so Flashy is just a genetic option that lets them change their color the same way Saurians can and then just make it a purchasable mutarace?

Could make it so they have to drink paint to recharge it. IDK.

[Snoid]

i do not see why, in a scifi game with a bunch of weird species that are kind of human but kind of not human, you shouldnt be able to get weird inhuman skin tones too. how is playing as a skeleton fine but having blue skin unimmersive.

opening up these options to everyone just means that people will have the option to do more creative gimmicks. ive wanted this so i could do one specific funny thing but i havent had the option to, but this would let me finally do my bit.

[KikiMofo]

I don't mind if people have access to the same stuff everyone else does at creation. Though I dunno what one is the contributor scream. Can someone link me a sound file of it?
Edit: Heard the three different screams and yeah I've barely ever heard them in game but then again I don't play often but I can see how people would get annoyed by them if everyone was able to use them.

[Glamurio]

i do not see why, in a scifi game with a bunch of weird species that are kind of human but kind of not human, you shouldnt be able to get weird inhuman skin tones too. how is playing as a skeleton fine but having blue skin unimmersive.

opening up these options to everyone just means that people will have the option to do more creative gimmicks. ive wanted this so i could do one specific funny thing but i havent had the option to, but this would let me finally do my bit.

Having blue skin isn't bad (that's why the idea is to allow that), but having a skin color that is visually jarring and hard to make out the details on is not just an eyesore but also borderline metagaming for visual clarity.