Overview
In late 2023, I developed a character customization system for Kaizen's Origami. This system enables players to create and customize their characters, allowing them to use any item from the Roblox catalog. This approach can be similar to the Catalog Avatar Creator, but tailored to our specific audience.
In early 2024, the system allowed players to create and manage multiple characters with individual bios, name colors, and outfits. They can easily switch between characters and outfits, providing a dynamic and personalized experience. A significant amount of effort went into the exporting and importing processes to ensure efficient data compression, allowing users to store multiple characters and outfits. We currently support 50 characters with 50 outfits each, with plans to increase these limits to 1000 characters and 3000 outfits through datastore fragmenting techniques.
In late 2024, we released our advanced customization system which allowed players to retexture faces and modify accessories with recolors, and repositioning. We are very proud of the work that went into this and believe we have the best system on the entire platform. As of May 2025, we now also have an auto-save feature that backs up player avatars to prevent data loss on disconnect.
Development & Features
The project was developed on Roblox and their Luau programming language. Key milestones included:
- Character Customization: Players can create avatars with full access to items from the Roblox catalog. Changes are applied as soon as they leave the menu.
- Change History Logging: Changes are logged to allow for undo & redo features.
- Character & Outfit Management: Players can create and customize characters, including setting names and bios. Characters can have multiple outfits, and players can switch between these outfits easily. Players also have the ability to export and import outfits through the code system.
- Data Compression: Focused on data optimization to ensure users can store many characters and outfits without hitting datastore limits, resulting in a 80% reduction in outfit data size. Current limits are 50 characters with 50 outfits each, with plans to increase this further.
- Avatar Compression System: Avatars are compressed into avatar codes, which are short and efficient for storage in datastores, making it easier for players to share and use avatars.
- Roblox Studio Plugin: We introduced a plugin that allows players to import their custom creations directly into Roblox Studio. The plugin can be found here.
- Advanced Customization: Recently added advanced customization options, including the ability for players to use custom textures for faces and manipulate various accessory options.
- Accessory Customization: Players can modify position, rotation, scale, color, and texture of accessories. We’re also working on a new option to adjust accessory welds to other limbs.
- Face Retexturing: Players can manually retexture their faces with their own assets.
- Auto-Save Avatar Backups: A very recent feature which enables the server to back up the user’s last applied avatar as well as backing up avatar drafts from the customization menu to cover a scenario where the player disconnects in the middle of customizing. The client sends changes to the server a few seconds after the last applied change to prevent multiple redundant requests being made.
- Networking & Replication: This project involved a substantial amount of networking when managing user data and applying avatars.
Screenshots of the Character Customization
Previews of our Advanced Customization
Screenshots of our Character Storage System
Screenshot of our Character Backup Recovery
Player Reception