Using colored sprites VS color them programmatically

2D
1

So, I’m really new to Unity development. A couple of friends and I are developing a 2D game in Unity and part of that game is creating an avatar and personalize it: Change aspects like the type and color of the eyes, skin color, type and color of hair, etc.

Me and my colleagues have come to a little discussion.

We are not sure if it is a better idea to have various copies of the sprites in different colors (I mean to have like five or six avatar heads, in different colors; same with body, arms, legs, eyes, etc) or to have just one base sprite and color it programmatically.

We are talking about saving lot of space in sprites vs saving processor usage in coloring (and possibly quality and stuff)

Like I mentioned before, we are really newbies, this might be really obvious to you, but we would like to read you opinion and reasons on the issue.
Thanks in advance

2

Well, both are valid options.
If you only want to change a few of the colors you might want to code a PaletteSwap script or something like that to make it easy to create variations of the same sprite.
If you plan to have other features as well (maybe scars, glasses or stuff like that) you should probably create different sprites.

1 Like