Devlog #19: Tattoos you earn, ink that grows with you

This one is all about skin. In Beyond you play a clone, and clones carry faint memories of the bodies before them. Tattoos are how that history shows: marks you earn by playing, kept on your account through every death and every wipe.

How they work

• Earned, not bought: every tattoo is earned through play. We're not saying how. Some are a badge of honour, some are marks you'd rather not have, and part of the fun is working out what you did to get one.
• A quiet heads-up: when you earn one, a small banner tells you there's new ink and where it is on your body. That's all it says.
• Yours for good: tattoos belong to your account, not your character. They survive death, server wipes and fresh starts.
• Only on bare skin: clothes and armour cover them. Strip down and the history shows.

A full bodysuit, piece by piece

The body is split into 36 shaped areas, and each one gets its own design: a chest piece, a back piece, sleeves, knuckles, thighs, shins and calves. Left and right are separate tattoos, so you can end up with one sleeve finished and the other bare.

• Fitted designs: each design is drawn to fill the shape it sits in, so it follows the muscles instead of being a square sticker on the skin.
• Old-school style: bold outlines, strong reds, greens and golds, with smoke and filigree worked into the background of each piece.
• Small face marks: the face only gets small pieces, like a teardrop or a row of stars under an eye. The rest of the head stays clean.
• Left bare on purpose: hands, palms and feet, and everything under the briefs.

Ink that grows

A tattoo doesn't arrive finished.

• Black and grey first: a new tattoo starts as black-and-grey linework.
• Colour comes later: keep doing whatever earned it and the colour starts to come in, first partly, then in full.
• Filler joins them up: as your pieces fill in, black-and-grey smoke and dotwork grows into the gaps around them. A body with a few tattoos looks like a body with a few tattoos, and a veteran ends up in a full suit.

Making it look like ink

We spent a lot of this round on making the tattoos look like real ink in skin:

• Ink in the skin: the ink sits in the skin rather than on top of it, so skin tone and shading still show through.
• Healed black: black heals to a soft blue-black, and light colours are thinner, like real tattoos.
• Soft edges: edges bleed very slightly, so the lines aren't razor sharp.
• Briefs line: the designs stop cleanly at the briefs line.

We went back and forth on how solid the ink should be. The first pass was too see-through and the second was too solid, so what you see here sits between the two.

Not finished yet

• Earning in real play: we've tested earning and colouring tattoos with test commands, not in a normal play session. The rules behind most of the new tattoos haven't been earned the normal way yet.
• Seams: you can sometimes spot a seam where two areas meet, mostly on the neck and shoulders.
• Multiplayer: we haven't yet checked how other players' tattoos look online.

What's next

• A play test: a full play test of earning tattoos the normal way.
• Seams: tidying the neck and shoulder seams.
• Kickstarter: back to the Kickstarter page.