   Character Creation System Advice for Web Game
  Hi all!  I'm working on a small web-based game using GWT and GAE/J (not flash at the moment, but willing to consider it if I have to go that route) and I was looking into letting players create simple static 2D characters for themselves.  I want to figure out exactly how I should tackle this technically before working with the artists.Basically I'm hoping to get these features out of the system:1. Choosing features such as eyes, hair, facial structure, body type, etc.2. Choosing colors for features like eye color, skin color, hair color, etc.3. Choosing clothes like dresses, jewelry, gloves, shoes, etc.4. They can change these features at any time if they want to tweak their character.I'm thinking since the characters are all static for now I can probably use a ton of artwork images for each feature and layer images that I pull from the server.  The layering can probably be done on the client (using css magic) or the server (blending the actual image data before returning a single character image).  However I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about doing this (there might be weird combinations where body type or facial type influences other features and I can't just layer the images but need many versions of each).Also, I was hoping to use a color chooser for all of the color selections.  I'm not sure how I would tint images on the client so I assume this would have to rely on image data manipulation in a servlet before returning the result to the client.  It has to rely on real time computation for the colors because even if I chose 20 colors and pre-baked the images the combinations would just explode (Or would it even matter?  Is it normal for most web games to hold hundreds of images and use character attributes to pull select images down?).Basically I'm just wondering how most games do this.  I know it's not a typical project environment for most gamedev questions.  I'd feel more at home using C++ and OpenGL/DirectX :(.  Basically I don't really know where to start or if I'm on the right track.  For example: Is flash the best way to do this?  I was hoping to keep it all GWT/GAE...Any advice would be greatly appreciated!  Thanks for reading!-Dave   