Posted October 14, 2019 by Crestpeak Bay
Hello, dear readers,
Right now character asset production is ramping up. There are over 100 NPCs slated to be in the game, separated into three general categories: "Dateable," "Unique," and "Filler." Today, we'll be talking about the Filler NPCs as they will be completed first for a variety of reasons.
Filler NPCs are going to be unnamed strangers that pad out the game world. They'll each have 2 poses and 2 facial expressions per pose, and 10 or so interactions that many of them will share. They will each have their own overworld sprite. Some of them will also share the same base body and poses.
Since the portrait artist is still improving over time and asset production is slated to continue well into 2020, it makes sense to batch them from least important to most important. That way, the highest level of portrait artwork is reserved for the NPCs the player will be spending the most time with. This also allows us to gain practice and improve upon the pipeline so that by the time we get to the more featured characters, we are well-oiled NPC creation machine.
The process for character asset production is to first create a lineup for each "batch" of NPCs (around 10 per location in the case of fillers). These will be full-boy, fully colored, and delivered to the sprite artist who will make sprites based on these designs. Meanwhile, on the portrait side, the different poses and expressions will be created individually for each NPC, collated, and exported for use in the game. The last step is to create the interactions and flavor dialogue pool for the batch. After that, we implement them in the game and test rigorously to make sure they are working as intended.
We will be sharing assets as they are made on social media https://twitter.com/CrestpeakBay and our Discord, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/3a9Z4dn
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