KoD Preview: Orc NPCs

This week, it's time to talk about NPCs!

Since Sabia is in an orc camp, naturally most of the characters she meets are orcs. The thing is, we know that a very small percentage of our audience is playing for the orcs! Most of the content and drawing time should be spent on the main characters, so NPCs represent a puzzle.

One option would be to just have a single orc model that's reused for every orc. But that would make the game look a little cheap, especially when two orcs have to talk to each other. We'd also rather have a more variable camp where even minor NPCs can have a bit of personality.

Therefore, what we've done is create the base orc model in multiple pieces. Not just pieces of armor, but different facial hair, piercings, and so on. This way, Sierra can mix and match different elements to create a large number of unique orcs without any new art assets. That frees up Nomo to spend more of his time on the main content.

Here's an image showing off some of the variety available:

http://i.imgur.com/18SDMXs.jpg

Just the basic grunt armor shown in that image allows for 64 combinations! That's plenty to give a little flair to every generic orc, not just for the first update but for the entire game. We've finished more variants, too, which will come into play when we need more than a generic NPC. Here's an example of a unique orc with a name and role in the story:

http://i.imgur.com/9MFODdh.jpg

Who he is and what role he'll play will have to come in a later update. For today, we just wanted to give you a glimpse into the effort we're putting into the game's quality. Our hope is that by thinking through the game's systems carefully, we'll be able to deliver a high degree of visual quality in an efficient way instead of spreading our efforts in a lot of directions every month. It's thanks to all of you that we can work on Kingdom of Deception with the long term in mind, so thanks again for your support!

Back next week with another update, see you then!