I have a question about characters. We saw in the last AtV an interview with Community Manager Disco Lando and our Persistent Universe Director Tony Zurovec about Nyx. Also we saw the cool Mr. Rob Reiniger talk about that. My question now is: Are you guys also involved with creating some characters(crime people) we heard? If yes, which one? And what is all involved to get an NPC to us the backers? Is it like the ship pipeline with concept, backstory, greybox, whitebox, etc? How long do you guys need for one character? Sorry. Sneaked in a few questions.asked by Perry_Hope

Snuck in a few question.

He's apologizes for sneaking in a few questions which is fine because we grew up in Reno.

And I pulled out this question specifically, Forest and I were talking about it because Forest is focusing a lot of characters right now and the development and creation of characters and we may not be able to answer specifically about what's going on in Nyx or those ingredients, but we can talk just in general about characters and I think this is a great. He asked basically what is the pipeline step and one thing I was going to speak to after that is how long a character takes and you know 8 weeks ago or not 8 weeks ago, 4 months ago in our tech, we couldn't have answered that question, but now we can and it's going to keep going faster. What are the steps for a character?

So the the way that we do characters and I've kind of mentioned this a couple times, but now it's really set in stone, were actually implementing that which is great. We build characters very different than most games. We don't build full characters, we build clothing accessories and then we have our scanned heads and then our base bodies. When we build a character, we don't need a character artist to go in and build a character from scratch.We can have designers go in a plug in different types of clothing and then that creates your NPC. So the NPC's use the same system that the players use to customize themselves right? We build wardrobes and we have these manufacturers for all this stuff. We also have this dynamic wear system for clothing to make it feel newer or older so when it comes to creating characters crime people right? You want to create some hooligans or something, it really depends. You take the clothing that you want to stereotype I guess as what would be crime, but really what it's about is.

Crime in that universe, what was dictated by our Writers and Designers.

Yeah, but you're really gonna have, it's more going to be in the areas where we place these characters and maybe we have certain character and we place them in darker alleyways and maybe we wear there clothes a little more so they're not so pristine. That is what gives you the illusion that these characters could be potentially be committing crimes. It gives our designers the ability to create these characters without needing our character artists to actually do it.

It's a very unique ideas of saying if I put these five pieces on a character, it means they're from this class system, they're from this planet, they're this place in their life. There's all these cool things that go into it instead of saying I'm going to make the crime person, here that's the only one you can use. It's like If I go up or down, maybe the crimes a little less and more which I even talked about on the StarMap so it kinda all blending into the same idea.

And you can have crime that you know, people that look nicer and you can have people that are quite wealthyEKD: Blue collar crime, white collar crime.

And you can have people that are quite wealthy in the game that decide to look like your average joe and you don't really know which is kind of cool because it's kinda like real life right? And then what is all involved in getting the NPC's back to us. So creating all the clothing, creating the system in the game that allows you to pick the different clothes and then that allows us to have the designer be able to pick the different clothes for the NPC's that are in the game.So it's one system, we do it once and then everybody has what they need and then how long do you need for one character? Again it's really based off the article of clothing, it's not about one character. Each clothing accessory we learned takes about a week and a half, something like that. So for a shirt or for a pair of pants maybe a week and then multiple that by how many combination you want or however many we want to do.

And each those pieces have a certain amount set amount of deliveries and those deliveries have different review specifications and depends on if we're doing it in house or if we're working with an outsourcer, there's a lot of different factors that go into play with that. As quick as we can, that's the goal, we're trying to make things quickly so he can get more variations and have more options.

And then you know is it like the ship pipeline concept, backstory, greybox, whitebox. Yeah it's very much like that. All of our pipelines really run a similiar, they really run in parallel with each other. You have the concept for the clothes. First actually you'll read it in order, first you have your backstory so the lore and the writers kind of decide what all the types of clothing you'll have in the game and then we have concept artists draw the actual clothing to fit the lore. Then we have the whitebox stage which we kind of block it out and get it in there. Then we have our greybox stage which is actually we make it look nicer, we start making sure the tech works with everything and then we do our polish stage which is our final pass.

This is a good question I felt for Forest because he, when I started we were developing.

We just got done with that.

We just done developing it, it's a very interesting, the fidelity to get certain levels of characters you really gotta hit all these pieces because they all they have different reasons. I want to get his version of this character because I want to get the designers to start using it and actually feeling the flow of the game. Then I keep going and make it really cool and there's just all different elements in play.