NPC Creation

[Late Bloomer]

The following questions are more about NPC creation on larger development teams.

Who decides on the look of both named NPC's and generic NPC's? In a game like Skyrim, during the cart ride that opens the game, you are in a cart with 3 NPC's. Ralof, Lokir, and Ulfric. Would the narrative designer decide their look? Who decides that Ralof has blonde hair? Who on the team actually gets their hands dirty and creates the characters themselves? Are they working with autonomy or with examples of what each character needs to look like? When the creation of named NPC's is done, would someone (or more) need to approve their looks?

For random NPC's, in a game like Fallout 4, the game pulls from a small pool of pre-existing faces. So if you strip them of their helm (if they are wearing one) you might recognize their face from an NPC you encounterd in the previous area you were fighting at. Would the same person (people) who worked on named NPC's also decide the look of random NPC's?

 

[Percolator Fish]

Lead artist whips up a quick sketch for each character and mails it to a guy by the name of Brad Horsely down in Kansas and he signs off on it. That's how it's always been done. He's the official NPC creator but he mostly just rubber stamps designs.

 

[Percolator Fish]

i can message u his address if u need

 

[Krice]

I don't have experience on working in a large team, but have a hunch that it's not that important. Tasks like that are just given to some developers, maybe there are even people who have experience on that kind of stuff. Character creation and dialog is probably one of the easiest things in RPG development, so you can hire anyone to do that. I think it's what Alanah Pearce is doing in game industry, some kind of character design or dialog. She is dumb as a door knob so even she can do that and it's certainly not an important part of modern RPG development. It could be, but you never see results of that, a really good character design / story / dialog.