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Recruitable Companions
🕑 Added 2020-12-13 20:13:31 +0000 UTCHey everyone! We're back with our weekly update!
This week we'll talk about recruitable companions, how we design/develop them, and what they bring to ToLLA. Note that everything mentioned below is written from a more general perspective, as each companion will get their own detailed entry as we develop and add their specific content to the game...
In ToLLA, companions are basically recruitable partymembers the Player can acquire (through various means), and who'll travel alongside Captain Hale on his adventures. You can add/remove them from your battle formation at any time, and even permanently dismiss them if that's what you want. Apart from some very specific situations (like Meredith serving as your guide through the prologue Fort), the game will not force you to take companions you don't want. Apart from that, all companions are fully controllable by the Player during combat (with their own spells, abilities, and equipment loadouts), and they also come with a good amount of non-combat content as well (more on this below).
Each companion is unique, in that each has a specific appearance, distinct background, overarching theme, aspirations, personal quest, and main reason for joining Captain Hale's party. Companions run the gamut from good to evil (and everything in between!), from chaste to promiscuous, from old and world-weary to naive and inexperienced... If you've ever played a Bioware or Obsidian game, then you know exactly what we're shooting for here - detailed characters with their own personalities, who'll influence you as much as you do them during your shared travels... and whom you equip to further your own ends.
The first thing we develop for each companion is their concept...
We begin by brainstorming ideas and themes we think would be fun to have in the game, and go from there. Some of the companions developed this way were fleshed out in a single weekend, while others grew slowly over the course of months. Regardless of the speed of their development, all end as a detailed, multi-page entry in our design doc, with an accompanying sketch to give them a visual identity.
We share custody over the main design doc, and it's not uncommon for all three of us to go back to older entries from time to time and add little notes, updates, and suggestions we think would make a certain companion even cooler. These can be anything from small conversation snippets and battle taunts to hidden background information or visual cues for their art assets. This collaborative process never really ends, but we eventually reach a point where we feel we finally have enough for a specific character, and can proceed forward...
Once we've settled on what kind of character we're doing, our artist gets to work... She goes through multiple sketches with major and minor variations between them, tweaking and updating things as necessary. We all chip in with ideas, until the iterative process gives us a final version all three of us are satisfied with. Once we're happy, she takes this rough sketch, and develops it into a high-rez concept art piece. This is a lengthy and involved process that can take up to a whole month, depending on how much free time she has on her hands. Thankfully, most concepts are done in about 15 days...
It takes her some 40-50 hours to produce a finished, painted piece, and these are then inserted back into our design doc, where we make updates and corrections in the companion's entry to account for any changes introduced by the new art (these finished pieces will also be used in-game to illustrate the Character Pane for each companion).
Once the concept piece is done, the artist moves onto the companion's in-game portrait and bust. These usually takes another week to complete, mostly due to how difficult it is to communicate enough visual information while confined to a relatively small amount of in-game space. Companions' portraits have to be instantly recognizable, and their busts must fit onto the screen while presenting unique silhouettes, even while surrounded by multiple other colorful characters. Eliminating visual noise while keeping things distinct and recognizable is an art in itself, and always remains a challenge...
After having painted the portraits and busts, our artist starts working on the companion's battle miniature - this is a series of 2D sprites used by the game to show the companion in combat. We'll make a detailed blog post about this entire process at a later time, as there's too much to talk about here, but suffice it to say that each partymember needs multiple sprites to account for all the equippable weapons the Player can give them. Grigori -- the werewolf from the picture -- is so massive in size that he can wield two-handed weapons in one hand, while casting shamanistic spells with the other. His weapon loadout consists of things like Quarterstaves, Morningstars, Poleblades, Halberds, Tridents, Spears, etc, each with its own spritesheet art assets.
As the art assets are being painted, our writer works to flesh out the companion's background, character, and voice. This includes writing the companion's banters, interjections, combat taunts, dialogues with Captain Hale, etc. The writing also covers the companion's personal quest, but since these quests are multi-area affairs that stretch over the course of the game, they currently exist only as detailed writeups which will see implementation at a later date.
And speaking of implementation, our scripter is busy with his own workload: it's his job to make sure everything meshes together, and that the art and writing function as intended. Every character quip, visual asset, and sound cue has to function along specific, preset conditions, and it takes a surprising amount of time to get it all up and running. We're still in the process of implementing ToLLA's core mechanics into the main build, so the scripter's primary job at the moment is assembling the asset and logic databases.
As you can see, something as simple as a recruitable character takes a large amount of effort from multiple people working concurrently to see its vision realized. Some features (like companion quests) won't be present for a while since they can't be implemented yet, while others (like dialogues) can be done pretty much from the get-go. We're also planning to have lengthy companion interactions in the party's camp, but that'll come with the World Map & Camping update further down the road...
The whole point of introducing recruitable companions is to breathe life into Captain Hale's party, and give the Player unique characters to love, hate, romance, seduce, use in combat, and form connections with (or betray, if that's the way you prefer to handle things).
Below is a work-in-progress list of how/where companions will participate in non-combat situations:
- Dialogue Interjections: companions' verbal interjections during the Player's convos with other NPCs (these are mostly for flavor, and won't impact a convo's outcome)
- Exploration Quips: shows the companion's portrait and quippy text atop the screen when the party encounters something interesting while exploring the current area
- Banter, Companion & Player: launches a regular convo box, and has the companion talk to the Player about whatever it is they want to emphasize/discuss at that time
- Banter, Companion & Companion: launches a regular convo box between *2* companions (a la Baldur's Gate II), and usually has them bickering about whatever pissed them off
- Player Influence: behind-the-scenes variable that tracks how much a companion (dis)likes Captain Hale's decisons... required to unlock the companion's romance talks and sex scenes
- Campsite Talks: triggered by talking to the specific companions at the campsite (once it's implemented), and discussing recent events and plot-critical story developments with them
- Companion's Quest: triggered by agreeing to help the specific companion with their personal quest/task/problem... this kick-starts a unique quest chain that will send the party to multiple areas in order to complete it
- Companion NPC-Aid: triggered if a certain companion is within the party, who then insta-solves an NPC's problem... quests of this type are rare, but offer a unique approach to certain situations that'd be difficult to resolve otherwise
- Sex Scene/Event (female-only): these are represented by special heart icons found in specific locations... launches the Storybook, giving Captain Hale the option to have sex with the female companion
- Dungeon Skills: each companion comes with a unique set of thematically appropriate non-combat skills, to use on locked/trapped containers within dungeons (locks, traps, chests, doors, shrines, etc.)
Many of these features will be added over the following weeks and months as we ramp up production and start tying together all the assets produced so far (in addition to all the new ones we've got planned). We invite everyone to share their thoughts and preferences on party compositions, and any of the other features outlined above; feel free to comment and let us know what you think!
And that brings us to the end of this week's developer post on recruitable companions!
As always, we hope you had fun reading - stay tuned for more next week!
~ Crimson Delight Games
