The developer Yatch Club Games He has left shyness in recent days and has not stopped sharing details about his company, including his some of its development processes.
The company in this opportunity Has published an interesting blog detailing how they created new ones from scratch NPC for King of cards, characters present in the title that are not controlled by the player, but that fulfill necessary functions for the gameplay.
We leave you with an excerpt from the blog below:
A lot of thought goes into creating all the characters you interact with during the course of an adventure in Shovel Knight! You may have wondered: How does Yacht Club decide on character design? Do you first sketch out the ideas or go straight to sprite? Why are there so many people on horseback?
Some questions don't have easy answers, but today we can at least shed some light on our process of creating and animating an NPC (non-player controlled character) for Shovel Knight: King of Cards.
Placeholder first
Most of the NPC characters you'll encounter throughout the course of a Shovel Knight game will have been added with a specific gameplay intent in mind. Generally located in a safe area, NPCs are there to impart a bit of feature teaching dialogue, to deliver a crucial item, or to challenge you. Most of the time, we implement NPC as a default riding sprite while d iscovering its function in the game.
Later in development, we will know what NPC we are going to need new designs for and we will begin to create a new art to fill the world.
Character concepts
When it comes time to create a new character, we ask ourselves some questions:
- What is the role of this character? What will you have to do?
- How does it fit thematically into the King Knight adventure?
- How does it fit into the world at large or the world of Shovel Knight?
In this case, we needed someone to act as a one-stop shop for the King Knight's skill upgrades. This character would be a passenger in Glidewing, the King of Cards aircraft hub. They would imbue the Knight King with special abilities such as an enhanced shoulder bump or a magnet to attract nearby gold when spinning. We thought this passenger might be a bird, like Cooper, the Glidewing's captain. With these ideas in mind, we start with conceptual sketches.
Via.
