NPC’s have layers just like onions (brought to you by Smeargletail) (Patreon)

wow hi guys
okay, so june was the first month ever that i didn't post at all here. i blinked and it was halfway through the month and i started thinking about it, and then i thought,
actually.
maybe this will be good for me.

those of you who've been here since the dawn of time (2016/17 (so much love btw)) know I used to do daily posts because I thought that was just the bar for any serious self-respecting creator. in retrospect, wow that was silly and probably unhealthy. 

but i really felt like if i wasn't posting that much, or later, just Enough ™ that you all would vanish into the wind. so halfway through june I decided to trust fall. It's a full charge cycle by patreon, that weighs on me, but I think it's helpful for me to not feel so much pressure on myself to just keep up with things. i think long term it'll help the self-pressure.

thank you all so much for continuing to still be here. this is some shit i gotta let into my heart. 

also, it's been pretty important lately. I want to make an update post soon on how I'm doing with stuff, I've still got some complicated feelings, but focus on myself has actually been waylaid by some medical concerns recently. nothing to worry about-- it's all on the up from here, but my time has been a bit out of my own hands recently.

so that's forthcoming, but for today, i have a post from smeargletail for you all. on the side of everything, smeargle has been undertaking a massive sprite project to create an NPC generator for us. I had something like that going for the audience in the demo, but smeargle has outdone by volume and variety by a margin of 3-4 times. I'm gonna hand the rest of this post over to him to share a bit of that with y'all.

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Some warnings before you read this, I suck at grammar, say I a lot because I can’t word well (really hope it doesn’t come off as narcissistic) and the organization of thoughts will be chaotic.

So Ame came to me one February day 5 months ago and gave me the task of making a NPC maker of sorts. I was like sure thinking I’d have it done in a month at most and that turned into 2 months because I have no restraint. Then after 1 ½ months iirc Ame got around to looking at it because she was taking well deserved mental health time. Then for a month-ish we did back and forth reviews via voice chat.

The fashion of the heaven’s NPC’s is that of the Victorian Era.

Here are just a small sample of the characters you might see along your journey but these are just samples I made for this post, might keep the top right one just because I’ve kinda grown attached to that one and have named them. If she does appear in name she might not be named or be important but to me she will always be Mint, a person who loves the macabre just because irl I love horror. Plus it’s probably not a very angel thing to like and she wants to go against the norm.

In making this NPC maker one of the biggest goals was to make it as if each layer made not just a random character but a character that has a history. They’ve been here their whole lives. They just chose to show each other through this aseprite file.

The ears layer won’t get it’s own discussion here just know that angels have feather ears and there are currently 2 versions but that might change in the future so you might see a lot of the same ears.

There are 80+ layers there…...if making egg icons, shiny eggs, shiny egg icons and shiny icons is anything to go by I kinda get out of hand. To make it easy on Ame I tried my best to organize it through color coded folders. Red being a main folder, then sub folders go down the rainbow in color depending on how many sub folders there are. It ended up only going to yellow but, maybe Ame will add more sub categorizes in the future.

That yellow folder there has a one base hair Hair E. (which now really that it sounds like hairy) With most layers in that group interacting with one another to make combos with each other.

Hair

I had so much fun with ladies' hair, this hairstyle had 2 passes. The left was my first attempt and the right the final one. (also gonna include a zoomed in version just so you can see the details) One struggle with long hair like this is including back hair since the further it goes back it’ll go behind clothing so the first pass might of worked depending on the clothing used but the second pass implies there is hair behind it imo.

One thing that sucked about doing the hair along with the clothing really was there were no front, back, and sides for most Victorian fashion. Plus the guys hair was always so bland, men back then had like 2 haircuts. Anime’s helped a bit in that regard which meant re-watching some black butler which did not bother me any. So we got some anime hair going on for some npc’s

Also some hair that isn’t as anime but still awesome.

Facial Hair

While men’s hair wasn’t very deverse in terms of styles in the Victorian era the facial hair was another level. They had mustaches, beards, and sideburns.

They even had some facial hair styles that made me question my faith in humanity. Sir, your beard looks like legs for your face. Alas we probably won’t have beards like that in game because it’d probably just look bad.

Hats

For this hat I wanted a hat that had a slant to it so I was trying to nail down the shape then Ame was like what about looking at “Howl's Moving Castle” the movie with a literal hat maker. (side note you should go read the book the movie is based on it is really good) So basically stole the witch of the waste’s hat, something you probably shouldn’t do unless you want to be cursed. The first 2 versions of this hat on the right were done by me then Ame applied some sweet sweet blending and made the hat cool. Look how floofy it looks, couldn’t find the actual name of this hat but it’s probably just a wide brim hat with wool or fur?

Now for an example of a guys hat but, for first a question. How many of you knew that this hat is called a deerstalker hat? It was always the Sherlock hat to me. Anyway, here's the front and side of the NPC version. No idea who will wear this, maybe we’ll have a Sherlock type character.

One last hat example is my favorite hat but, no idea what it’s called I’ve seen so many names. Like a flat cap, newsboy cap, ivy cap, driving cap, gatsby. I mostly knew it from the movie “The Newsies”. The way it turned out it’s probably leather with how reflective it is. It feels less fancy than the other hats but maybe it’s for people who are just slightly less fancy.

Clothes

So for clothes you’ve already seen a good sample of those and you probably don’t want to be spoiled by too many of the outfits. From googling Victorian clothes a lot of the same stuff popped up especially for men's clothes. It was a repeat with the hair situation with probably like 2 choices. They loved to tuck in their shirts and tailcoats.

For the lady’s they loved their poofy dresses but did vary. Some had the ruffles open up at the center of the dress revealing legs, some ladys had long silky gloves to go with their dress. There were even dresses with no poof since they lacked a crinoline (the wire frame at the bottom of a dress keeping it’s dome like shape.)

So that’s it, I was thinking I could say more about this subject but I don’t want to show off too much and lack the words to encapsulate such subjects of fashion whether it be hair, outfits, or hats. Thank you for taking the time to look at this post it means alot. Hope you all had a good 4th of july and for those outside of the states I hope you’re all doing well just the same.

I’ve been a dev for 8 years now and am so grateful for all of you. This has been my first patreon post in all those years and I hope you look forward to Starlight DIvide.