mcsven wrote:One of the reasons I
pushed back a little on the concept of not having faces for NPCs is that interacting with a list of data about which the only unique thing is a name could be... well, lacking. Having the ability to see a face - and recognise it as a friendly - would go a long way to suck the player in.
From your post in the other thread:
mcsven wrote:I know the Boss has said NOT a face, but I was wondering: why not? Procedural facial generation should surely be feasible, if we go for something rudimentary. Anyone that has played with a Wii can attest to the large variety of faces that are possible to construct using a palette of fixed features (like eyes, noses, eyebrows etc.). Why not get one of the resident artists to draw up some of these feature templates... and then just randomly (or nearly randomly) piece them together when the AI is first encountered?
I agree with you that rendering faces could be one of the best ways to increase the atmosphere and immersiveness of Limit Theory
if done right. When I was developing a game with two other people last year as part of a university project, one of the suggestions a member of the team made was to make it so these orb-like objects we had in the game had faces. Since the game was my vision, I didn't think that it fitted the feel of the game, but I can completely understand his reasoning: games tend to benefit a lot from having some kind of character or personifiable object in the game that the player can relate to. I don't think Doodle Jump, Pac-Man or Angry Birds would have been quite as popular otherwise. I'm not familiar with any research to justify this at the moment, though.
That being said, I think that you'd need to have fairly realistic face generation in LT; I don't see Wii-style avatars as really fitting the feel of the game. But getting realistic face generation that works well would likely be an extremely challenging task for Josh, due to a psychological phenomenon called the
uncanny valley where humans tend to be repulsed by things that are similar to healthy human beings but not quite there.
On the other hand, I'm thinking along the lines of having some very weird and abstract version of representing the NPC. No eyes, faces or mouths; something like having a bunch of nodes arranged in a circular or spherical layout and which bustled about in some manner as the NPC "spoke", or re-oriented themselves/changed colour/changed size in some way to convey his "mood". NPCs that belonged to the same species or were closely genetically related to each other would have similar patterns to these arrangement.
In fact, I think this could be quite interesting and something that would be easier for Josh to implement as well as fit more with the style of the game: abstract an NPCs face as a collection of nodes with a certain pattern to them, and have them re-arrange themselves as they talk or change their "expression". Make it so that the static patterns and dynamic re-arrangement behaviours of them are procedurally generated and consistent, so that a player can become familiar with these patterns as he plays the game and interacts with NPCs of a particular species.
Futurama's "God" is the best example I can think of for conveying what I mean.
This could tie in with gameplay as well: a universal translater might be able to deliver you the raw translation of what an NPC is saying, but not
how they expressed it. I imagine that in any interaction you have with an NPC, you have a node panel/interface that opens that shows both the translated text of their message, as well as their "face" represented as a pattern of nodes. By becoming familiar with those patterns, the player could become better at interpreting the mood of the NPC, which could help them in their negotiations. If you're bartering with an NPC and you see the nodes representing his face patterning themselves into something you recognise as anger or frustation, it's probably not a good idea to drive the bargain any harder - you would likely be better off settling on what you've currently agreed. If you're a pirate and you open comms with an NPC that expresses fear or intimidation, it'd probably work in your favour for you to try and intimidate them into surrendering their cargo. And so on.
In order to make it so that the player does not gain any special privilege that NPCs don't have access to, NPCs would also need a way of gaining the ability to interpret NPC mood. I envisage a process whereby the more an NPC interacts with a particular kind of faction, the higher a coefficient becomes that lets information about the state of the other NPCs' moods and expressions "diffuse" over to the first NPC, allowing him to utilise that information in his reasoning. The rate at which this coefficient increases could be based on his
FRACAS characteristics, such as whether he's more feeling or thinking, more sociable or reserved, etc.