Wrestling with the Character Pipeline

Hey there, this is Emma!

We’ve got lots of new characters coming to Pigeon Sim’s wrestling scene. I want to give you all a peek into how we build out our NPCs…

Because we want to be able to create a lot of variation as efficiently as possible, we’ve taken a sort of modular approach to “civilian” NPCs - the regular folks you’ll see walking around the city and populating various spaces. Our Average Joes come in two “archetypes”: A and B.

Human A is pretty average, while Human B is taller, more muscular, and has more playful proportions. Up till now, we’ve reserved Human B exclusively for Brute type enemies - PP minions and Hot cops that are beefier than their smaller counterparts - but we’ve sprinkled B in with our wrestlers to make things interesting. Who else is going to throw all the small fries out of the ring?

NPC creation always starts with some concepting. Once we figure out how a new character or outfit will fit in with our template, we move on to sculpting any fresh assets. Once high-resolution work is finished, we create low-resolution versions of any new pieces and fit everything to our existing Human A/B base mesh! This ensures that their respective rigs will be compatible with this new NPC model. Treating new NPCs and their outfits as “accessories” that fit onto that archetype’s basemesh helps us keep all of our models and rigs as consistent and efficient as possible. It also makes the library very expandable - creating just a couple new assets can create a lot of new variations.

Our goal is to have a huge, diverse cast of interesting NPCs, so that efficiency is very important. Once we have a base character model set up in Unity, we can create variations using different fitted hairsets, hats, and materials to swap colors.

We’ll see you in the ring!