Thursday, September 20, 2007

An Idea

For some reason, I was talking about RPG's today and the problem of re-visiting NPC's just sort of bashed into my head.

You know what I'm talking about. There are 30 NPC's in a town, and you need to talk to all of them, but sometimes you can't remember if you've already talked to someone, especially when quite a few of them might look alike. So if there are one or two key characters you haven't spoken to, it can be repetitive and time-consuming to track them down.

So here's an idea. What if all these characters had mostly blank faces when you first met them? They'd have hair, plus eyes/nose/mouth, but they would be very indistinct otherwise. As you spoke to one, though, their features would gradually fill in--their uniqueness--and when you had received all the information the character could give you, their face would be fully formed.

I think the process of seeing a face "come alive" like that would be a memorable experience, and as a game mechanic, it would easily identify which characters you still needed to speak to. And particularly for a highly-stylized game that used cel-shading, for example, it could be implemented in a very stylish way.

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