http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYrKJ9SB7hw

Corey Hall doing another fantastic job with Krillo, the last of the voices required for Darkened Steel to go live. Corey, who previously voiced Drelas, Leifan, Gabania, and Sven will also play a major character in the mod’s main questline, Blood of Kings.

A few weeks back, a user asked me to contact someone. She was an aspiring singer who did covers of fantasy stuff(no, not that one), and expressed interest in being part of a mod. The user thought it would be a good match.

I contacted the person, and we were both initially excited to be working together. However, as time went on, it seemed we had different goals. She wanted to expand her profile as a singer, namely by putting her likeness in the mod. I wanted to make the bard as unique as possible, which meant avoiding any similarities to existing NPCs or living humans in general. Things were starting to unravel even before I made my suggestion of giving her NPC humongous boobs. Long story short, we decided it was best to part ways.

Now the question was, what to do with the NPC I created? I had already added her to the cell, and given her a routine. I could delete everything and remove the edits, but it seemed like such a waste. So, I decided to turn our would be busker into something else entirely.  And as much as it disappointed me to lose the bard and possibility of new music, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. Caylene is that awesome, as is her voice actor, Elisabeth Hunter.

Elisabeth, who has been voice acting professionally for some time, is volunteering to do a variety of characters for the non-beta release, but we both agree this one’s our favorite.

One of the things I don’t like about the vanilla taverns is the fact that they’re so quiet. I wanted to make Robber’s Refuge more like a normal bar, and fill the halls with a chorus of words, songs, and laughter, without the player ever having to engage anyone.

While I want to experiment with a number of tools, the first thing I played around with was the concept of prolonged skits. Over the course of several scenes, these characters can be given the same dimensions and depth as the other NPCs and still be part of the background.

Of course to shoot this scene, I needed a bit of quiet, so I had to kill everyone else off save Ortheim. You may notice the corpse in the top right corner. This is just one of 7 scenes between these traveling adventurers, and just a small sample of the kind of goodies I want Robber’s Refuge to have.