Backer NPCs
Ziets here. As backers of our Kickstarter campaign, you probably know that certain pledge levels unlocked the ability to design content for our game - an item (or item description), a monument, or an NPC. In this update, I'm going to talk about the NPCs that were created by our backers... and how we integrated them into our world.
So what does it mean to create a backer NPC for TTON? If you pledged at the backer NPC level, we asked you to provide a name and description for your character, as well as a preference as to where your NPC should appear in the game (e.g., Sagus Cliffs, the Bloom) and what role they should fill (e.g., merchant, cultist, traveler). As TTON has some rather dark moments, we also asked whether you'd mind if we did terrible things to your NPC. Some of our backers provided that basic information and nothing more, while others took advantage of our "Additional Notes" section to tell us about their characters' backstory, motivations, or the reasons their character was important to them. By the time we hit the submission deadline, we'd received about 55 backer NPCs.
Incorporating 55 backer-created NPCs into the game was a challenge, especially because we set high standards for ourselves. It was important to us that backer NPCs feel indistinguishable from other NPCs in the game and be integrated seamlessly into our quest and exploration content. (The quality of NPC submissions was high, which helped a lot. Backers clearly put a great deal of effort into making their NPCs feel creative, weird, and "Tormenty," so most of them fit easily into our setting.)
