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Character Avatars

I thought an article around our idea of Character Avatars would be quite interesting.  It does give away some of our design secrets, but what the heck, I don’t believe what we are planning on doing is totally unique, but our approach and implementation might be a little special .

Avatars appear to be everywhere on the web nowadays, especially on forums, social media websites and of course games.

In Ilkor, each Player Character will be represented by an avatar.  An avatar will be a portrait drawing, basically a ‘head and shoulders’ drawing that will be used to represent your character.  The avatar will be used throughout the game in a number of ways, during encounters, on forums (once we’ve sorted out the integration), ranking lists, etc.

Each avatar will be drawn by Simon Le Tranter and for the better part will be unique (read on further to see what I mean).  Ilkor will be capable of hosting 10′s of thousands of players (hopefully more!!) so for Simon to produce individual avatars is not realistic.  Instead, each portrait will be made up of a number of facial features.  For the sake of this article lets settle of just 5:

1. Head & Shoulders
2. Mouth
3. Nose
4. Eyes
5. Hair

Each facial feature will be drawn separately on a transparent background, called a layer.  Each layer gets placed on top of one another in a pre-subscribed order; head and shoulders, mouth, nose, eyes and then finally the hair.  Once this has taken place, the finished portrait is produced.  It will look something like this:

Ilkor Avatar Male Human Example

The example above has been drawn by Simon and gives you a real idea of the type of style and high quality you can expect when playing Ilkor.

Your avatar will get automatically assigned to you when you join the game.  At that point the avatar portrait will get randomly created using three important pieces of information:

1. Your Email Address
2. Character Race (human, elf, dwarf, halfling)
3. Character Gender

We are using a very similar process and implementation that has been used at Monster ID.  If you have time, go and check out their website.  They go into some technical detail on how they produce unique monsters:

MonsterID is a method to generate a unique monster image based upon a certain identifier (IP address, email address, whatever). It can be used to automatically provide personal avatar images in blog comments or other community services.

Ilkor only has 4 playable races.  Taking gender into consideration, there are just 8 possible combinations or groups.

Simon will drawn a number of facial features per group.  Lets take the Male Human group as an example.  If Simon comes up with 5 different sets of each facial feature we’d have a total combination of 3,125 unique male human avatars (5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 3,125).  If we had 10 sets, we’d have 100,000 unique avatars.  If we produced this for all 8 gender / race combos we’d have 800,000 unique avatars.  Hopefully you can see the basic maths behind this.  From a max of 400 unique facial features, Simon would be able to give us almost 1 million avatars.

Remember a player will begin the game with an avatar that has been created uniquely from the player’s email address.  The player will not have the option at the beginning to change his avatar, but later on in the game he will be able to alter it’s appearance.  The player will never be able to upload his own avatar, it will always be created from Simon’s artwork.  This is important to us, as we want to ensure Ilkor remains at a high standard.

Well that’s about all I’ve got to share with you this time around.  Before I go, here is one more avatar example.  Enjoy, and hope you are looking forward to what is coming your way from Ilkor: Dark Rising.

Ilkor Avatar Female Human Example