Hello, Mages! 🧙
In this week’s dev blog and vlog, we’re sharing our plans for custom NPCs in Fablecraft. We always had custom NPCs on our internal roadmap, but we’ve raised its priority significantly after seeing the response and demand for the feature within our community after we launched into Early Access this past July.
We’re here today with this set of planned features because of your feedback. So! Thank you for sounding off about custom NPCs early and often.
Before we get into it, please note that most of the screenshots in this post come from the design stages of development. The UI and functionality might change between now and the feature release, though the core principles should remain the same. Don’t be surprised if things look slightly different once they’re in your hands.
Let’s begin.
Options for custom NPCs will come in waves
This is some inside baseball stuff, but we wanted to take a second to share a peek at our internal workflow to help illustrate why features are delivered in the rolling fashion we’ll discuss today.
Like most studios, we’re a studio that uses a heavily modified version of Agile to track, complete, and deliver work. We chunk tasks so that they can be assigned to a developer on our team in two-week chunks. Those two-week chunks are called sprints; single features typically come after a sprint or two are complete.
The short version of that for you? We’re delivering features as we have them ready rather than releasing them all at once way down the line. It means we’re iterating quickly, and you’re getting a Fablecraft that evolves a lot over the course of a single month or year.
First up, getting the GM’s heroes in the side tray
We’re starting with a relatively easy win that opens the gate for a more robust system. In early to mid-September, we’ll make it so GMs will find their heroes in the side tray during their campaign play.
The idea is that GMs will use the current character creator to build a Mage, complete with a custom portrait, to serve as an NPC in their games. Functionally, these Mages will behave like PCs; they’ll be able to level up and have inventory, and GMs can define their allegiance and use their combat kits in battle.
We think this is a solid first step, and we’re actively developing and testing it now. We’re on pace to deliver it in a few weeks...ish.
Copy & Customize to follow in short order
Next up? We’re giving GMs the ability to Copy & Customize existing Fablecraft Friends and Foes, and we’re set to deliver this one in late September or early October.
GMs will be able to open their side tray, navigate to the Friends and Foes area, right-click an NPC, and select Copy & Customize. From there, they’ll have a dupe of a creature or humanoid that they can customize with a homebrew portrait, description, and name. This lets players use existing combat ability kits to create NPCs.
Functionally, you’ll be able to Copy & Customize a Shadow Bandit and make them a generic ranger-type friend or foe for battle and story scenes. That includes all of the Shadow Bandit’s attacks and their animations.
There will be some early-dev funkiness for this, of course. You can Copy & Customize the Highland Dragon, for example, but that means you’ll take all of its attack animations to the new NPC you create, including the 3D model for its head. This is temporary; our goal is to let GMs choose from the whole pool of existing animations for each attack.
The future features full-on customization
Want even more customization? It’s coming.
We intend to deliver completely custom NPCs to Fablecraft. That means a custom character sheet with homebrew stats, abilities, and attacks. This is a significant feature with a ton of nuance in game design and UI/UX. These features take a while to cook because we want to ensure the homebrew experience is intuitive and seamless. We’re working to make homebrew features that encourage GM creativity without needing an extensive tutorial explaining how to use our tools.
Rest assured that it’s on our roadmap and a high priority. We'll share that information with you as soon as we’re ready to lock into a time frame for the feature release.
Thank you for being a player, and thank you for your feedback. If you have a feature request or want to make sure an addition or change gets to the top of our priority list, be sure to check out our feedback board and submit and upvote requests.
Join our Discord to find your next party or ask our team a question. We’ll see you soon!