This week, I’m going to talk about a tool I developed for Star Wars Galaxies used to make Non-Player Characters creatively called … the NPC Editor.

The first time I played Galaxies, I was blown away by the amazing level of customization provided by the player character creation system. It still stands out to me as one of our most impressive features.

When I started at SOE, I was working on generic engine tools. I had a meeting with the design team and asked them what tool they would like me to make. After a brief discussion, the idea came up to create a tool that would make it easier to create NPCs in the game. We all agreed that was a very important tool to have and I started working on it immediately.

The initial design was based on the character creation interface you use when making a new character. We wanted all that functionality and more. The process for creating NPCs prior to this tool involved several manual steps, lots of files, and poor iteration time to see the results. The goal of this new tool was to allow the designers full access to all the customization options and wearables– every change made could be seen just as it would look in the game, and many of the manual steps would be automated. In the end, the designers would be able to focus on making cool looking NPCs and the tool would handle all of the engine work for them.

The Design Team wrote a document that explained how the tool would work and also provided details on the user interface. Based on that, I wrote up a Technical Design Document that had all of the technical requirements and a task breakdown with estimates of completion times. When I started working on it, I was still new to the technology, but I was really excited about the potential of the tool– given the game’s character customization capabilities. I started with a proof of concept prototype that was based on an existing tool with a modified version of the game’s character creation user interface. Once the prototype was working, I had more follow-up meetings with the Design Team. It’s amazing how enlightening it can be seeing a tool in action compared to just the paper concept of it. In the end, the base goal was achieved plus many cool ideas made it in as well.

The NPC Editor got its first use at the tail end of Jump to Lightspeed development. It was used to create some of the conversable NPCs in that expansion. The tool continued to get use from then on. Most recently, in Chapter 6, design revamped the treasure map system and used the tool to create some of the elite mobs you may encounter during your exploration.
When you see her in your adventures, I’m sure you won’t be thinking about the really cool tool used to create her…

It was a pleasure discussing my work with you all. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you in my next Dev Diary!