Dressing the World: NPC Design in Progress

It’s been a while. We’ve been quiet because we’ve been hard at work building a demo we think you’ll enjoy.

In the meantime, here’s a look at what we’re doing with NPC characters. These shots show clothing for our generic male models. Female characters aren’t ready yet, and we’ve only added one face so far, so yes, everyone’s a clone for now. That’ll change soon.

We’ve put a lot of work into systems that make clothes easy to customize, like changing patterns, colors, and logos. Since LA is packed with unique brands and sports teams, we need more than just color swaps to capture that variety.

We’ve also built tools to change hair color and add tattoos to limbs and torsos. Tattoos are key to gang identity, so they’ll help show which faction someone belongs to.

All this visual detail helps ground the world in reality. That way, when missions take you into the surreal parts filled with rust, monsters, and smog, the contrast hits harder.

Since we’re a small team, we’ve focused on making character creation fast. One big time-saver is our modular atlas. It’s a library of zippers, buttons, chains, and more. Each piece can be colored directly in Unreal. Need a brass chain and a green clip? No problem. No new textures needed.

More soon!