Troll Hero Preview

As you may know, we’re hoping to make a fairly large number of new scenes for a King of Dragon Pass update. We do have a constraint: there is no art pipeline the way there was in the original, so we are repurposing existing art. This isn’t actually a new thing — we reused artwork rather than commission art for the over 500 scenes in the original. (There are “only” about 420 illustrations earmarked for scenes.) After all, it makes sense that Sora Goodseller looks the same each time she visits (though she actually has a second piece of art).

One of the design goals for this update was to make use of artwork that may not be commonly seen, such as a scene that occurs as a direct consequence of a previous scene (i.e. a story branch). Here is one of them, a visit from a troll hero.

To write this scene, I consulted with the world’s foremost uzologist, Dan McCluskey. (I had to cut some of the finer points of troll behavior since you are seeing this from the human viewpoint.)

This scene has some internal branching, so it was a bit time-consuming to code, but it’s now ready, and got a good response from initial testing. Now we need to perform more rigorous QA, making sure each of the branches works.

This is the 11th new scene. Others are in progress, though I don’t know if I’ll really end up with all 29 I have ideas for.