Destiny, the upcoming first-person shooter from the popular Halo developer Bungie, will be touting a seemingly robust character customization program when it launches in September of next year.
Technical Art Lead Scott Shepard will be leading a discussion on the design of Destiny‘s character customization, and how its systems interact with the game’s art design. The overall objective of the discussion to delve into, “the increasing complexity and fidelity of character content, player customization is an ever-present challenge facing many game developers.”
The following summary of the discussion has been provided:
"Destiny’s player customization system is highly ambitious and unlike anything seen in a first-person shooter thus far. This talk focuses on the tools and process Bungie built to create a large variety of high-quality character content, with a system that makes the most out of the art created, allows for continued growth and expandability over the lifetime of the franchise, and gives artists the ability to make strong visual impacts quickly and easily…After this talk, you will have a better understanding of the challenges a highly customizable player system presents, and a clear example of how Bungie chose to face these problems, including where we succeeded and where we failed…This talk is for technical artists, art directors, character leads, tools developers or investment designers whose projects call for a highly customizable player character, a world filled with unique NPCs, or to simply build large amounts of character content in an efficient way."Source: GDC 2014