New Features: Races and the Fully Rebuilt Portrait System

Every adventurer who walks into your guild hall now has a face drawn in ink by your guild scribes, in the same hand as the guild leaders and faction figures you already know. And for the first time, not all of them are of the same ilk.

This is one of the biggest changes to how Gargadusa's Tower looks since launch, so I wanted to walk you through it all -- here's a deep dive ;)

[NOTE: This is a big change that touches almost every system in the game, so all of this is on Beta for an extra week before hitting the Live version, which I am shooting for next Wednesday (11/4).]

The Peoples of Irda

The book "The Shield of Hiltcrest" showed that the world of Irda is full of many walks of life. And now, six additional known races can now take up a sword in Hiltcrest:

• Elves, long-lived and patient, in their prime for longer than most human families can remember. Slow to populate, but lovers of culture and history, many spend their youth exploring Irda and getting to know its people.
• Dwarves, slow to age and slower to quit. They are just as grumpy and stubborn as one might expect and their crafting skills are the bedrock of many economies.
• Orcs, who grow up fast, hit hard and burn bright, which has made them a spiritual people. Certain orc groups specifically view the Tower as something to live in harmony with, not something to battle.
• Goblins, quicker still, with the shortest careers and the loudest ones. Industrious, smart, and full of energy, Irda is filled with many divisions of goblin-kind: some civil, some not so civil.
• Halflings, who live a little longer than humans tend to keep to themselves and it's rare when one craves the thrill of combat, but it's been known to happen.
• Fae, the rarest of all and the longest-lived. Incredibly reclusive and hailing from a hidden city somewhere in the east, Fae and Elves were once the same long ago. The Fae have a uniquie perspective on the world and what the Towers really are.

As the most common and populous race, most new recruits are still human (about half), but the other peoples turn up often enough that a growing guild will soon have a few of each, while the fae stay a rare find since they are a rather isolated people. Every ilk has its own names and its own faces, so an orc recruit looks and sounds like an orc from the day they arrive.

Lifespans and Aging

Balancing multiple races with different lifespans was a bit tricky, but the solution ended up being very simple. The game's age rules are all aligned in human years (growth to 25, prime to 33, decline from 38, retirement from 50, certain at 60). Each race has six matching ages, and a hero's real age is mapped onto the human curve between them before any rule reads it.

Every race evolves over the same relative career arc, from rookie to retirement, on its own clock. The age on a hero's card is their real age, so an elf of ninety can still be in their prime and a goblin of thirty-five is already past their prime. Beside each hero's race you will see a word that tells you where they are in life: young, in their prime, seasoned, past their prime or elder.

That clock is the only way race touches play (there are no race-based buffs yet, I'm starting with just career spans). A short-lived hero grows fast and retires early. A long-lived one grows slowly and stays with you for decades. Everything that cares about age follows a hero's own clock: growth, decline, retirement and even party chemistry.

Some key takeways:

• The image above shows "Career Span" not "Lifespan". These are the years that race "wants" to be a working adventurer, even if they live for much longer (Elves and Fae can live for thousands of years, but only the "young" tend to want to explore the world as adventurers, etc.).
• The mapping is a straight line between anchors. An elf of 100 runs lock and step with a human of 33, the end of the prime. This means that longer-living races will simply grow at slower rates to match the power of other races, so ebb and flow will become a completely new element to consider with your roster composition.
• Yearly growth is scaled. Natural stat growth on each birthday is multiplied by the race's growth factor: long lives grow slower each year, short lives faster.
• The life stage word. Beside a non-human's race the game shows young, in their prime, seasoned, past their prime or elder, pulled from the mapped age. The age itself always shows in real years.
• Everything age-based follows it. Retirement, decline, staff aging, the Academy's graduation age and party chemistry's age gaps all read from the mapped age.

What race doesn't do (currently)

Race is a story about who a hero is and not a stat to min-max. No single race fights harder, learns faster or costs less. Stats, potential, wages, shop prices and quest odds never look at race. A battle plays the same whoever is in the party.

My intent is to leverage race as a story-telling mechanic, not a combat system addition. Each of these peoples has a unique history full of stories to tell (and politics to explore), and I'm excited to get those moments cooking.

NOTE: The next potential expansion to this system I'm looking at is a pool of lore-based traits for each race that would add to a hero's current trait, but I won't be touching that until this current implementation matures a bit.

Your current guild stays as it is

If you are already playing, nothing about your guild changes under you. Your roster, your staff, your rivals and your records stay as they are. The next time you load, the fresh recruits on your board and your Academy prospects may be drawn from the new peoples. Anyone you have already scouted, starred, shortlisted or written a note about stays exactly as you left them.

You can turn races off

Just like most new features I release, you can turn it off. If you would rather not see races at all, Settings has a Races switch that hides every race label in the game.

But! You can also add your own races. In the Portrait tab you can give a hero's race a name of your own or hide it. The label changes and their real lifespan stays the same.

A New Generation of Pre-Made Portraits

As usual, your heroes are drawn by your guild scribe and revealed when scouted (or signed): broad shoulders and broken noses, laugh lines and old scars, every one of them an athlete who earns a living on the end of a blade. No two are meant to look alike.

Each face is drawn at three points in their life: young, in their prime and as a veteran. As your hero ages, their portrait ages with them. The rookie you signed at eighteen will look like a different person by the time they hang up their sword. That is the point. This update alone adds thousands of new portraits to the gallery, with more on the way.

If you've been following along since launch, you've heard me reference a super deep and robust Portrait Lab that I've been developing over the last six months to generate random portraits at the moment of spawning based up on artist-crafted components (eyes, ear, nose, etc.), but unfortunately, the generated heroes actually turned out to look rather awful.

My intent was to add the Portrait Lab in-game in the Dossier for players to mess with, but the portraits it produces just don't cut it. So, I pivoted to creating pre-made portraits to maintain consistency and quality.

To do this, I got saucy and put together a work around for Astra to use the Lab and handcrafted components directly to create thousands of pre-made portraits and then "smooth out" their features so they don't look so hideous. The results we more inline with my personal creative expectations and complete the vision of a scribe literally drawing adventurers for you.

Although I am sad the Lab didn't produce the results I wanted inside the box, this change in approach also presented a super cool unforeseen opportunity: artist packs.

This first generation of "inked" portraits functions under-the-hood as the first "pack", which is now a fully built-out system I can use to work with artists from around the world to create portrait packs for use in-game. I've already opened conversations with a couple artists I love, so let me know if you like this idea or if there are artists you think would be into this idea.

Portrait Picker

Open any hero's Dossier and you will find a new Portrait tab beside Notes. It is a choice, never a roll: free, unlimited and every face is there to see.

• A hand of faces. You are dealt five portraits no one in your guild is wearing. Tap one to try it on in the big frame. Show others deals a fresh hand.
• See them all. Open the whole gallery your hero can wear. Faces already worn in your guild are dimmed, with the name of whoever wears them.
• Through the years. Slide from young to veteran to see how the face you are trying on will age.
• Keep this portrait. The guild seals it and your hero has a word or two to say about their new likeness.
• Restore original. Changed your mind? The face your hero signed with is always one tap away.
• Use my own image. Custom uploads still work exactly as before.

Favorites

Found a face you love but no hero to give it to yet? Tap the star on the big frame or on any face in See them all and it goes to a Favorites row at the top of the tab. Favorites follow you from hero to hero, so the perfect grizzled veteran is waiting the next time you sign one who fits.

Prefer the classic look?

The original pixel portraits are still here. Turn on Classic Art in Settings under Appearance and the whole game goes back to the old faces. The Portrait tab works in either look and a pick follows your hero into both.