Star Trek Online official dev blog: Jeremy Mattson page 2

Matt Highison, our Character Lead, has taken the same basic approach in character creation for STO. Uniforms are categorized just like you'd expect: jackets, pants, shoes, gloves etc. But where STO character creation really shines is our Alien Gen system. We've basically taken every alien species the team has created for the game, disassembled them and put their parts into a system that allows you to mix and match to create some pretty amazing stuff. It's really powerful and a ton of fun to play with.

For instance with Alien-Gen you can start with a Benzite face, add a Denobulan forehead, put on some Ocampa ears, add a tattoo and blammo! A never before seen Star Trek alien is born at your fingertips. It's tons of fun to just sit and hit the random button over and over... and over. And much like the CoH costume creator was, it's a great time saving dev tool. It takes some extra thought and some set up time but now we can make the games non-player characters super fast, in some cases they can just be randomly generated. Another great thing about building a system like this is that every piece that gets added makes the system even more powerful. But it's not without its downsides.

In order to make characters modularly there's a lot of set up involved, only about half of the character artists job is actually making the art. We're constantly thinking about compatibility between all of the pieces, for instance all of the hairstyles have to work with all of the ears and vice-versa. And some artists have trouble getting used to being part of a team that is making pieces for a system rather than making their own one-off characters. Luckily we've been able to alleviate this last problem a bit on STO. Using the Jem'Hadar as an example the artist gets to make the entire Jem'Hadar character first and then break him up into pieces for the system. So we get to spend some time sculpting something we can be proud of as well as making costume pieces. It works out pretty well. The positives definitely outweigh the negatives and in the end the game is that much better.

At Cryptic our games have always been about customization and trying to give players the tools they need to create whatever character they want. STO definitely stays true to that. Our Alien-Gen system is in some ways the most powerful customization tool we've ever made. I think players are going to have a blast coming up with new alien species for themselves and their bridge crew. Lucky for me, it turns out that making something this much fun for players makes my job a little bit easier too.