Meet Akeem the Assamite Vizier (NEW NPC)

Akeem the Assamite Vizier (NEW NPC)
Meet Akeem the Assamite Vizier who's come to LA seeking certain relics of interest. This 400 year old Kindred can be a friend or foe depending on how you address him. He is one of the Research Book sellers, will tell you all about the 7 new TFN clans in detail, and will even give you Side Quests to expand your adventure. He is fully interactive in every way including brand new dialogue and voice files designed and spoken by our Writer/Voice Actor 'Scarecrow'.

Always wearing a half smile on his face, as if he knows something you dont...


Akeem looks like he's taking a dump here, but really I just took a bad screenshot, lol.


This model originally didn't have fangs, so we had to use Blender to add them.


I spent like 3 days in Photoshop getting Akeem's face exactly how we wanted it. Scarecrow kept saying "Remember as Assamites get older their skin grows darker" so getting the perfect blend of wrinkles and darkness were esential to making Akeem legitimate to the PnP game.


Here is a full body shot of Akeem. He picks black and dark red as his colors of choice. Also if you notice he's wearing a hood, as do the Tier 4 Assamite player models so that worked out VERY well.



We hope you enjoyed these screenshots of Akeem. I hope to have a full video of him speaking, fighting, handing out Quests, and other features soon. Getting the lip movements synchronized with the voice files has taken alot of time so once that's done we'll be in good shape. Enjoy!

We actually wanted the contrast between the hair and skin. Assamite's skin get darker over time until their skin is completely black. Akeem was embraced as an old man so his hair was white at the time, he actually explains all of this in the game, which of course you haven't seen.

So yes we could make his beard darker but we want the contrast between skin and hair.

LOL

Looks great, I can't wait for the beta or the release

Me either Phil, me either!

thumbs up for this creative model^^

Which makes me rather curious: How much of the story actually do you want to rewrite? 50/50?

I like Akeem's facial features. Maybe you could add the slightest touch of the most brackish black green or indigo color to his skin tone? Basically a more uniform, more pristine, much less splotchy, but near equally saturated version of the colors used on Andrei's upper and lower lip. This way, his face will still be making its way to the color of charcoal as it should, but by way of blue or green just like a black eye.

Right now, without any spectral highlights on his skin from a strong light source, (e.g. buring 50 gallon drum, red light in Santa Monica Hospital alleyway) Akeem's face looks like it's in simple grayscale. Instinctively, I want to dismiss his face as soon as I see it because his shade reminds me of concrete.

Awesome. Good Job. Love his eyes

SpellForcer wrote:

thumbs up for this creative model^^

Which makes me rather curious: How much of the story actually do you want to rewrite? 50/50?

Well we aren’t trying to re-write any of the main story, or even the side quests really. What we’re trying to do is create additional content on top of what was already there, so you still have the original game, of course with the new clans, disciplines, strategies, etc… but now we want new/more side quests to make the game last longer and have more for the player to do.

For instance, Akeem (if you’re nice to him) will give you a quest called “Inquisitors know too much”. This quest will take you to a new Society of Leopold hideout in downtown LA led by a Hunter mini-boss named Edgar Hirsh. He is similar to Chastity in many ways and heads up the LA chapter of Hunters. He contains a never before seen book on Vampires that Akeem wants for his collection. If you accept the quest then you can choose to try to sneak into the hideout and steal it from Edgar Hirsh and his band of Hunters, or you can choose to assassinate Edgar and steal the book, or you can walk in the front door guns a blazin’ and attempt to kill the Hunters and take the book.

Without giving too much away, I just want to say this quest is brilliant and a lot of fun to play, and gives you a multitude of options on how to complete it depending on your play style. These quests are in addition to the original Bloodlines quest, we didn’t need to remove any of the original game content to make it work and therefore it’s safe to call TFN a Bloodlines expansion, because it expands the original game.

We plan on creating many more of these sorts of quests and have 3 others in mind right now, it’s just a matter of writing the quest, getting the details right, getting our voice actor “Scarecrow” to speak the lines, etc…. all the technical stuff.

With Childe of Malkav scripting the necessary python code and Scarecrow writing the dialogue, quest design, and voice acting the possibilities are limitless and I see TFN adding A LOT of additional content over the next few years.

HAHA! I hope not too, he'd look funny in a bikini!

Will there be an option to keep the book to yourself or give it to Strauss or someone else?

Interesting idea, we never thought of that. See this is why this is a community project, 3 guys can't think of everything.

What would you guys suggest for something like this? And an even better question, how do we relate to the player that the option to give the book to another person is even available?

Well, when you lay your hands on the book, the quest log can update and tell you that You should return to Akeem, but there might be others besides him who are interested in this particular book.
You can go back to him and give him the book, or tell him that you are going to keep it to yourself. If you do the latter I suggest that he tries to ambush you in the later stages of the game as a true Assamite.
If you decide to give the book to someone else, you might get a dialog about it with Pisha, Strauss, Beckett or even Lacroix. Sadly we will need someone to mimic their voices, or voice-sculpt dialogues.

YamiRaziel wrote:

If you decide to give the book to someone else, you might get a dialog about it with Pisha, Strauss, Beckett or even Lacroix. Sadly we will need someone to mimic their voices, or voice-sculpt dialogues.

Mimicking Strauss is a walk in the park, since that's not the original actor's natural voice, probably the same for LaCroix. Beckett and Pisha sound (more or less) like the actors' natural voices, so they would be more of a challenge. Re-recording all the original dialogue in addition to the new dialogue would solve the problem, but would no doubt be a (Elizabeth Dane-sized) boat-load of work.

Deleting the existing dialogues and re-recording them with new voice actors? You are kidding right? That will be the biggest mistake ever!

YamiRaziel wrote:

Deleting the existing dialogues and re-recording them with new voice actors? You are kidding right? That will be the biggest mistake ever!

true

You would also have to re-write all of the lip movements because there's no way the new voice actor could get it perfectly with how the original was. That would take years without voice synchonization software, which costs $5000.

YamiRaziel wrote:

Deleting the existing dialogues and re-recording them with new voice actors? You are kidding right? That will be the biggest mistake ever!

Didn't I write it would be a boat-load of work?

You did, but even if it wasn't that impossible to do I still consider it to be a big mistake. The original voice actors are just to awesome to be taken away.

YamiRaziel wrote:

You did, but even if it wasn't that impossible to do I still consider it to be a big mistake. The original voice actors are just to awesome to be taken away.

As a group, they're not that awesome, but that's just my opinion. And, again in my opinion, the quality of the voice acting is no reason not to re-record the dialogue. The work involved is more than enough justification.

Looks awesome Good work