A stylized robot face made of the letters F and T.
 

Bard Bot

Brief

We were contacted by Perfect World Entertainment on the strength of our Madam Eva project and asked to build a similar custom-content bot for the Neverwinter Nights MMORPG. After some discussion we settled on a rude bard character, who announces the unfortunate deaths of Twitter users and engraves their avatar onto a tombstone.

Implementation

The big difference between this project and Madame Eva is that instead of simply attaching pre-made art to the custom tweets, it takes art provided by the Perfect World team and then customizes that art per Twitter user. The team gave us a number of blank tombstones, and we then had to "engrave" a user's avatar onto the image. We ended up running the avatar through a convolution matrix tuned to emboss an image, and then superimposing the embossed image onto the gravestone. We were pretty happy with the results!

Post Mortem

This was the project that convinced us: if a potential client is referencing an old project, we're going to want to introduce some kind of interesting technical hurdle that we've encountered before, instead of just retreading old ground. This gives the client something unique, and it also gives us a chance to stretch our technical expertise—the next time a project calls for a convolution matrix, it'll be something we're already comfortable with.

 

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