Effigy - Every NPC Generates Its Own Portrait

Effigy gives every character in your game a face that is theirs alone — and not one of them is a PNG.

A villager, a guard, a merchant, a nameless bandit: each one composes its own portrait from its own properties. Skull shape, brow, nose, jaw, eyes, mouth, hair, headwear, garment and colouring are all derived from that character's seed, drawn as engraved line work in pure GML. There is no sprite sheet, no atlas and no texture page anywhere in the package.

The same person, twenty years later

This is the part a sprite-based portrait set cannot answer. Ageing, mood and injury re-derive the same face rather than swapping to a different picture. The blacksmith you met in act one is provably the same skull, the same hair mass and the same palette in act three — only the features move. Fold lines deepen, the jaw softens, an eye clouds, a nose breaks and stays broken.

What is actually in it

• 12 head forms — oval, round, long, square, heart, triangle, diamond, oblong, pear, gaunt, brow, child. Every outline built from ratios, not traced.
• 10 hair and headwear masses — cropped, long, bound, wild, tonsure, hood, helm, crown, veil, bare.
• 8 brows x 8 noses x 8 mouths, plus 6 garments and 10 palettes computed in Oklch against a measured contrast floor.
• 120 head-and-hair silhouettes, every pair measured distinct inside the engine — 7,140 pairwise comparisons, none below the distinctness floor.
• Ageing, mood and injury states that re-derive rather than replace.
• A runnable demo room, so you can press Play and see the whole space before writing a line.

Built and verified in the engine

Effigy ships a headless self-test that runs inside a real Igor build: 686 assertions, 0 failures. Every image on this page was rendered by the product itself, not by a preview tool — what you see here is what the GML draws.

Compatibility

Built and gated against GameMaker runtime 2024.14.4.268 (the current stable LTS-line runtime). Pure GML with no extensions and no native DLLs. Every global and macro is namespaced eff_ / EFF_, so it cannot collide with anything already in your project. Raw, readable, commented source — nothing minified.

Import

Local package: Right-click in the Asset Browser → Import Local Package → Effigy.yymps, take all resources, open rm_effigy_demo and press Play.

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More generative systems for GameMaker from CSAF: Meridian (procedural skill trees) · Shoal (a fishing system that draws its own fish) · Crest (composed heraldry) · Facet (a card framework that draws its own faces) · Affliction (a status system that draws its own icons) · Charter (illuminated auto-cartography).