Liege - The NPC Day: Townspeople Who Walk To Work And Do It

Your townspeople walk to a station, adopt a real work pose there with a generated tool in hand, and the town visibly changes shift across the day. A smith swings a hammer at an anvil from 06:30; the watch stands at the brazier all night; the baker starts at 04:30 and has finished before most of the street has begun.

Every one of those pictures is drawn from numbers. There is no sprite sheet in this package.

What you get

• 46 work loops, each a pose that is a continuous function of its phase over 12 motion archetypes - not a table of frames.
• 46 station props built from 11 shared mass constructors, each returning a back and a front so a worker stands inside a well, a vat or a stall counter instead of behind it.
• 42 tools, held at the wrist, built from the same constructors.
• 10 materials, 4 regional themes, 5 builds, 8 hair styles. A theme is one struct: it re-colours every prop, every tool and every garment in the town at once.
• Clothing with no outfit table. Smock length comes from the stance, sleeves and apron from the trade's hazard, colour from a hash of the work id. Add a work loop and it is dressed.

The idea that makes it cheap to use

lge_where(town, person, hour) solves where somebody is at that hour. It does not integrate movement frame by frame. That buys you:

• Re-entering a map is exact and free - there is nothing to catch up.
• Save and load are free: a routine is a few numbers and the clock is yours.
• Scrubbing the clock backwards works, at any speed, including past midnight.
• A conversation can pause a person for as long as you like and they resume exactly where they were.

The honest limits, before you buy

Because position is a pure function of time, nothing here is path-dependent. A townsperson cannot avoid a collision, jostle in a doorway or queue, because the answer at time t cannot depend on what happened at t-1. If your game needs NPCs that push past each other, this is the wrong architecture and you should not buy it for that.

The figures are drawn front-on. There is no side or three-quarter view; a figure facing the other way is mirrored, and the lighting is mirrored with it so you do not get two suns in one street.

It draws a lot of primitives. One townsperson at a station is roughly a thousand drawing records. The cache is part of the product, not an afterthought, and the Readme's Performance section gives you the numbers.

What is in the download

A .yymps local package - Tools > Import Local Package, Add All - plus raw, readable GML and a full Readme. Everything is lge_-prefixed, with nine globals, all namespaced, so nothing here can collide with anything in your project.

A runnable demo room ships with it. Open rm_lge_demo and press Play: scrub the clock, pause the people, follow one person through their whole day, switch theme, re-seed the town, and run the package's own in-engine self-test with F1.

Built and gated against GameMaker runtime 2024.14.4.268.

Every picture on this page was drawn by the code you are buying

The cover and all eight screenshots are rendered in-engine by lge_bake, which ships inside the package, so you can re-render them yourself. No image model was involved and no raster art ships.

AI disclosure: the code and the artwork it draws are AI-generated. No audio ships. This listing text is AI-written.

Also from CSAF, for GameMaker

Raiment — characters and clothing draws the figure that walks this day. Liege generates the work loops and poses; Raiment generates the body and the clothes doing them.

Lexicon — invented writing · Forage — foraging · Adversary — multi-phase bosses · Chitin — insects · Pastime — minigames · Charter — auto-cartography · Verdure — cultivation · Effigy — NPC portraits