Features

About

Xander's Refuge is an extremely simple ghost that I made during August of 2023, for "Aughost", using the prompt "a ghost of an ancient deity that always seems tired, and is looking for a safe place to hide". He has very few features, and instead I focused on making him very polished. He has about 100 idle dialogues, and also some idle animations.

In addition to this, he does have a few story dialogues in his menu, as well as an additional detail where he will change poses now and then when he is idle. This includes randomly smoking his cigarette, and he will do this even if you turn his dialogues off. (Most ghosts will just stand still!)

Despite his simplicity, his content should last for a few hours (unless you set the talk rate to 1 minute), and I hope he will be entertaining! He's not the friendliest, but can you really expect that from an ancient deity that has literally seen it all?

Behind the scenes

When I first started working on Aughost, I had a different ghost in mind I wanted to make. However, that idea proved to be too big to get done to my standards within a month, and I was also dealing with a big shift in my sleep schedule, so about a week into August I decided I wanted to work on a simpler ghost. Something very straightforward, that I could just try to make as polished as I could.

So, I turned to @funkylittlemothman's ghost idea generator, and after a few rounds, decided on the prompt "a ghost of an ancient deity that always seems tired, and is looking for a safe place to hide". Using this, I decided to make it a ghost where the user is a part of his world. In this case, the user is someone who is hiding from something, but what is not clear.

Xander is not a pre-existing character of mine, I made him for this project. So, I had to spend some time designing him, and settling on some details of his world to talk about. Normally I would have tried to work on the code in the meantime and get his mechanics sorted out, but he simply doesn't have many unique mechanics! I really wanted to stick as closely as I could to the Simplicity Template, so that I could show off what I mean when I say I want to see ghosts with an emphasis on writing. Once I had surfaces in place, it only took an hour or two to fill in the first boot, booting dialogues, and closing dialogues. And once those were done, I could spend most of the rest of my time focused on those idle dialogues.

It was only towards the end that I decided to add some story dialogues in the menu, because I wrote a dialogue and then felt that it was too dramatic for him to say randomly. But, I didn't want to give up what I had written, so I decided to add in the menu questions within the last few days of development.

Quite a bit of development time was spent working on his shell, which at the time of making him, was my most polished shell. It had been a long time since I drew a shell that actually had poses and expressions, and it's the first time I ever did a shell like this with shading. And it has blinking animations, talking animations, as well as the smoke animations to boot!

I'm very pleased with how he came out! He doesn't really have any fancy features, just a lot of attention to detail, and all of his dialogues are very uniquely him. This ghost won't talk about what month it is or what day of the week it is, instead he talks about things going on in his world, his relationships with the other characters, and so on. I hope that it makes him a fun companion to simply stick on your desktop and chill with for a while.