Designing the Test NPC - Part 1

To test player and NPC interactions, we are obviously going to need an NPC.

However, simply using one of the Half Life 2 NPC characters for our own will not be sufficient for our needs, as our testers may have preconceptions of that NPC if they have played HL2 before. The solution is obvious: we must make our own NPC.

Building an NPC from the ground up will be extremely time consuming, and making it fit into the visual style of HL2 would be difficult, so the best way to go is to take an existing NPC and modify it to match our NPC design.

The first step is to choose which NPC is best suited for this modification, and the method of choosing the NPC is discussed here.