Silly Gremmie. Gremmies can't read!

Meet the Gremmie.

Gremmies are one of the first creatures we have fully designed for the game. They were contrived one night while Amy was working her regular job. While designing them, the original intent was to avoid your usual smattering of creatures. You know the ones I speak of. The ones you see in EVERY OTHER MMORPG: Kobolds, Orcs, Trolls, Goblins.

We wanted to take a fresh approach to something you are going to see a lot of. Gremmies were thought of originally as some kind of Gremlin. However, we wanted them to be less of a mindless chaos devoted creature. While we wanted them to be dangerous when provoked, we did not want them to be 100% fearsome.

Indeed, in beginning their article on our development wiki, the following was thought up:

Very little is known about them, or their culture. They tend to speak in very broken speech patterns, but with a soft sing song quality. To an observer, whether what a Gremmie says will make sense is completely subjective. They have a very nonsensical quality in the way they construct sentences. And while they seem to know how to speak, they have almost no glyphs or symbology. They have next to no writing, and it would seem they do not know how to read. Gremmies are absolutely fascinated by technology and machines in general, and can often be seen looking through ruins and remnants for anything from working items to any bit of junk they find fascinating. Mortals often find them underfoot, and Gremmies typically cause trouble at times by tinkering with working machinery.

We have already begun to use the fellow you see here in branding. All in all, we are very pleased with his design. Our target for their behavior and communication is best summed up as a conversation I had with Amy (Who is really the soul and core creator of these guys).

She wanted them to be kind of loopy, I felt they should be “always underfoot” but not stupid. I proposed to Amy the idea of “What would happen if you took Ed from Cowboy Bebop, toned down the articulation a bit, but kept the aloofness and some of Ed’s speech patterns, and had a whole race like that..and then mix in “The Jeep” from Popeye” … she agreed that would be both funny, and add a great deal of dimension to them as a monster/creature.

I could not agree more. They look loveable, but not something you would approach by throwing caution to the wind. They can be free spirited and yet feral…but always facinated by bits of junk or machines…and frustrated by their inability to articulate at times.