Working on an indie game with a tight budget can present some pretty tricky challenges from time to time. One such challenge that came up during the development of Techtonica was "How are we going to present a compelling, character-driven narrative if we don't have the resources to make multiple fully-animated, recognizable characters?" It might've been a joke that turned into a solution, but I believe the idea was tossed out there to literally make our characters cubes...er storage devices for the human conciousness. Thus our NPCs were born. We iterated a bit on some neat effects and waveform visuals that are reactive to the voice lines being spoken, but in the end they are just that: glowing cubes.

Also you can make them ride the conveyor belts in game...try it! Seriously, you'll laugh.