The spooky season is behind us, but even as the cold weather sets in, we get ready to slip into our cozy houses. Stunlock Studios is hard at work creating monsters for us to play with in the next major V Rising patch.

So, there is more than just making a creature look menacing or ferocious to make it have an impact in the game; it takes work from multiple areas within the development team to make them a reality, so let’s take a look at how they make a monster.

All the characters, creatures, and monsters in the game belong to a family, or rather, what’s known as unit families. These different units in the game belong to unit families, which control their behavior and affiliation with other units inside the game. The different families determine how the different units in the game interact with each other, which builds the believable interactions of the game. For example, the undead units are highly aggressive towards the Church of Luminance, and militia soldiers are friendly to townspeople but unfriendly toward bandits.

This is how units from this world work with each other, but what about an enemy, or rather an army from another world, laying siege, entering our world and attacking in swarms, and overrunning the townsfolk who abide there, your food source?

Next up is the vision of what these creatures will look like, how they will move, and how they will sound. If something is off, it will break the immersion, but build it right, and you will be sucked into the full scale of this battle, which comes down to the artist, animators, and sound team to bring alive never-before-seen creatures, such as an enemy shown above that has 19 eyes on a highly muscular headless torso lumbering toward you with a blood-soaked cleaver.

Lastly, what unnatural powers will these beasts bring with them from their otherworldly domain? Like a powerful Succubus that has the power to charm even the most steadfast vampires to lure them ever closer to her and their deaths. Moderating these abilities and how they will affect the game play is a serious consideration for the developer team.

We do not know when this next update will launch, but one thing we did learn is that it takes a village to raise a ghoul. So let this newfound knowledge keep you warm during the chilly months, as once the update drops, war will follow.

What type of creatures do you think will come? Are you afraid? Or are you waiting for worthy foes? Let me know in the comments below.