Bringing characters to life Part 1-3

Today we will try to explain a little bit about how our NPCs work. However, there's just way too much content to just put it all in one post, so we will make this a three part article.

But just before we begin, we are happy to announce that we have gotten Dani's brother, Mikkel Laynes on the team. He will be the one responsible for the music and we are really excited about this. :)

Actually, we are so excited about it that we have already finished the cover art for the soundtrack, so we can share his awesome work with all of you. :)

So remember to check here for updates, because once in a while, we will post a track.

Anyway, let us begin talking about the NPCs

The Work Cycle.

In our game "The Creature" We want the player to experience being the monster in the horror movie/game instead of the Hero. But where's the Horror without the drama and people. To get the best feeling and to make the gameplay more interesting, we need our NPCs to Interact with each other. All their actions should be based on what they've seen, experienced and what influence and relationship they have with one another.

Every NPC follows a work cycle. The NPC will move to a waypoint where it will do something for a pre-determined amount of time. When it is done, it will go to the next waypoint where it "work", and so on and so on. 

Sometimes if two NPCs are near each other when the player is nearby, they will start a dialog. In this way we easily create an illusion of socialisation between the characters. 

A work cycle can be interupted in a number of ways, but most of the time the NPC will return to its work Cycle unless given a new one.

The most common things that will interupt an NPC is:

- Alarms.

- Finding a corpse.

- Spotting or hearing the player.

- Another NPC interacting with it.

- Changed work space.

Making unique Characters.

Every NPC has a character profile.

This can be compared to a pen and paper RP Character sheet.

The profile describes the character's persona, its emotions and what relationship it has with other units.

When the characters interact with each other, the characters profile will determine what kind of action it will take.
Let us take a look at how NPC Fiona reacts when NPC Garry tells her to follow him.

In this case, Garry has seen something "probably the player". He then finds Fiona because he is scared and wants someone to investigate with him. However, Fiona has a bad Relationship with Garry. This can be because Garry is an A-hole (which would be described in his profile). Another reason could be that this is not the first time he comes running. He has probably already done this two times before and therefore is Fiona starting to get pissed. She is also scared at the moment which doesn't help Garry's situation.

Normally, Leadership has an influence on the outcome, but because Garry has a leadership of "0", it doesn't really provide any modifiers and therefore has no effect.

So in this case, Fiona chooses not go with Garry. By doing so, Garrys relationship to Fiona will change for the worse.

In some situation, the characters will be put into events that has different outcomes depending on Character relationships. For an example; Character (A) is stuck in a door. Character (B) can help Character (A) by getting free. But because (B)'s relationship to Character (A) is critical, he will just let (A) hanging. 

Leadership.

Leadership represents the characters "will".
The greater the Leadership, the more will other characters listen and follow the character.

Leadership plays a great role during encounters. Whenever a player encounters an armed NPC, "The creature's" Fear is compared to the opposing NPC group's Leadership. If their Leadership is less or equal to your "Fear", the groupe will run away. If their leadership is greater than your "Fear", they will stay and fight you. Any member of the groupe without a weapon will flee. If the fleeing member's leadership is high enough and he has "brave" in his Character description, he will find a weapon, for then to return and fight with his/her comrades.

Leadership also have another important role.

Lets say that an NPC spots a corpse. The NPC will react in a number of ways determined by its Leadership. If the NPC has a low Leadership, it will flee from the place, hiding somewhere it feels safe. If the NPC has high leadership, it will instantly alert others about the corpse. Brave NPC's with high leadership might even try to find you (the creature), with their weapon drawn of course.

There's more to it than that, but we will get into that in the next article.

All in all, the Character profile is a way to define a characters personality and in that way makes it possible to easily make unique characters.

I think that's it for now. Thanks for reading. :)