Here’s a quick overview of villager’s functions. They would all have basic needs as passive parameters, and a relationship with the player as well as with other villagers. They can also be assigned roles to help gather resources and build, but depending on their relationship and needs, they may not always be compliant.
Initially, we went with the idea of generated villagers. It was appealing for a couple of reasons:
It provided no limit to the amount of villagers the player could obtain
It gave more novelty to each new villager
On the development side, it was less work
To create a distinct personality recognizable between each villager, we came up with a spectrum of traits that could possible influence their behaviour:
Introvert & Extrovert
Aggressive & Passive
Lenient & Picky
From this spectrum, there would be dialogue variations to prevent dialogue fatigue. Which variation the villager would have depends on two things: the traits they had and whether the villager liked the player or not.
Obviously the more traits we had, the more combinations there would be. Eventually, leniency and picky were removed because it wasn’t significant enough to include. Instead, we looked to RimWorld as reference for its emergent narratives and use of generated NPCs.
RimWorld utilized a variety of traits and these traits would affect different NPC skill parameters or certain behaviours like drug use. The main difference is that there is no character dialogue whereas in our game, dialogue is one of the main things to differentiate and identify traits.
My group eventually had a discussion on generated villagers versus unique. As a reminder, our design challenge is to give the player a sense of belonging within the community they are influencing. To push that agenda, it could be said that unique villagers would make a bigger impression on players (think Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing) than multiple generated ones.
Some pros and cons for unique villagers that we noted:
Pros:
Distinct personalities
Predictability
Familiarity
Cons:
Less replayability
Limited amount of NPCs
More assets & writing
So in the end we shifted to 6-8 unique villagers. An archetype will be used to reference the various traits they will have. These traits will influence their behaviour, relationships, and needs.
With this change, there are several things we had to consider:
A balance of ‘negative’ traits since the player cannot simply re-roll to get a new one
Unique dialogue for every villager
Villager death becomes very punishing. Instead of death, the villager will become a shell of themselves and occasionally pass out/not work.
We shall test some NPC events in the next few weeks.