How can you get personality into your NPC's?
It may seem impossible at first,
to trick a player into believing that your NPC is a real thinking character,
but people are always projecting personalities onto inanimate objects.
How many times have you heard a friend or a co-worker say,
my computer is out to get my today, or my car has been temperamental lately.
Their computers aren't out to get them and their car isn't temperamental.
They're just wanting something from machine, and the machine is letting them
down and creating emotions, so your friend then uses
the bits of information they have to make a narrative to go with their experience.
Let's take a simple example that could work in your game project.
If your player was moving along a path and
they were rolling standard dice to see how many space they could move.
The dice would give them a number between one and six, so
on average they would be moving about three and a half spaces.
If your game was a car game,
you could make an NPC opponent that would compete with your player.
What would happen if this NPC moves three spaces every turn?
Well, your player's moving three and a half spaces on average, so
this NPC moving only three spaces would normally lose.
If the NPC moved four spaces every turn, they would win on average,
but these races would normally be pretty close.
Now, what would happen if we made an NPC that could move only one or
two spaces every turn?
They'd be slow, and they'd usually lose.
They now have a quality that's outside the norm, they're especially slow.
The player might start projecting some personality onto this NPC,
seeing them as a sad, unlucky loser.
>> Well that car never wins, what a slow poke.
What if we had a NPC that moved five or six spaces every turn?
They'd almost always win and the player would almost certainly develop some strong
feelings towards this NPC, seeing them as a difficult adversary or a villain.
>> Who is that super fast driver?
Can I steal their car in this game?
>> By changing just one number, we can take two identical NPC's and
change them into two characters that the player will see as having different
personalities, a slowpoke and a super faster racer.
Now, all along we've been stressing simplicity in our game making, and
this is an illustration of why.
We're keeping our rules minimal and
we're letting the players imagination create the story.
Imagine the way your game would be seen as different if the imagery representing your
NPC's were designed in different ways.
If we took the NPC racer that moves only one or two spaces each turn,
the perpetual loser, and designed them to look like a fancy race car driver with
an expensive race car, the player might see them as an over funded but
incompetent driver who is all show and no go.
If we took the NPC that moves five or six spaces each turn, the perpetual winner,
and designed them to look like a rough and tumble racer with a beat up old car,
the player might see them as a lucky old timer.
All these personalities and emotions are created by adjusting one number and
a bit of imagery.
These small changes can be quite powerful in shaping the experience of your player,
and these NPC's are essentially just running a script.
They aren't reacting at all to what's happening during the game play.
So what if they did?
What if we created an NPC that always moved one or two spaces
until they were losing, and then they'd always move five or six spaces each turn?
We'd have a character that might seem kind of clueless at first, and
then fiercely competitive.
What if we had an NPC character that did the opposite?
They could start out moving five or six spaces per turn until they were ahead and
then only move one or two spaces per turn when they were in the lead.
This would make a character that might seem like a show-off who is just
toying with your player and wouldn't you love to beat that darn show-off at a race?
>> Oh, I wanna beat that show off.
They're driving me crazy.
>> Well that's the point.
The previous example created some extra personality for our NPC characters,
by giving them a condition whether or not they were winning.
NPC's can react to all sorts of things.
Maybe a NPC might only start to move when the player gets too close.
Maybe they might only appear after a player reaches a certain number of
points or chooses a certain path.
All these conditional behaviors can be use to make your NPC's feels
like they are thinking, and that makes them more believable to your players.
Remember, you don't need to make NPC's that actually think, you just
need to make NPC characters who appear to be thinking, like this guy over here.
Fran KrauseFaculty, Character Animation
