splendidostrich

Female NPCs - a question

Added 2016-02-25 15:12:52 +0000 UTC

Hello everyone!

Sorry for the barrage of posts lately, but I have another question about how you want female NPCs to be implemented.

Female NPCs will have one of the 5 personalities used by all NPCs, and additionally one of the (initially) 3 character types used by female npcs only.

These will interact with each other to some extent. For example, I mentioned that you won't often get an innocent jerk, although I do plan to have selfish ones.

The question though, is which should be determined first.

- If Personality is picked first, then it can easily use the same weightings that are used for male NPCs. These are the ones that you can change in the cheats screen. The downside is that extreme games (e.g. all jerks) will have everyone be a jerk, rather than a good-girls/bad-men situation. This also means that you'd see few or no innocents in such a world, as that character type wouldn't be compatible with their personality.

- If character type is picked first, then it becomes the deciding factor in personality, and the cheat weightings would be partially or completely ignored. This gives you less control over character generation when not fine-tuning it with custom npcs. However, it means you'll more easily see a difference between male and female npcs which might be desirable in some situations. I might eventually add female character type weightings to the cheats screen, but that will be fairly low priority for the initial implementation.

Of course it'll be possible to make custom female NPCs, and this will let you have quite specific custom worlds - for example fixing just the personalities and character types while letting everything else be algorithmically determined.

Still, a lot of people won't want to go to the trouble of setting up lots of custom characters, so I want the default option to reflect what players want.

Personally, I feel the second choice (picking character type first) is the more intuitive and it'd be my preferred option. However, this does mean that the personality weightings cheat will be ineffective on female NPCs so I want to get your opinion on whether that would be a problem.