Devlog #11- NPCs

I’m very close to finishing the tutorial for my game, and so I’ve finally started working on some fun stuff for change! I’ve held back from doing world-building, quests and characters, because I know how easy it is to get carried away and then have to do it all again when the systems beneath it change. I’ve thought about it a lot though and have written down a lot of ideas, so it’s exciting to finally get to this stage in development.

I’ve done a lot of uninteresting tweaking and polishing this week, so for this devlog I’m gonna show you the beginnings (still WIP) of some new areas and explain my approach to NPCs.

-Cornfields-

I haven’t polished this area yet, but I wanted to make sure that it’s technically plausible to do so. As of now it’s just a lot of corn, but eventually it’ll have more details and a bunch of ghosts not-so-subtly hiding among the corn (it’s one of the first areas).

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-GhostTowns-

This next area will likely be the first town you’ll come across (might be possible to sequence break). I made a test house sprite that turned out alright; you can enter every building in my game as I think decorative doors are a huge buzzkill. Also no copy-paste buildings, worst-case maybe colour-swapped.

Finally this week I also drew some test NPCs! They’re all ghosts, so visually the only constraint I have is that they have my signature ghost eyes, the rest I just make up as I go along. I try to roughly theme them to something as they’ll eventually need a nondescript ghost name- e.g. FOX, PETAL, OWL

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-What do NPCs do?-

I’ve always thought NPCs in RPGs are super under-utilised, often just the trigger for a fetch quest or even worse just a guy walking back and forth in a town ready to tell you how comfy and easy to wear his shorts are on repeat. They’re mostly used to fill an empty space, and even interesting characters tied to quest-lines often become one-liners once you are done with the quest. But I think they have so much more potential.

A main pillar of my game narratively is a focus on deep characters where every human character can be recruited and join your party, each with their own storyline and upgrades. In this sense, there really aren’t ‘Non Player Characters’ in my game ….at least not any human ones. And that’s where ghosts come in-

The ghosts in my game have lost their humanity and mostly spend they’re time loitering about, and therefore work perfectly as traditional NPCs. These ghosts are more refined than the more savage ghosts who disguise themselves as objects to attack you, and you’ll find them mostly doing their own thing completely ignorant of you.

You can talk with them the same as human characters, and some might even ask favours of you, but they’re still ghosts and are all selfish and stubborn so don’t expect to make any friends.

In addition to the traditional NPC role, all these ghosts can also be battled!
To get them to battle you, you’ll need to provoke them somehow: Some will get provoked when you hit them with your sickle, some will be triggered by certain dialogue choices, and some may require external actions or quests completed.

Why would you want to do this? -Defeat them and they’ll get spirited away and provide a decent reward, and you might be able to access something you couldn’t get to before in their absence. They return the next day, same as any other ghost, but they’ll probably have some new choice words for you.

-Ghost Glossary-

You don’t have to challenge any of these NPC’s if you don’t want to (there’s no undertale style pacifist/genocide run or anything), but you’ll need to provoke them if you want to fill out your ghost glossary.

You’ll see it’s still a work-in-progress as I’m avoiding finalising anything yet to make sure I get all the details right first.
The gist is, every ghost you encounter is added to this glossary and once you defeat it it’ll fill in the enemy’s glossary page. Here you'll be able to see their stats, attack style, number of times encountered and defeated, and your overall percentage of unique ghosts seen. 

I added a glossary because I think it adds a collectathon element to the battles, so you'll be excited to encounter new enemies and can watch the glossary slowly fill out as you play. As a non-linear game, I have no intention of designing so that the player sees every enemy, but this will help those players that want to.

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Seeing the list of systems and tutorials I have on my to-do list slowly whittle down to the point where I can now actually start working on the fun game stuff is kind of surreal, but very exciting. Still a lot of polishing to go, but look forward to more devlogs about game content from now on! See you same time next week! Thanks for reading! :)