Hello everyone!
I hope you are having a nice weekend. The playtest will finally start next week on Tuesday, July 8th. We’ll probably release it in the evening, around 4-7 pm CEST. With that said, there is one final topic to discuss before the playtest:
HavenCraft is an NPC town-building game, so one of the core parts of the gameplay is the actual townspeople management. Let’s talk about it!
The issue with using NPCs as part of gameplay is that NPCs are dumb and unpredictable. Most gamers have had the experience where NPC followers are standing around blocking the door, or where important NPCs in escort missions seem like they’re trying to die.
The game design paradox is this:
The problem is, the smarter the NPCs are and the more behaviours they have, the harder it is for the player to understand why exactly they are acting the way they act. If the NPC ends up playing 4D chess, they are less predictable, and playing the game becomes frustrating when you just want them to do X.
We’ve seen variants of this problem in Founders’ Fortune and in InfraSpace.
In Founders’ Fortune, the issue was that your colonists could starve if they did not eat. But when we programmed them to abort their tasks and automatically go and eat, they ended up eating at just the wrong times. We added “combat mode” to prevent people from caring for their needs, but if a player forgot about it, people in combat mode would stand around until they starve to death. Not an easy problem to deal with!
In InfraSpace, the issue was that cars chose were to go and which path to take. While this took a bunch of management work off the shoulders of the players, especially in large cities, it created new issues when the cars took a road the player did not expect or when deliveries only went to building A because it was closer, but building B was starved of resources.
We learned a lot from our past games, so let’s try to find the best solution yet!
Alright, so this is a hard and important question: How do you manage NPCs so they do what you want, without having to micromanage them?
We went through a lot of iterations, but these are the main points that we built our designs around:
As you can see, there is a huge focus on making the player understand what is happening and why. One of the features we built is a visualization of what is currently going on in the villager’s brain above their head when the player is nearby:
Working on the workbench versus going to work.
Another, more detailed panel is the management overview. It might be a lot to take in at first, but this is where you can see what is happening and why:
The villager management panel has a lot of information. If a worker is not doing what you want, you can see exactly what is going wrong.
It’s important that players can experiment with the villager tasks and figure out the system in real time. So as soon as anything about the work situation changes, every symbol and every text in every menu updates instantly, giving immediate feedback.
This is just our current system and probably not the end of our experiments. I’m looking forward to getting the playtest into all of your hands next Tuesday so you can try the NPC town building firsthand and tell us if it works!
If you have feedback and thoughts already, let us know!
