Posted January 28, 2022 by JHyde
I've been adding a bunch to the UI side of the game, and thought I'd make another devlog.
I knew I wanted to have a pool of faces that could be randomly drawn from and assigned to the NPC when spawned. I just had to draw the faces and code it up, and it was surprisingly easy. I think I'm getting better at pixel art, I drew 4 more male faces and 4 female faces real quick, and I like how they turned out and will probably add more. Some of the faces along with the stats made me laugh, so I think I'm on the right track.
I also added a little minigame where you have to find the NPCs memory inside their brain by moving sliders to reveal the spot where the memory is located then Probe them. It plays a animation and a harsh buzzing sound which I think turned out pretty funny. I still need to work on the console some more because I think it looks a little plain. After I'm done polishing these things a bit more I'll upload an updated version of the game.
All of these randomly assigned faces and stats makes me want to add randomly generated, paragraph long bios for each NPC. Like how dwarf fortress has procedurally generated histories. Its probably super complicated to procedurally generate text that actually makes sense, but I could just write a bunch of histories and depending on the NPCs age and gender they would be assigned an appropriate history. It would be really cool if I could some how make these stats and bios relevant to the actual gameplay, but for right now its just a fun idea I'm spitballin.
I guess I'm gonna keep posting progress so if things go terribly, I'll be able to look back and see what I did wrong. Also writing things down helps clarify some of the ideas I have. I'm making this up as I go, so any ideas are more than welcome!