It occurred to me this morning that I had made one concession here, which I had intended to take further: making the NPCs carry things.
As it is, there are a small handful of outward signals:
- When starting to make a soup, the NPC always begins by grabbing a pot and putting it on the stove.
- When taking out the trash, the NPC will carry a trash bag around until they take it outside.
- The doorbell will always ring before an NPC goes to answer the door.
I had plans to incorporate a variety of other accouterments into their workflows, less as a signal of intention but as another layer of realism that brought life to the "house". The pieces that did get added feel really successful; I just ran out of time to add more.
(I also had plans to allow NPCs to pick up and move the stools so they wouldn't get trapped, and more generally allowing tasks to be interrupted-and-resumed later (e.g. if the stove became blocked in the middle of soup making), but that would also necessitate putting back whatever they were currently carrying, and better pathfinding logic in general. Ultimately I had to draw a line between what I could get implemented well for the deadline and what I wanted to get done… As another example, it was originally planned that you would have to jump up onto a stool to reach the upper cupboard, fridge, and cookie jar — but doing so would leave stools in positions that blocked NPC jobs, and while it was cute, it made the already difficult gameplay more challenging, so it got cut … except for the jumping on stools code.)