Create your own NPCs!

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

So i was checking out this game the other day, “Death Road To Canada”. In this game you usually end up finding NPCs a lot, because they are critical to how the game works and stuff. But what’s fun about it is that you can create NPCs that then appear in the game! You can even play with only the ones created instead of the ones that come with the game.

And hey! That’s seriously fun, actually. I’d love to be able to create a bunch of my friends and family and be able to survive with them. After all this game is a sandbox roguelike, the perfect thing to make fun stories, ala Dwarf Fortress. Well, adding custom NPCs that would be your friends would add a lot of flavor to those stories! Like, i don’t know, being robbed by your mother or meeting all your gang of friends and make some kind of survivors group.

There is already a way to costumize NPCs, but it is really clumsy in my opinion, as the menu closes each time you do any change and it’s not as convenient as the normal character creator. Also it’s modifying an NPC, not having them spawn already customized, and you also have to have the debug menu key to even know about this. It’s cool to have it though!

I don’t know how this could be implemented. Though, i’d suggest two options! One would be copying the character creator that is already in game in another menu, but putting a new tab that would be “relations, trust, fear” etc. Even “inventory”, why not!

Another would be having a menu that would read all your Presets of character sheets you have, and then be able to tell them which ones you would want to appear as an NPC. That doesn’t have the trust fear or inventory options but well, having the option to have them appear is awesome enough IMO.

What do you think? Don’t you think it would be fun?

(Also i’d totally put some of the forum people to see how much they survive, hahaha)

2

I’d love this, especially if you could use it to export character files to become barebones NPC templates. Just imagine community bones files where retired characters periodically showed up to shank the player.

3

That would be an awesome addition indeed!

It should also be easily exportable, but as presets are easily exported i don’t think it should be that hard! Character packs, just imagine. We could even create Marloss Man.

4

We should also be able to customize where NPCs spawn, too. Making NPC Spawning work like Monster Spawning would be far less frustrating, as NPCs wouldn’t spawn in my face and immediately kill me.

5

Game start with a group of NPCs would be nice. Its pretty unrealistic that every survivor is all on his own, most people have relatives, friends and families whom they trust and with whom they stick in times of trouble. Having scenarios for starting with a family (1-3 friendly NPCs of your design) or buddies (like a biker gang, otaku friends or at least your colleagues) would have been nice… but only if NPCs will be more realistic without being a bother. Right now NPCs are basically either your slaves, neutral, or are your enemies. Friendly NPCs never act on their own, which limits RP value severely. Playing as a sidekick of a bandit boss or becoming a slave and escaping slave camp would be pretty interesting but I doubt NPC ai will ever develop that far.

6

You can already create custom npcs in cata via .json/mods but not with total customization. You make an npc, chose its name/ title, give it a gender, assign it a faction, assign it a dialogue set and assign it a class. Stats and skills are random and their items are randomly drawn from a pool depending on the class assign to the npc. To spawn them you either include them in the overmap.json of the bulding where they spawn or use the debug menu. Adding more customization to this would give the desired effect.

7

Well that means the only hard part about this would be to actually add the menu for it basically.
After that it is just adding it to the array of all the other NPCs and stuff!
Also making them appear with you would be awesome, as well as some other costumization, specially regarding inventory. And making them spawn next to you on start. It should be awesome!

8

More Npc customization and its own menu in the debug menu would be nice.