It was indeed the Stanford people who did the whole town of people, i believe this is the paper:
I thought it was a pretty interesting read, me and a few other people were doing something similar, but the project is currently on pause while people deal with IRL stuff.
What I’ve done a bit different is having an “overseer AI” that is able to add instructions to the NPC’s current task, I’m most case’s it’s just “inform <Player_Name> about XYZ”
There we go. Thanks for the link. I saw an overview video the other day, but I’ve been working a lot on this roguelike game.
I want my NPC to be one of the first to be able to refuse to give the player a quest if they’re not nice. So, I’m thinking the player will have a “reputation” score with each NPC or in general. If it’s too low, the NPC won’t give out a quest. If it’s good, the NPC might follow the player around and help (chatting after battles ABOUT the battle…) If it’s not good, the NPC might not talk or go as far as to attack you.
I don’t think we’ll be first to market on this one, the project my friends and where working on have already been ripped off by some people who saw a preview in a Facebook post.
Don’t let that get you down though, making games is a creative process, people will love your game, if you just concentrate on making your game the best it can be.
Great idea, here’s a few tips from my own work with this:
Store the reputation score and requirements in the NPC data, not the player data, it’s a lot easier to handle when writing the code.
Make sure there’s quests available for players who want to raise their rep.
Have an inverse relationship between some of the NPC’s rep. Making it so you can only befriend one of them.
Have multiple reputation score’s some of which are shared across different NPC’s, this could be stuff like guild_rep and town_rep
