Character background generator.

[Burger_Time]

I've had one pretty interesting concept on my mind for quite a bit now that I think would help expand on the game's RPG aspect once the final iteration of NPCs come out, which is character backstory generator.

 

Basically, the idea behind it is Rimworld's childhood/adulthood thing, except working the other way around: instead of character's abilities and skills varying with background, we could have some randomized brief stories of our characters that would reflect character's traits, occupation and maybe even scenarios they're in.

 

A general background would consist of a three different parts:

1. Character's birth date (If age selection will be a thing) and place (may be completely randomized with some bias towards the towns near the game's setting).

2. How did character acquired their traits.

3. How did character get into the situation they're in right now (Especially fun if some scenarios like Prison/Hospital escapes are implemented)

In between those there would be some random bits added such as education, moving from town to town etc.

 

For example, I created a character: a chain smoking, unemployed brawler and runner named Chris Anderson, born on 3rd of December, 1960.

After making sure my dearest boy Chris looks all fine and dandy the game would present me with something like this:

 

Chris Anderson was born on 3rd of December of the year 1960 in Nashville, Tennessee.

At the age of 13 Chris has joined school's Baseball team. He became quite good at sprinting.

Chris has studied in the local school until the age of 14 (random number), when he and his parents moved to Louisville, Kentucky. 

At the age of 17 he has acquired a smoking habit and became interested in illegal street fights and even had a chance to take part in a few.

After completing high school at the age of 19 he started attending local University but soon dropped out.

Until the age of 33 worked as labourer, and currently resides in Muldraugh, Kentucky.

 

This short story would then be used as material for small talk of the character, personality and maybe it'd even create relatives, friends and their initial relationships (Let's say, Chris' mother's name was Angelina Anderson, and his father's name was Michael Anderson).

 

I think this feature would make characters have a lot more depth to them and the way their relationships progress. Besides that, it'd be really fun to see how it could describe some absolutely fucked up characters like morbidly obese, ugly asthmatic cops people are able to create.

 

Fin.

 

 

[TrailerParkThor]

Yeah this would be really cool, especially since this would allow them to build off the current character creation system instead of completely starting over from scratch. I think a system that would work well for the game code would be to start off assigning relationships to every zombie and survivor in the game world. The game already tracks a randomly generated name for every zombie in the world, I don't think it would be hard to categorize by family names during worldgen and tag each relative. From there, they could categorize by workplace so coworkers and bosses can be tagged. Finally, tagging a few randomly generated friends that live nearby or work with the character. These last two can be done for only survivors to save on amount of processing required. I imagine players would be able to further specify their relationships by either adding a Spouse, Roommates, or Nearby Family that you could either rescue or find as zombies. Maybe children if old enough for them to be adults.

 

Now the game can spawn the zombies based on where they should be, and can calculate a degree of separation and relationship for every survivor in the game. Then, taking the traits of these survivors, can randomly assign backstory to each trait based on current age. I imagine picking true age won't be practical, but maybe a Young Adult, Adult, Senior system a la the Sims. Maybe we could specify Zodiac sign to further select month. I also think the birthplace should be random like you said, but I also think this should either be selected or left out so we can still RP what we want. Imagine creating yourself and setting up a backstory that you ended up in Muldraugh for some reason then it says you're from Detroit, Michigan! Still I think we would get an incoherent backstory if all blurbs are RNG, so we need a way to tie them all together. I think this should be done with Profession. A Doctor obviously had a decent upbringing and must have graduated med school even if he has a lot of bad traits, but an Unemployed guy probably hasn't had the best life even if he has good traits. So after all that, for your example of Chris Anderson, it would say something like this:

 

Chris Anderson, Adult, Sagittarius, Unemployed (Smoker, Brawler, Runner)

Born December 3rd, 1960 (randomly generated)

Family - Spouse[X] Roommates [] Siblings [] Parents[] Coworkers [N/A] Children [N/A]

Backstory - Negative

Childhood - Chris grew up on the streets, and had to rely on his little legs to carry him out of too many hairy situations. [Runner]

Adolescence - As a teenager, he started smoking with his sketchy friends. He never was able to kick the habit. [Smoker]

Early Adulthood - Since he never graduated school, Chris took up amateur fighting to make some money here and there. [Brawler]

Adulthood - Knox Event

Old Age - N/A

 

I imagine then that realistic traits and backstory would then be generated for all relatives and relationships so that Chris isn't married to some rich doctor. Then the game could randomly decide if she is nearby and alive, zombified in the bathroom, dead in a burned out office, whatever the Sadistic AI wishes. Ideally, if this was added to the game, the spawn location would be dictated by whatever backstory each entity has. Since we know Chris has a negative backstory, maybe the game can raise the likelihood of starting in a Mobile Home or an abandoned Warehouse/Store. Chris is unemployed, but if he wasn't, he might spawn at work with his boss being eaten by a zombie. It would be very cathartic to kill him. This would allow us to inform the world of the intended backstory and hopefully generate an engaging starting survivor/group for players to then build on naturally through gameplay. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a dumbed down version of the trait system for NPCs, but the devs have said they want them to be immersive and engaging so I imagine only a system like this would work well for creating those procedural characters we all want to see.

Edited December 12, 2020 by TrailerParkThor
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