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RimWorld => Mods => Unfinished => Topic started by: Hahkethomemah on April 18, 2021, 08:55:31 PM

Title: Simple Personalities
Post by: Hahkethomemah on April 18, 2021, 08:55:31 PM
TLDR: This is an attempt to introduce colonist personalities outside the vanilla trait system in more lightweight manner than Psychology (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2016263135) did.

Introduction
For many people Rimworld is about storytelling in the first place. I remember when a shuttle crushed near my mountain base. My fiancée pointed out that one of the survivors had a "Mountain Lover" trait (from VTE) and that was obviously her fault. She went into the cockpit and nagged the pilot until he gave up and tried to get dangerously close to the mountain. And just like that, for many incoming years in the colony, that pawn was labelled as "the girl who crashed a plane".

The most popular personality tests and fortune-tellers use vague, broad descriptions and let the customers use their imagination to fill the narration gaps by themselves. This is perfect resource to use in a game like Rimworld.

Idea
I love Psychology mod and how it makes each pawn unique, more lively. Unfortunately, Psychology makes quite a few changes in the game to achieve that, which results in incompatibility with many mods. I'm working on a different approach.

Simple Personalities is designed to be modular, each module with increasing impact on the game. The goal is to let the player decide how much they want personalities to matter.




Roadmap
Module 1 - Enneagram
This module creates a web of dependencies between personality types and character traits to generate consistent, believable psyche description for a colonist. By itself it has no impact on the game mechanics.
(https://i.ibb.co/FqpVfkN/obraz-2021-04-19-015006.png)


Description example:
(https://i.ibb.co/mC4jffx/obraz-2021-04-19-022726.png)

This is the whole draft (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t34UuM4QryNOXAXtR4GwAEC4icY94jfQ/view?usp=sharing) for this module design, if you're interested.

More invested players can even make one step further and check enneagram personality types online to learn more about their colonists. I used quite a few versions of enneagram to procure the most fitting list but all types should be easily reachable when searching "personality type" + "enneagram".


Module 2 - Psychological Drive Expanded
This module makes personalities influence in-game mechanics. Thanks to module 1, we already have pawns tagged as those who rely on instincts, feelings and thinking.
Module 3 – Worldviews
Module 2 introduced a simple mini-game, easy to track and understand for any player. This might not be enough to satisfy people who loved Psychology for the deep level of pawn diversification it brought to the game. Module 3 is not fully designed yet, my xml knowledge is way too poor to choose a development direction and set it in stone.

Module 3 should introduce "real talk", 3rd option next to "chit-chat" and "deep talk", weighted somewhere between those two. Real talk will use hermetic pool of topic categories and opinion changes induced by those will never fade. During the years they will help stabilize relations between pawns (for good or bad) and make friendships and rivalries not only believable, but also easy to explain after a peek into social tab. Do they argue about politics every now and then? That usually explains a lot.

I'll spare the details for now, I'm still considering options while slowly filling massive spreadsheet of topics and their categories.




What do you think? Would you use Simple Personalities? How many modules would you be interested in?

My meager xml knowledge is probably not enough for modules 2 and 3, so if you're interested in coproducing Simple Personalities – let me know. I would gladly stick to the design and filling spreadsheets with data.[/list][/list]
Title: Re: Simple Personalities
Post by: ChirpScree on April 21, 2021, 10:04:56 PM
This is really interesting. Thank you for this.
Title: Re: Simple Personalities
Post by: m1st4x on April 22, 2021, 04:38:29 PM
Hey mate, that's great!
I do know Enneagram by myself and would never have thought of using it in Rimworld - really interesting!
First, rename your mod into 'Complex Personalities' what you wanna do is not simple imo^^ It's not just XML, you'll have to work with C# as well.
Anyway, thanks for the concept, gonna think about this!
-m1st4x