Welcome back to another edition of Sun Haven’s Development Blogathon! Too much? Yeah, it felt like too much.
Thanks for joining!
This week, I wanted to share some insight into how we developed our romance-able non-player characters, or RNPCs for short. In deciding what personalities our RNPCs should have, we leaned on psychology. Specifically, the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
For those unfamiliar with MBTI, it’s a sort of personality test that parses out the different ways that people perceive the world and make decisions. It’s a really interesting subject and I highly recommend everyone give it a shot just to see what you’ll get!
There are 16 different personality types according to MBTI, and we just happen to have 16 RNPCs - funny coincidence, huh? Nope! Absolutely by design. Each of our RNPCs is modeled after a different Meyers-Briggs type.
For a quick reference into the 16 different types, I’ve straight-up stolen a graphic from an article on erikthor.com! Don’t blame me, it just sounded easy, okay? For the record, I don’t know a darn thing about that website other than the fact that I stole the following graphic from an article that you can see if you click this link! So please don’t call me names if it turns out that the website is actually run by a grumpy pollywog who sleeps in his own slime.
And now for the stolen graphic in question:
This might not mean a lot to you if you’re unfamiliar with the system because it is somewhat esoteric. I’ll break it down for you slightly:
I/E - Introverted/Extroverted - Where a person focuses their attention
S/N - Sensing/Intuitive - How a person takes in information
F/T - Feeling/Thinking - How a person makes decisions
J/P - Judging/Perceiving - How a person deals with the world
You can see that each personality type has attributed characteristics as well as functions. All of these things come into play in the design of each RNPC, their interests, their modes of speech, what decisions or reactions they tend toward, etc. What’s more, it makes it MUCH easier to align on character design when all of your coworkers are hundreds of miles away!
Can you figure out which character has which personality? I guess we’ll have to wait until May to find out!
Excited to Chat With Y’all About Our Characters,
- Michael, Sun Haven Writer
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