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Yan Zhang
Level Design
How to Build an Emotional Bond Between the Player and an NPC by Using Relatedness
The goal of my thesis was to seek efficient ways to build an emotional bond between a player and a game character . Combining the concept of relatedness in Self-Determination Theory and tactics that development teams have used in the past to develop excellent games , I collected several guidelines and implemented them in my artifact .
I chose this topic because I found impressive characters could stay alive in my mind even when the game had been finished for years . I wanted to take the chance to conduct deep research on the magic of building a strong emotional bond .
The Skyrim artifact took me around seven months to build and usually requires a player 70-90 minutes to complete . I built a questline with five quests . These included coaching , as well as two play segments —‘ normal days ’ spent in a large
residence with a girl character , which are then followed by scenes in which dangers come and you must escape with the girl as soon as possible .
Since this artifact was large in scope , it required me to skillfully plan , organize , and maintain the project . When adding new cooperative mechanics , such as mind-control and dog-guide , I ’ ve learned and written dozens of custom scripts . Moreover , making vivid characters also helped me to gain a deeper understanding of the AI system .
According to the data I ’ ve collected , there are several efficient ways to build a bond , even in a short term . I believe this is a useful conclusion for people ’ s further exploration of building great characters in games .
68 LEVEL DESIGN