How Do I Add NPCs In Dreams?

Media Molecule's Dreams allows you to make full-fledged games. Full-fledged games typically have non-playable characters (NPCs) the player interacts with to pick up quests, learn about the world through dialogue, or befriend. Naturally, there is a way to create NPCs in Dreams and it's an easier process than you might think.

Usually, your playable character is a puppet with the rather self-explanatory "player" tag. Since an NPC is, by nature, non-playable, puppets created with the intent of being NPCs cannot have this tag. You can find tags in the Puppet Logic menu, where you'll make the majority of the edits to create your NPC. 

Along with the "player" tag, you'll want to erase the "follow behavior," "level complete," and "controller logic" tags once you have a new puppet to work with. Then throw in a Microchip and Selector to start working on the behavior of the NPC. This behavior can be as simple as giving a quest upon being prompted with a button press by the player, or as complicated as carrying out a whole conversation. The sky's the limit.

Now that you have an NPC standing there, staring blankly, you might want to make it do something. That's where the Selector comes in. This Selector allows for different modes, each of which requires a Microchip. For the simplest of NPCs, you might want the character to look at the player's character. For this, you can add in a "look at" Rotator to one of the Microchips and set the "look at" setting to the "player" tag. 

Ta da! You have a very, very basic NPC on your hands. Making it interactive requires more steps, like adding in some kind of text display so players know they can chat with the NPC and then creating that dialogue with another text display that becomes available via a Trigger Zone. There are a lot of options. Dreams allows for players to get seriously creative, even when it comes to their NPCs.