Nintendo details their process for creating unique villagers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

The developer-oriented CEDEC 2020 conference recently took place, and a number of Nintendo devs were on-hand to talk about their work on Animal Crossing: New Horizons. You can see slides from Nintendo's presentation right here, and the tidbits they shared below.

- Animal Crossing: New Horizons has roughly 400 unique villagers
- the goal was for each player to have their own unique set of villagers to show off to others
- to make the villagers beloved by players, the team needed to design characters players would “want to interact with”
- Nintendo also wanted to make villagers that players enjoy watching to see what they're doing
- designs start with the silhouette, as each villager has a distinctive silhouette by species
- silhouettes are very simple by design, as getting to specific limits the sort of animal variety the developers can use
- the challenge was making characters unique, while also not standing out too much overall
- Nintendo said this approach allows for freedom, as a cat can look like a cat from afar, but it can have a unique design up close
- when deciding each of the villagers’ personalities, the developers looked towards real-life
- the team decided how each of the five personalities are perceived in terms of appearance
- this can create a sense of connection towards the villagers, as players can imagine them being similar to someone they know
- all 35 villager species are designed to draw out the distinctive traits of their species
- the feelings are expressed the same no matter the species in order to help further the connection between with players
- villagers have two general categories of actions, ones that they enact themselves and ones that are derived from their situation
- this includes eating, doing yoga, sweeping the floor, fishing, and more
- villagers with an interest in music will be seen more frequently singing
- villagers who like to read will be seen reading more
- Nintendo adjusts the frequency of actions and patterns to make the villagers seem as if they have their own will
- villagers will also change their clothes to fit what they are doing, further giving this impression
- actions where the villagers find something and do something depend on what the villagers happen to see at the time
- the change from “doing their own thing” to “doing something with what they found” happens automatically
- the developers made it so that the villagers will look at the object and ponder about it before switching to interacting
- as players interact more and more with the villagers and see how they act, each player will get to make their own memories