Devlog #3: Wants and Fears - Characters and Psychology
Every character in Hard Neon is built around two questions: what do you want, and what are you afraid of?
Sounds simple. It isn't, really. Or rather, it's simple in a way that gets more interesting the longer you sit with it.
When I was designing the character creation system, I wanted something that felt meaningful without being overwhelming. A list of stats to distribute is fine mechanically, but it doesn't tell you who someone is. I wanted the player to make choices that felt like they meant something even before they'd done anything at all.
The starting point was a spreadsheet I'd made years earlier for my tabletop games. A quick tool for improvising NPCs on the fly when I didn't have one prepared. Wants, fears, basic traits. Enough to make a character feel something like a person in thirty seconds. When character creation came up in design. I fed that spreadsheet fed into an LLM and it took what I'd spitballed off the top of my head and grouped it in a way I hadn't seen myself. (More on using LLMs as a design thinking partner, not a replacement for a person but an augmentation of one, in a future post.) Those categories that emerged became the first set of wants and fears. They worked pretty well, but I wasn't satisfied.
I picked at it. I went digging.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs was an obvious starting point, but it had a problem: It's inherently tiered. Security sits lower than Meaning, which implies Meaning is more evolved, more worthy. That's the kind of implicit judgment I didn't want the game to make. A character who wants Security isn't less developed than one who wants Meaning. They're just different. They're interesting in their own ways.
I kept looking. I'm not an expert here. This is Wikipedia-level research, not academic study. I haven't read the source texts cover to cover. I spent time working through the implications of different frameworks, not just stress-testing them but asking what felt true, what matched my own understanding of how people actually behave.
I looked at Steven Reiss's 16 Basic Desires, an empirically-derived framework that treats all motivators as equally valid personality traits rather than a ladder to climb. I spent time with Karl Albrecht's five core fears, which map the deep existential things people are actually afraid of rather than surface phobias. A fear of abandonment is character-defining. A fear of bees is a Tuesday.
A lot of the actual working-through happened back and forth, testing implications, following threads, seeing what held up. What came out the other side wasn't a direct lift from any one model. It was something distilled, filtered through what felt true and useful for the game.
Connection and Abandonment
Dominance and Helplessness
Actualization and Stagnation
Each pair sits on the same psychological axis. Want is what you're reaching toward, something you move toward, desire, actively try to make happen. Fear is different. Fear is compulsion. It's instinctive, sometimes cautious, sometimes reckless. People don't always choose how they respond to what scares them. They just do.
They're not opposites. They're the same wound from two angles. Someone who wants Connection and someone who fears Abandonment are oriented toward exactly the same thing. But they feel completely different to inhabit, because one is hopeful and one is defensive. In game, both grant the same stat bonus, but in play they feel different in how you read your own character and how they impact your choices.
I was talking to my partner and mentioned these Wants and Fears and how they were circling in my head, thinking about people's motivations. There wasn't much pushback, more a recognition: yes, it's simplified, but it felt real. There's something there that rings true to how people tend to behave. The distinction between wanting and fearing, between moving toward something and being compelled by something else, that maps onto how people actually live.
What really landed for me is how the mechanics extended into the game's state system. High Stress suppresses Assertiveness. It shortcircuits the ability to hold your ground, to take up space, exactly the way real stress does. It makes the Fear limit you. High Excitement loosens Morals. It makes you do things you normally wouldn't, things that align with your Wants more than your values. The game is modelling something that feels true: we are not always the authors of our own behaviour. Sometimes want and fear are driving and we're just along for the ride.
I didn't set out to make a psychology game. I set out to make character creation feel meaningful. The fact that it seems to brush up against something real is a side effect I'm happy about. It speaks to the importance of design and asking why. Even if you don't end up with something useful or successful, you learn along the way. Maybe you even recognise something about yourself, too.
If you like what you're reading, ko-fi.com/hardneon
Playable version coming soon!
