ABSTRACT
Designers must have environments in which to place NPCs before they can be painted, and it makes the most sense to have NPCs before assigning the objects that they will give and receive. In order to partake of the mythic depth at the heart of quests, characters must be at some level archetypal in the sense advocated by Carl Jung and various post-Jungian thinkers, such as James Hillman. In conjunction with the functional abstraction of Propp’s dramatis personae and the mythological depth of Jungian and post-Jungian archetypes, archetypal visual language is also a part of designing powerful quest givers and other characters in quests. By carefully designing archetypal significance, gameplay function, and visual symbolism of quest characters, these characters can then be arranged in the overall context of quests to promote immersive interactions with players. Quests are dialogue- and journal-driven in their basic structure.
