Discussion Procedural NPC informaion

I am making an RPG game that is procedurally generating the world, including the characters in it. The characters are all going to be associated with a specific location and have various stats including things such as their job, an reference ID, and typical RPG stats. There will be an unknown number of NPCs that will change based on certain input conditions and these stats can all be altered by the story and the choices the player makes throughout the game so I need to be able to read and write the data in a efficient way that makes it easy to change when I don’t know exactly where it may be in the array.

Any suggestions on good places to start? Most of the discussions I’ve already gone through point to JSON and I’ve played a little with lists doing this so far but haven’t made something that functions as intended yet.

 

Yeah! Make a single data structure, perhaps a ScriptableObject, give it a "Name" field and then one particular attribute you have in mind, perhaps their job.

Make a preliminary UI to present that and interact with it as you envision, only relating to the two traits above.

Iterate upwards from there... GO!

 

Thanks for the reply! Pardon my ignorance but I am hitting a roadblock with what you’re describing with scriptable objects. I read through the manual part and I’m not quite following how exactly it stores the data so I can access it again when I need to say have the player run into John smith again after they have already met.

Do you know of any good tutorials for scriptableobjects that could help me understand the basics of it?

 

Google the above, there's plenty to choose from.