Emotion & Mood
Mistscale separates volatile emotion (the immediate feeling driving the current reply) from stable mood (the long-term baseline an NPC carries toward a specific player). Together they produce believable affect across time.
Mistscale separates how an NPC feels right now from how an NPC generally feels about a player. Confusing the two produces flat characters. Splitting them produces ones that simmer.
Emotion (volatile)
The immediate feeling driving the current reply. Set fresh on every message: irritation, surprise, warmth, fear. Visible in the Playground inspector as current_emotion.
Mood (stable)
The long-term baseline an NPC carries toward a specific player. Shifts slowly as emotional signals accumulate over many conversations.
The mood scale
Mood moves one step at a time along this ordered scale:
How mood shifts
- Every conversation leaves emotional residue. Warm exchanges push the baseline one way, hostile ones the other.
- Mood always moves exactly one step along the scale, never further, whether it shifts gradually or all at once.
- A single very intense moment (e.g. betrayal) skips the gradual buildup and triggers that one-step shift right away, without waiting for pressure to accumulate.
- After a shift the pressure mostly releases, but not entirely. The NPC remembers why it changed.