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Spek posted:I found a bug/sequence break. You can use knockback ammo to propel yourself through doors on the background or foreground. Shoot down as you move towards them and you just pop right through. Congrats on your impending Hot Tin Roof speedrunning title.
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Feb 22, 2015 18:13
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Shalinor posted:PM me. I'd really like to put your name in the credits for that. Nice find. Shalinor posted:I... WOW. Ok, so I know this is a bug, right but... I may leave it alone. It's SO specific a glitch, and SO hard to do that I kind of don't want to gently caress with it / kinda just want to leave it there for sequence breakers. We'll see if anyone stumbles into it accidentally, but it strikes me as a pretty intentioned thing to trigger. (I'll have to fix it if it's a thing people start stumbling into commonly) So if other people follow a similar train of thought as me it might be somewhat likely they might stumble on it. But yeah I'd definitely leave it in if it doesn't become a problem. It's quite nifty. Yodzilla posted:Congrats on your impending Hot Tin Roof speedrunning title.
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Feb 22, 2015 18:45
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I ran into that glitch last night, except I was using the grapple shot. If you do it on the bathroom to the left, you can glitch through the door and get stuck out of bounds above the first floor bathroom. Edit: I checked, and you can pull it off with grapple on the explosive door behind the rat barricade to get into Scratch's vault. It's also pretty easy to also get back out of the vault. SketchyPlane fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 19:13
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SketchyPlane posted:I ran into that glitch last night, except I was using the grapple shot. We may just have to lock out shooting entirely when in mid-teleport. It'd fix all the bugs, but ruin that awesome sequence break, alas. I'll experiment with solutions next week. EDIT: VV He's talking about Haps, the little pigeon down left of the Clinic, sitting on the paper boxes. Should update the dialog to make that clearer. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 19:47
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Is the smoke shop the Chief told me to look for leads a while ago a real place? Because he told me it was at the corner of two streets, except there are no street signs in the game so I can't tell if I'm missing an entire area where it's in, or he's just hazing me or something like that.
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Feb 22, 2015 19:50
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Shalinor posted:The latest patch tutorializes quick reloading in the Dump entrance, after you fall down. Hopefully, that'll mean everyone learns that mechanic before they hit any major shoot'y sequences. The problem has nothing to do with whether a person knows how to quick reload. The problem is it is a clunky mechanic that makes it hard to play your game. Do you honestly find that having to open a menu, click potentially a dozen+ times, in order to solve an obstacle (which may take you many more than one time to attempt due to the fact that failure at any point in your attempt may require a full reset of your position and bullet status/order) to be THAT compelling?
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Feb 22, 2015 20:02
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Shalinor posted:The grapple thing's tricky - we'll end up making a lot of colliders, like ceilings, non-grappleable, just because they can cause a lot of problems if you fire them off just right in corners, or in teleports like you're seeing. Which is a bummer, since it's kind of goofy and fun to grapple to ceilings, but eh. You can pull yourself out of a lot of corners too. We fixed most? of them in the alleys, but I'm almost certain there's somewhere in there you can pull yourself entirely off them and possibly fall into the void. Sounds like you need the quality "DontGoThroughThings" unity script. Or are you using it already?   
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Feb 22, 2015 20:37
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I'm not a very good coder. Most of the times when I see an error I just sigh, laugh at my silly mistakes and strive to improve. Like 99% of the times it's completely my fault. The associated script cannot be loaded, please fix any compile errors and assign a valid script This error is different, in that I feel justified in not blaming myself for once. Does anyone know what causes Unity to do that? Sometimes it just suddenly decides none of my scripts are valid anymore. It's usually easy enough to fix, but it's just annoying.
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Feb 22, 2015 21:11
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Hopeford posted:I'm not a very good coder. Most of the times when I see an error I just sigh, laugh at my silly mistakes and strive to improve. Like 99% of the times it's completely my fault. I could be wrong here (and as a fellow not very good coder, it's quite likely) but isn't this what happens when there's an error in one of your scripts? Unity doesn't load the file in until the error is fixed.
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Feb 22, 2015 21:24
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Pi Mu Rho posted:I could be wrong here (and as a fellow not very good coder, it's quite likely) but isn't this what happens when there's an error in one of your scripts? Unity doesn't load the file in until the error is fixed. I wish! This is the error that comes up when Unity just glitches out while saving a script and refuses to load any scripts in the game, even if the aforementioned script has no issues. The way I just solved this was by deleting the entire script then copy-pasting the entire code onto a new file. No run errors after that, despite not having to actually change any lines of code. It's just a weird glitch, and when it happens Unity just refuses to load any scripts, even if none of them actually have an error. It's kind of odd. Not too hard to fix, but it's just annoying when it happens.
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Feb 22, 2015 21:31
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Pi Mu Rho posted:I could be wrong here (and as a fellow not very good coder, it's quite likely) but isn't this what happens when there's an error in one of your scripts? Unity doesn't load the file in until the error is fixed. Lork fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 21:33
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It's actually really hard to get anywhere near the big ship now. http://i.imgur.com/Li1AH5O.gifv Homing missiles with splash damage and applied force, concussion effects on the red projectiles (they shove you away when they hit you). I'm happy with how it's coming together. Thanks to crnobog and Jo in #sagamedev for helping me with a timer issue on the missiles!
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Feb 22, 2015 21:59
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Here's a gif of the eighth, and my personal favorite, minigame from the multiplayer typing game: Each player commands two tanks. The tanks drive themselves along a preset route, but the players can rotate the turrets and fire bullets by typing groups of letters. Friendly fire is on, so you have to be careful you don't blast your own tanks! The graphics still need a bit of sprucing up. This game went through so many variations before we settled on this one. At first, you had total control over your vehicles - by typing letters, you could drive the tanks around. However, when the game worked like that, players would just drive the tanks around until they were point-blank, stop moving entirely, and do nothing but fire. There wasn't any strategy and it wasn't a lot of fun. It was just a race to see who could point their tank in the right direction first. Now that the tanks drive themselves, it's so much more fun. When you fire a cannon, there's great suspense as you watch the bullet fly and pray it hits its target... kind of the same essence that makes the Worms games so much fun. Legal question - is it a really bad idea to include a "drinking game mode" in a local multiplayer title? Like, when you create a game, you get asked if you want it to be a drinking game? And if you say yes, then the game tells you to drink at certain moments? What if we specifically say it's a "water drinking game" and say that "we absolutely, definitely, do NOT recommend drinking something like beer instead of water?" Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 22:58
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Let's talk RPGs. From what I understand, you usually want to focus on a few points of your game as opposed to every thing facet being super complex. For my game, I'm having moderately complicated combat mechanics, extremely thorough item creation/modification, and fully customizable magic with character specific special abilities. My story is less about choices you make and more about telling a good story. I figure if I leave the personalizing to the character skills, equipment, and tactics, then not having choice driven story isn't as bad. I'll go ahead and go more in depth of what everything entails (not full explanations, but enough to help you understand the gist of it all). Combat Mechanics Battles work off of a time system where each character gets 2 time units. Basic attacks and (most) items cost 1 unit, while magic attacks (called elements) and special attacks take 2. You can have one character use all the time units if you really wanted to, but their resources will get exhausted rather quickly. Elements work like most magic systems, only that if you hit an enemy with a fire element, then hit them with an earth element, it'll consume the fire residue and produce an hybrid effect that deals increased damage and can have extra effects. Each character has a personal inventory instead of a general inventory, so you have to specifically assign items to each of your characters. Combat is more tactical than just smashing out as much damage as possible. Building up resources (Energy comes from attacks and items) and performing triage are naturally cheaper and your magic and special attacks have some real oomph behind them to compensate. Customization Options In addition to finding items in chests and buying them from stores, the player will be able to create items if they have the recipe and proper tools for them (as well as being in the correct building). Getting the recipe lets you know what items you need to make a specific item. This works for equipment, while consumables function a bit differently. Consumables require ingredient groups, so for example, you want to brew a healing tea. Your groups are liquid and leaves. Liquid improves the maximum capacity of qualities you can assign to the end product from the leaves. While the player has this recipe for almost the entire game, they are able to make progressively stronger items based on what materials they use to make them. Equipment items and certain normal items can also be dismantled to generate basic materials that can be used to make something new. Equipment can be infused with runes to add additional effects, bonus stats, and some penalties to the base item. Think of it like item customization in FFX (items have slots and you can assign an ability/skill to each slot). Elements are added to characters through use of an element sphere. Characters can equip element shards to allow the use of the corresponding element. Additionally, equipping complimentary shards next to each other can unlock those hybrid element spells for use without needing to use two actions. While a character has an element equipped, they can also infuse the elements with essences to enhance the effects of the elements in various ways. This further adds to the highly tactical nature of the combat system. Now my question of course, is whether or not this is too much. I don't think it's too much, but obviously I'm not going to think that. Comments concerns?
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Feb 23, 2015 00:09
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FraudulentEconomics posted:Let's talk RPGs. But is it too much or is it not enough? It really depends on what kind of design you're going for. If you were going for "more is more" that wouldn't be enough. It also depends on what market you're going for. The combat sounds like it has a poo poo load of potential for people that like thinking tactically in a complex system but you're going to alienate people that just like mashing ATTACK and watching numbers get bigger.
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Feb 23, 2015 00:56
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ToxicSlurpee posted:But is it too much or is it not enough? It really depends on what kind of design you're going for. If you were going for "more is more" that wouldn't be enough. It also depends on what market you're going for. The combat sounds like it has a poo poo load of potential for people that like thinking tactically in a complex system but you're going to alienate people that just like mashing ATTACK and watching numbers get bigger. If we're talking "more is more" then my additions would probably be more advanced character development (stat points, branching development paths) but that too lends itself to alienating the smash attack crew. Considering I condensed the number of customization options already, I feel like the expansion of mechanics wouldn't help me in reaching a wider audience. People who like being clever, customizing the poo poo out of their teams, and grindhogs who have to have the absolute best poo poo are going to get what they want out of my game (at least in what I can perceive). I design levels and encounters around an absolute least possible power level to achieve it. Basically since I know how I want an encounter designed, I will test it until I can just barely eke out a win with the bare minimum (which, in my designs, is 1 equipment tier behind). So the clever ones can earn a hard victory whereas the basic player will have the ability to upgrade their equipment and spend a little more time but will be able to finish off the area. When I figure people who are just going to mash attack, I think they're not going to get too in depth in item creation, won't use hybrid elements, and will probably misuse the battle system. So if I can achieve a design where 2 or 3 experience levels and a tier of equipment can make them successful while being idiots, that's optimal. My main references for idiot gameplay are hilariously enough, myself. I managed to slam my dick through Legend of Dragoon using the basic 2 hit combos for each character because I couldn't process hitting another button when the counter indicator came up. How'd I do it? Grinded out a level or 2, which would take FOREVER but would let me continue on. Another is Breath of Fire II. As a kid, I went and unlocked EVERYTHING and grinded up to like level 60 and crushed the game under my foot. Whereas my older brother tried going as low level as possible, and when I finished at 60, he finished at 37. He hardly used any of the shamans and didn't find any of the super powerful gear, he just had enough items to survive the last boss (which took 2x as long as I did). But I'm getting away from the point, I feel like it's enough to hit the right notes and maybe even allow a casual player to possibly move up to a more serious tactician. What, Toxic, would you say would put me in the "more is more" category?
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Feb 23, 2015 01:42
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Not really a question, just status-postin'. (Strange posting in this thread instead of the game dev megathread.) So the last prototype I made turned out to be not so fun.  I started a new project last week in the hopes of bringing something new and interesting (possibly even fun) into the scene. I like text adventures and good narratives, but the interactivity always irritated me. quote:"You are in a room with a lamp and a door." Of course, as InternetJanitor pointed out on IRC, this would require a general AI that doesn't exist in the world yet. I am not so smart and won't be building one like that any time soon. Instead, I can limit the scope. There's been a lot of progress in natural language processing since the days of chat bots and markov chain sentence generation, so I last week I ported a bunch of my academic code from Python to Java and started training a network for NLP. If it works, the game will revolve around interviewing one or more robots. That's as far as I am. When the first babbles from network emerge (that aren't horrifying) I'll post them and some sample chats or bundle it up and hand it out. My concerns are (1) that it won't work at all. It's expensive to make a minimum viable product because it takes an eternity to train the network. Also, while I've worked out how the dialog can advance progress, I'm not sure that the generative part of the model will produce sensible results. (2) It might be hella-boring. I've got only a shell of an idea for a narrative (since that doesn't usually count for poo poo). (3) That it will be really tacky. I'm not good at serious, but being witty is even more difficult.
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Feb 23, 2015 01:50
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Assuming you don't have a couple hundred grand you're ready to throw at: you don't have the budget to make a bunch of in-depth systems and execute them well. Otherwise you're gonna have a bunch of things that people see as "the crap that's getting in the way of the fun stuff". Take Divinity: Dragon Commander as an example. Wonderful over-world systems, but terrible combat, or to be more specific terrible RTS combat. The combat would have been bearable if you can just stay in Dragon form the entire time. Instead every time you fought a battle it felt like you have to stop doing the fun thing, and had to do chores like take out the trash, where in this case the trash is an enemy battalion.
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Feb 23, 2015 02:01
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Good luck with that. I love interactive fiction but there are so few people doing anything with it. You might want to check out Inform 7 which was designed to handle issues like that. You can tell the program that any kind of interactivity, like touching/activating/using/turning on the lamp all perform the same intended action.
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Feb 23, 2015 02:01
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al-azad posted:Good luck with that. I love interactive fiction but there are so few people doing anything with it. Truth be told I've played Inform7 games a good bit, but even the ones which were supposed to be open always felt overly restricted. *cough*Galatea*cough*
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Feb 23, 2015 02:08
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FraudulentEconomics posted:What, Toxic, would you say would put me in the "more is more" category? Anything and everything. If you're going for pure "more is more" then just cram as much crap as you can in there. More is more can work if you do it right; look at Dwarf Fortress. The game is just belligerently complex and insane but it's a fun little trainwreck. In the case of an RPG though it matters more toward what you have time to accomplish and what you can add without taking anything away or making the game not fun for people who aren't 100% completists. I think you have the right idea however in trying to make the game beatable by anybody while having stuff in there for everybody. If you're going for a "more is more" for an RPG you could do stuff like optional bosses, challenge areas, or Game+. That way people can beat the game but still have other stuff to go back to if they want. The biggest problem with RPGs though comes from a basic game theory idea. The choice between a good option and a bad option is not a choice at all. How do you make every option viable? Granted on the other side of that you have the truly hardcore that will deliberately beat the game with the worst equipment available at the lowest level possible. Can you cater to that crowd too? Even so, "more is more" for RPGs is more like...how much other cool stuff can you add?
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Feb 23, 2015 02:08
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Anything and everything. If you're going for pure "more is more" then just cram as much crap as you can in there. More is more can work if you do it right; look at Dwarf Fortress. The game is just belligerently complex and insane but it's a fun little trainwreck. Hah, I hadn't even listed some of the ideas I had in mind outside of game mechanics. Optional Bosses, Challenge Areas, and Newgame + are staples I would never leave out. Your comment about the choice between a good choice and a bad choice reaffirms my decision to not have a type of skill tree. In terms of the resources available without resorting to coding (SweetBro I'm getting to you), I'm very tapped out and have all of the systems I can find that are compatible (and fortunately systems that I've used before). SweetBro posted:Assuming you don't have a couple hundred grand you're ready to throw at: you don't have the budget to make a bunch of in-depth systems and execute them well. Otherwise you're gonna have a bunch of things that people see as "the crap that's getting in the way of the fun stuff". Take Divinity: Dragon Commander as an example. Wonderful over-world systems, but terrible combat, or to be more specific terrible RTS combat. The combat would have been bearable if you can just stay in Dragon form the entire time. Instead every time you fought a battle it felt like you have to stop doing the fun thing, and had to do chores like take out the trash, where in this case the trash is an enemy battalion. You bring up an extremely vital point. It's gotta be fun and that's something that can't be figured out without trying it in a multitude of settings. While my medium of choice probably isn't going to garner much confidence from anyone (RPG Maker VX Ace), every single system I mentioned I have both in my possession AND working. I made a post about this earlier in the thread, but if you can make an RPG maker game NOT look like an RPG maker game, you're going to open up a lot harder than people who just use the baseline crap. So consider this to be my experiment in that idea  .
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Feb 23, 2015 02:20
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Jo posted:Truth be told I've played Inform7 games a good bit, but even the ones which were supposed to be open always felt overly restricted. *cough*Galatea*cough* It's something the creator has to be conscious about. Inform 7 includes a bunch of generic responses for interacting with objects outside of you explicit instructions but you can write scripts that cover synonyms that people might use. It's always easier to just give the player a list of approved verbs that apply to everything. If I "use" the door I obviously want to open it just like "use" the lamp means turn it on.
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Feb 23, 2015 02:26
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FraudulentEconomics posted:Hah, I hadn't even listed some of the ideas I had in mind outside of game mechanics. Optional Bosses, Challenge Areas, and Newgame + are staples I would never leave out. Your comment about the choice between a good choice and a bad choice reaffirms my decision to not have a type of skill tree. In terms of the resources available without resorting to coding (SweetBro I'm getting to you), I'm very tapped out and have all of the systems I can find that are compatible (and fortunately systems that I've used before). Yeah skill trees and talent systems and the like are probably one of the hardest to do properly. As much as I adore the game the absolute worst one I've ever seen was for ADOM. If you haven't ever played that give it a whirl. There are a poo poo load of talents you can get but there are a few that are just so incredibly good the rest of them might as well not exist. There are also a lot of others whose only purpose in existence is "prerequisite for X." The rest of the game is worth playing the but talent system was just plain stupid. There are even a few that literally do nothing. Granted this is a roguelike so "poo poo that actually harms the player" is basically mandatory but even so...the talent system isn't even good at doing that.
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Feb 23, 2015 02:28
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al-azad posted:It's something the creator has to be conscious about. Inform 7 includes a bunch of generic responses for interacting with objects outside of you explicit instructions but you can write scripts that cover synonyms that people might use. It's not even a matter of recognizing synonyms. Every time I play through an IF game, the characters have the same dialog. What I'm trying to accomplish with this prototype (which I'm calling Voight) is to use deep language models to generate dialog. At the moment, I have a very simple room. You can issue commands with the forward slash, /help, /quit, etc. Otherwise, it's a dialog. Text is propagated through a deep framework to produce a point in a small, 4-dimensional semantic space (like word2vec, but I have a different vectorization scheme). Responses are generated by backpropagating from the 4D space back into a complex sentence vector which is then translated back into readable characters. I have a simple monitor which reads the machine response and sets flags based on keywords. (So if you can make the robot say, "Wayland Industries", the story moves forward and new places are unlocked to investigate.) The practical upshot is you can enter free-form text like, "How is it going?" and get back a new, novel, not-preprogrammed response. I'm training it on the Wikipedia corupus to give it some idea of grammar and word structure, but the individual dialogues will require me to train it on lots of exchanges. I'm really hoping it will feel like an honest to god interview with a machine, but I'm not sure how realistic I can get it with my skill set.
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Feb 23, 2015 02:37
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That sounds great in theory and I wish you the best of luck. There was that one game (can't remember the name, someone should fill me in) that was about talking to a couple in the middle of a break up. The text parser and characters were designed to recognize naturally language. It was very rough stuff but if you haven't played it (again, apologize for forgetting the name) you should.
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Feb 23, 2015 02:50
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al-azad posted:That sounds great in theory and I wish you the best of luck. There was that one game (can't remember the name, someone should fill me in) that was about talking to a couple in the middle of a break up. The text parser and characters were designed to recognize naturally language. It was very rough stuff but if you haven't played it (again, apologize for forgetting the name) you should. It was Facade. http://www.interactivestory.net/ Chip did NOT appreciate me kissing his wife when I walked in. THAT'S HOW THEY DO IT IN EUROPE CHIP!!! JossiRossi fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Feb 23, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 02:54
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JossiRossi posted:It was Facade. http://www.interactivestory.net/ Oh neat. I'm glad someone did it before. Downloading.
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Feb 23, 2015 02:57
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Facade is really neat and endlessly hilarious.
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Feb 23, 2015 03:26
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I've tried it and everything always went too fast for me to respond. I'm hardly the slowest typer on the planet but it can be difficult to be fast enough to interact with Facade more meaningfully (and maturely) than telling whatsherface to suck my cock.
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Feb 23, 2015 05:38
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In terms of other games like Facade, Starship Titanic had a fairly nice natural language parser. It wasn't anything amazing but it worked fairly well.
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Feb 23, 2015 05:47
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Is there any happy medium for conversation between branching dialog trees and sims-style emoticons? Characters in my detective game are all procedurally generated for replayability's sake, but that illusion of change flies out the window if dialog obviously recurs between different characters across different playthroughs. The system I prototyped to get around this was eliminating verbal conversation entirely in favor of emoticons (click smiley face to say something nice, click steve buscemi face to say something creepy), but I find that it makes what's supposed to be a reasonably grim atmosphere unexpectedly cartoonish, and it creates a bit of dissonance when combined with the fact that canvasing neighborhoods and interviewing people produces full sentences ("I was with John Doe from 9:00pm-9:25, he stepped into the alley at 9:26 and I heard the gunshot at 9:31"). Another possible solution I'm looking at is making speech itself procedural, so each dialog card would just read something like "[Pronoun] [Verbed] [Object] [Time measurement]", and creating a couple of basic behavioral statistics to determine which word banks NPCs draw from, but that seems like a lot of work for a simple mechanic.
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Feb 23, 2015 06:48
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JossiRossi posted:The problem has nothing to do with whether a person knows how to quick reload. The problem is it is a clunky mechanic that makes it hard to play your game. Do you honestly find that having to open a menu, click potentially a dozen+ times, in order to solve an obstacle (which may take you many more than one time to attempt due to the fact that failure at any point in your attempt may require a full reset of your position and bullet status/order) to be THAT compelling? Ripping that out at this point would be, basically, re-designing the game - and that isn't the kind of change you make to an already-released game, especially not when it could just make things worse. In this case, for instance, ripping out the revolver would remove a lot of the charm, and a lot of our positive reviews specifically mention it, so - is there enough left for them? Or do they hate it now too? The goal with it was to get players to think about what they were doing, put them into a puzzle/adventure mindset. Some players really dig that, but others really don't. There's heavy overlap between the really-don't players and "not enjoying the dialog / not digging the Adventure side" too, so it isn't clear if removing the revolver would solve their basic complaints with the game even then - the pacing would still be very slow, for instance, with the world intentionally lacking enemies to shoot or the like. So, all we can do is to try and improve the frustration experienced by the not-digging-it players without ruining the fun of the already-digging-it players. To be perfectly honest, I don't know how successful we'll be at that. The game's always been aimed at this weird niche between two relatively opposed gameplay designs - adventure games VS metroidvania games. The Cave tried something vaguely similar, it's a platformer fusion, but skewed more heavily adventure, and I don't know if they faired particularly better. The one big design mistake we made was 2 years ago, in not realizing that basic conflict, or at least in not realizing how niche that would make the resultant experience. The resultant game is thus experimental and somewhat unique, and hopefully will be judged as an overall fun game/interesting/success/whatever (we'll find out this week basically), but it certainly isn't perfect. Even if we were to decide "hey, let's upend everything!" - we've got plenty of other minor-but-annoying bugs that we should squish ASAP. If we don't attack those, we'll give the current customers the sense that we're abandoning the game, which'd be super bad not just for this game, but for their faith in whatever we make next. Any upending like what you're requesting would be substantial enough that either we'd have to drop everything else to get it out quickly, or, get it out so late that now we're making drastic changes to a game that's been out for, conservatively, a month by then - and neither of those is particularly acceptable. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Feb 23, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 07:11
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You'd be surprised at how little the average player will care about little designy things that drive game designers crazy.
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Feb 23, 2015 08:44
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mutata posted:You'd be surprised at how little the average player will care about little designy things that drive game designers crazy. On the other hand, they still effect players' experiences, even if players don't consciously care about the little niggling thing you're agonizing over.
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Feb 23, 2015 08:49
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Hot Tin Roof on Rockpapershotgun. They liked it!
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Feb 23, 2015 11:15
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Omi no Kami posted:Is there any happy medium for conversation between branching dialog trees and sims-style emoticons? Characters in my detective game are all procedurally generated for replayability's sake, but that illusion of change flies out the window if dialog obviously recurs between different characters across different playthroughs. The system I prototyped to get around this was eliminating verbal conversation entirely in favor of emoticons (click smiley face to say something nice, click steve buscemi face to say something creepy), but I find that it makes what's supposed to be a reasonably grim atmosphere unexpectedly cartoonish, and it creates a bit of dissonance when combined with the fact that canvasing neighborhoods and interviewing people produces full sentences ("I was with John Doe from 9:00pm-9:25, he stepped into the alley at 9:26 and I heard the gunshot at 9:31"). I'm going to goo out on a limb and say that there's no way you can make procedurally generated dialog that won't be terrible. If you wanna make it procedural generated, I would abstract the dialog into something less precise.
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Feb 23, 2015 11:59
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Omi no Kami posted:Is there any happy medium for conversation between branching dialog trees and sims-style emoticons? Characters in my detective game are all procedurally generated for replayability's sake, but that illusion of change flies out the window if dialog obviously recurs between different characters across different playthroughs. The system I prototyped to get around this was eliminating verbal conversation entirely in favor of emoticons (click smiley face to say something nice, click steve buscemi face to say something creepy), but I find that it makes what's supposed to be a reasonably grim atmosphere unexpectedly cartoonish, and it creates a bit of dissonance when combined with the fact that canvasing neighborhoods and interviewing people produces full sentences ("I was with John Doe from 9:00pm-9:25, he stepped into the alley at 9:26 and I heard the gunshot at 9:31"). This Dwarf Fortress update is relevant to your problem http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/16/dwarf-fortress-poetry/ They're generating poetry, but not the poetry itself, just the description of it. You could do the same, describe in text what people are saying or feeling. So not "I was with.." but "He says he was with..", and "He's upset" Everything is explained the same way, and it won't be so bad if it repeats when it's the same player character thinking those things, or alternatively use an emotionless disembodied voice. But making it the player voice brings opportunity for going full noir inner monologue, adding flavor text etc. "He's upset like I wasn't when my wife left me". I don't know I'm not a good writer. It would feel more repetitive but it would be worth it.
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Feb 23, 2015 12:20
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I keep forgetting to document my development process, so here are some recent screenshots from Ghostlords.     I've been letting people playtest it recently to get some feedback coming in. It's kind of humbling when you show your game to someone for the first time and end up with a huge list of things that are awful and need to be fixed.
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Feb 23, 2015 12:30
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shimmy posted:This Dwarf Fortress update is relevant to your problem Ooh this is a great idea, it preserves the atmosphere and goes hand-in-hand with some other things I've been working on. Dialogue is surprisingly hard to implement smoothly... I was originally picturing Bioware-style dialogue screens where you shift from the action to a cinematic menu-driven encounter, but my game is so heavily based on time management that I'm flirting with the idea of flat-out dictating that nothing short of raising the system menu will pause the game, and building everything to feed back into the core crime scene-interview-accuse loop. I'm thinking that this might pose a balance problem simply due to different people having differing reading speeds, though, so I suspect the compromise I'll end up making is having conversations pause the clock, but chew up a dedicated amount of time- passing greetings are free, office gossip burns less than five minutes, but something like conducting an information interview could burn up to a quarter of an hour (calming people down is hard, and everyone knows how many times a good detective gives you the chance to answer the same question a different way), and if you have a fresh crime scene with shocked onlookers, I want every decision to talk to someone feel like it's burning time and other possible leads.
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Feb 23, 2015 13:52
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