“Well it’s a bit of both. Right now it feels a little bit shallow. The conversations you do get feel like an interview. Would be cool if you could make them flow a bit better.”
@Shoelip said this in my topic “Unnatural” about how the PC interacts with the NPCs in the game.
I want to make the characters more defined and more interesting. I had a thought of coding a conversation system which I’d hoped to implement, however the code itself was causing me trouble and would require a lot of work. So rather than spend days on it only for people to not like it I’m going to post the basic idea here and get some opinions on it.
Basically every conversation with NPCs will be via a two choice system consisting of a subject and a tone.
For example;
you can ask someone about sport but you can ask about it in either a friendly, unfriendly or neutral tone (with an optional flirty tone for certain characters)
then depending on what tone you use, the NPC reply will vary (and their opinion/relationship with you will change)
Yes very, although I would want to have the tones and subjects combined as a single choice for each combination so as not to add another needless couple of clicks.
Just added an option to test the conversation system in “Unnatural” it is a very short sample scene (two subjects/three tones) that I just made up to test it.
This conversation method sounds great but it’s also very time consuming to implement. In this current chapter of my game, I do a lot of conversation options along with tracking tons of variables to maintain consistency of the flow of the action, and it has become an obstacle to code and test. It adds great replayability and offers freedom to readers but it adds a lot of time to the process. So, just be aware of it.
The complex nature of a system like this is one of the reasons I’m cautious about using it, especially if the result is people find it useless or dislike it.
I’m hoping to limit conversations to a variable (for each npc that can become a LI or an vip character, minor ones won’t have variables affecting them)
_ #Talk About Sports
___ #Passively
____ “Hey so do you like football?”
___ #Aggressively
____ “I bet you’re crap at football! Ain’t 'cha?”
Ex2. What I would personally prefer
*Choice
#Talk About Sports…
___ #Ask him if he likes football
____“Hey so do you like football?”
___ #Tell him he sucks at football
____“I bet you’re crap at football! Ain’t 'cha?”
The more interesting and diverse the choices, the better. However i personally think that this only would work in a few cases, and not the majority. This is because your goal - making choices more diverse and less shallow, not necessarily gets aided the most by a system like this.
By making this system, you have to make each subject very broad. Else you would get combinations like unfriendly + discuss last days events, which would be weird. I think that just listing the approach + subject/line together would be better, as that still would add more choice, but instead of making it confusing, which i even thought some of the sample combinations were, you just get more information about what your character does. Just my opinion.
