I am having trouble representing a set of personalty stats, I think would be the term, to the player. Stats like Idealism/Cynicism in GoI and SoI, Ruthless/Genuine in Versus, and Disdain/Vigilance in Dragon. My problem is that I think the issue is three sided instead of two so I can’t just use regular opposed variables, and I’m not really certain how to represent it.
The situation is that the player can believe in god A, god B, or neither and everything between. I really want something like this, where its a triangle and choices push you toward one of the corners instead of just a tug of war between two issues. Would it be possible to make this in choice script other than inserting an image based on *if statements from certain stats?
If there is no other way, I have a few ideas on how I could work it. I could display it where both deities have a “faith” bar and simply have it raise or lower based on choices. I could make an opposed stat for the deities and skepticism/devoutness but that feels confusing, and doesn’t represent believing in both devoutly or not believing in either very well. I don’t like either of those because it could end up feeling like it’s not one issue. I could just not display that in the stats screen because it isn’t necessarily representing the character well or always useful, but I feel like you could make the same argument for opposed stats in general. I know I didn’t like the regime/rebellion stat in versus very much.
Does any body have any ideas or thought on what they think would look and work best?
When you have one stat increase, you can simply decrease the other two stats by a smaller amount.
Eg;
*set statA %+12
*set statB %-6
*set statC %-6
Or, if you’re trying to close off the other two stats, decrease them by a larger amount. And you could also set a conditional for doing this only if, say, ((statA > 49) and (statA > statB)) and (stat A > statC)
No I mean on the stats screen. I know how to code everything I just want to know what the best way to present it would be. Since the issue is three sided and I can’t just use opposed pair.
The only way I can think of is to make images. Grab Inkscape, draw a triangle, and drop the dot depending on where the stat is. AFAIK, You’ll need to have an image for every possibility, or cluster of possibilities depending on how precise you want to make it, (but with a triangle precision becomes naturally less important than general influence from a storytelling perspective). Either way it shouldn’t be too difficult, just a bit of time invested. But yea, no good effective native support (Actually, I drew up such a triangle because the technicals interested me for a moment, looks something like this):
Drop a filter on it and you can even have something both good looking and easy. Just takes a bit of extra work. This was warped rainbow I think? (Got board trying to find a nice looking filter for the tracker, which is why it’s missing in the second image.)
To make a somewhat out of left field suggestion, you could code the three values and then write individual statements for each increment, for example if belief in God A rises more than 20% above the others, you could add in a statement to the stats screen stating something like: “You are a tentative acolyte of Lord Snagglepuss, but the other Gods might win you over yet.” or something to that effect.
Ok I was definitely leaning toward photos and since Inkscape looks great and is free I will be going with that.
Thanks @Reaperoa for that link.
@Moreau I was thinking about that too and I will probably add in a little tag line at the bottom 'cause I will mostly likely have to put the images on a separate page.
