[Feedback Friday #65] - April 6 (April Showers?)

What's a theme for April? Easter is gone, as are the Leprechauns. Where I'm from, April evokes nursery rhymes of April Showers and May Flowers. Maybe, if you're Jenova Chen that's a good game topic (aka Flower).

FF #65 is close until 'May the 4th be with you.'

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Want design feedback for your new game? Then you've found the right thread! Post here to get precious player feedback. Discuss until we lock the thread to start the two week break.

How To Ask For Feedback

• Show - Pics, videos, or best of all, a playable game!
• Be Concise - Who's got time for Wall 'O Text? Less is more

How To Give Feedback

• Be Positive - Finding redeeming qualities in the worst of games, is in itself a game
• Focus On The Design - Not the designer
• Be Specific - "Your game sucks!" is for nubs

What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play >>> everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)

Gigi

[PS - Feedback Friday #64 is here]

 

Didn't even realize this was open. Anyway...

A real-time dialogue system. https://eternalambiguity.itch.io/dialogue-test

I've spent a great deal of time with Tony Li (who develops the Dialogue System for Unity asset) working on this. It's a system where a conversation moves in real time. At relevant points in time, you may get a possible reply to an NPC's comment. If you don't reply, however--the conversation continues. Your potential reply will disappear (after some time, shown by a timer), and you move on to a different topic.

The idea behind this was to make conversation or dialogue in a game more engaging. Many times in games this is treated as a non-interactive element, or a semi-non-interactive element (since in the situations I'm thinking of, you're typically still picking choices). You pick a choice, then the dialogue runs for a few lines and then stops again when you reach the next decision point.

Sometimes, this is okay. Sometimes that fits the pace of the game better. But other times it can limit the player's "immersion" or sense of presence in the experience, in the same way that an action combat system is more "immersive" that tactical or turn-based abstractions. Emulating a real-world system where you can't just pause time and pick every [Interrogate] dialogue option from the last five minutes of conversation was the goal here.



Anyway. I'd imagine that pretty much anyone who actually reads this thread has already seen it in my own thread, but I'd love any feedback. Any ways you can think of making the system more natural.

 

@EternalAmbiguity - I noticed some UI glitches in this version -- for example, when you click on a response, the response menu doesn't disappear, so you can keep clicking it while the PC is delivering the previous click's line.

Here are some miscellaneous thoughts:

I wonder if the conversation would benefit from a "hold on for a moment" response, since people can do that in real life.

What about the player's body language? Could that somehow be incorporated into what the NPC says and when?

This was mentioned in your thread, but I think it would be interesting if the NPC gets annoyed if the player keeps interrupting. It would add an appearance of greater awareness.

 

I recall the first point too, but hadn't thought of removing it while the PC makes their response. The responses do need to be available after that, in case the PC wants to address another potential topic that was already added as a response, so I'll have to look into ways to enable/disable it rather than simply removing it completely.

The "hold on for a moment" thing is a good idea. Would be pretty simple to add.

Hmm. I'm not against allowing the player to incorporate body language, perhaps in a separate set of options (say you have a number of options (Indifferent / Uninterested / Intrigued or something, could go even further into specific emotional states like confused / angry / happy whatever) where one is always selected). I actually like the idea now that I think about it. The main thing here is whether the player would actually want to interact with this constant other bit of settings or would leave it the same as they played.

I feel like I recall some other game doing something like this--not as part of a conversation system necessarily, but some system like this where you're expected to give some kind of response to something in real time that's persistent--and people almost never actually used it.

That aside, thinking about this has got my imagination running again. I can see on the right side of the screen a tic-tac-toe like grid where the three middle options are disinterested / indifferent / intrigued. Once you select one of those the buttons above and below become available, to modify that further. The player could navigate it with the numpad. Thanks for this.

Yeah, I thought (and still do) that the NPC responding to your interruptions was (is) a good idea. As I mentioned before I didn't try to do it for this conversation because it doesn't really fit the dynamic in play (the other guy is a tour guide), but it would be a smart idea to look into designing it at least.

One issue right now is how you'd delineate between an actual interruption or waiting until someone is finished speaking. As it stands whenever the user presses the response it plays immediately. One way we might work around that is by having a timer displayed on each NPC dialogue. When you get to the last 10% or last second (arbitrary) of the timer, it goes green or something, and when you pick a response, it queues it up instead, waiting until the NPC stops speaking for the player to interject.

Of course you might also want one for a whole topic or group of NPC responses, because they might be upset at someone breaking their train of thought even if you're not literally speaking over them.

Something similar actually happened to me on Sunday. Someone was speaking to me about her son, and I didn't understand a few of the specifics, so in between her very focused set of statements all on the topic I asked her a few questions to get the understanding I needed. She didn't mind, but someone might have (and either way, it was clearly a focused group of comments by her about a particular subject).

Some good stuff here. Thanks a ton.

 

I am trying to programm what I call a 2x2s (explore exploit secure survive) game giving players a continous experience of early and midgame of 4x games trough: Shifting resources,climate and terrain, political splintering and seperation, unused technology fading.

I want to give the player maximum choice how to play the game at character creation and in his choice of technology while enforcing the struggle for survival in other regards.

There is alot more I could say and I will if asked but on to my question:

One of the features I want to implement is to have delayed communication, there are some text based games that do that, you send out an expedition and are later presented the results, maybe the expedition get lost and years later you suddenly reencounter the expedition, maybe they even founded a settlement etc.
I am trying to find the best way to do that, my current thinking is a fog of war that delays information and a delay in when orders arrive, I am also toying with making this delays distance dependancy dynamic based on infrastructure.
However I can not shake the feeling that this might still be inelegant, so any opinion, ideas proposals on delayed communication?

 

The method probably depends very heavily on the setting of the game. Is it space? Wild west? Medieval times?

 

I would call it mild fantasy, vast areas of almost wasteland(maybe due to eternal twilight,or some magical erosion effect) Spotted with oasislike resource knots of varying size and type(Mana comes out of the ground?), intelligent creatures of great variety. I originally was inspired due to the lack of a true Moo2 inheritor but did not chose space so there would not be pure vacuum between resource centers.

 

What technological level does the world have? As long as people can't "call" each other or some equivalent the expedition idea sounds fine to me. Or a situation where you're waiting for a response to the action you take (which may take X amount of days).

Endless Space does similar things, you might take a look at that.

 

It is really not a question of lore but of mechanics that provide good information und feedback. Text is often less involving than something visuals, so I want to show not tell ;p

 

Ah, I see. In that case I don't know. You can still have visuals (an image of some sort), but I still see the most likely route as just picking between a couple of text options. Not sure about other methods.

 

These great discussions draw another FF to a close. May the 4th be with you - is our next FF!

Gigi