Event Tutorial - 05 - PC Responses

And now, finally, the player options. For a start, let's prepare them, the writing is going to be pretty straightforward, precisely the same thing I've done before in the NPC tutorial. Before we get there, we need to represent and describe the options properly.

1) Short, icons, condition

There are three attributes each node requires. You can see the spaces for them already represented here:

The short represents the bit of text that's visible for you as you make the decision. By convention actions are shorthanded, but if the player character says something, it has to be fully represented in the choice — no misleading texts. The icons are the insights, as I've presented before, a fairly complex, dynamic system currently governs insight icons. Fortunately, we can set them using an interface. The condition represents a logical statement that will govern if the whole segment appears or not at all. It has its own interface as well, though there's a lot more we can do with it than what's presented there.

Let's start at the top. We have the smile option. Everything is fine at first, but I'd say there are two different ways this can go. The accident, smile and charming parts definitely represent a somewhat positive, if unwanted interaction. But the lewd comment is definitely not as positive. Let's do a split for this, using different insights and eventually different outcomes. I'll also start removing the auto from the node header, I want the ability to refer to it in a meaningful way, and I can't do that if I let the system generate it:

I'll have to fill out the icons as well, but I'll bring up the interface first:

That sounds like what we want, we could tweak the interactions in the menu above, but we don't need to, what we need is to instead set up the check:

It's a Sense Emotion check, as it essentially revolves around reading the person's intention. Now, because the comment is lewd, it might seem that Desire is in order, but our character is not trying to arouse someone, she's trying to understand someone's intentions. A two-star difficulty for the check is about what the game considers normal. A more naive and sheltered character might not catch it, but otherwise, it should be obvious what's happening here. After hitting Copy, we can place it in our conversation.

We've got a few more to go. But we can fill them out pretty quickly. The only remaining issue is the last one, we need to do something there to represent an accurate response to what the NPC said. Additionally, I want to give that one a condition:

We'll be requiring the PC to not be Uncanny for her to have the wherewithal to come up with a reply on the spot:

And let's set this variable up:

This variable is now empty, but we can set it using our grammar, adequately assigning replies to the NPCs dialogue:

This lets us assign responses by category, but also override them when needed. I've added only one such special case here, but I might come up with some more later. In any case, this way we'll have the reply prepared (and a fitting one too) before we need it.

2) Handling the choice

Next up, it would be best if we gave these responses some consequences. We can use that using an eat decorate, which will process some text without pushing it to the printer — that way, we don't need to worry much about formatting:

From there, we can move on to filling out the NPCs response. I won't be getting into that too much, it's just a repeat of the techniques I've presented already. I will, however, present how to build up the next node:

It's the same as with the text we inserted at the very start, but this one goes on the tail end. When this event is in the game, you can check how the rest of the writing looks. In case you want to catch how it works.

This tutorial is now concluded, I hope that after this, you understand how I assemble events and how they are then executed by the game. I'd like to hold this event up as a kind of technical standard for what I do in the future. Of course, not having to worry about explaining what I'm doing lets me work a lot faster. So this isn't really a large event.