Esoteric Update #132 - When You Need A Break But Can't Stop Working

I'm not feeling well today, so I'm gonna skip out on the lore. Instead, have this, which might be interesting from a game design standpoint rather than a storytelling standpoint:

General Writing Style Guide
Random Conversation Tutorial

Now then, what have we been up to over the last week?

I took a break from the main work I was doing. I've felt I started burning out on it and needed a break. So a break I had. Specifically, I decided to revisit random conversations.

First, I implemented a new feature that explicitly calls emotes for specific lines of dialogue. Either as stand-alone responses or as additions to spoken dialogue. For the moment, there's only four emotes, but over time there should be more of them.

Secondly, I sprung for an implementation of a random conversation generator implementation/syntax. In a fit of irony, it's based on the algorithm from Oblivion, but hey... there's nothing wrong with that algorithm; it's the data provided to it that was trash. I didn't have much time to implement text conversations, so I just made a joke. It proves the syntax works, but with only eleven conversation nodes, it doesn't produce much in terms of diverse dialogue.

Thirdly, we increased the number of NPC conversations in the game from about 40 to about 100. Though there's still a good deal of conversations that have yet to be implemented for one reason or another. About 30 or 40. Still hoping to get a lot more conversations into the game in the future.

Fourthly, I devised an adjective and adverb system with a similar structure to the previously done verb system. Once I'm done with it, it should be pretty beneficial for the diversity of words used in narration. There's a bunch of various odds and ends that use randomised adjectives or adverbs where implementing this diversity will help with the feel and experience of reading. Unfortunately, that's about as much time I had for this. I was more interested in the other things I've worked on over the last week. So, the system is ready, but it's not yet filled out with data, and it's subsequently not used anywhere yet.

Fifthly, I thought that maybe with about 100 conversations, there would be enough data to think about vocabulary idiolects. However, we weren't able to do much with it. Hopefully, when there's more data, we can go back to it, but we weren't capable of doing much as it stands. Oh well, it happens.

This week I'm going back to what I was doing before; the aim is to, possibly, make an interactive test for the poses and verify that they are correctly handled. In the process, I'll look into a few still open-ended questions about setting up the AI graphs, specifically managing variable connections. (I.e. edges that might or might not exist or might have different costs depending on the situation.) The goal is to work towards a sketch version of the system and flesh it out from there.