New Stories; Conversation Game Project · 5:25am Jul 29th, 2020
I have a series of fantasy novellas out now called "Wavebound", about a novice water goddess:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08D3SW5WP?ref_=series_rw_dp_labf
They're unusual in that they're generated partly by using tabletop RPG rules. Cards and dice determined important facts and interesting details. I'm 10K words into a third story arc for this project!
Working also on "Freelance Minion", another Thousand Tales story, this one set early in the timeline and involving an ambitious young Cuban.
What I haven't been working on for weeks is the conversation-based game project. I began coding "Ethos #12", the latest version, but have been stuck on finding the exact combination of game mechanics to make certain aspects of persuasion and conversation fun! The last idea I tried out, on paper, seemed to lack interesting player decisions because there was an obviously best action at all times.
I've seen various games attempt to handle persuasion, but they all seem to be either extremely scripted (big obvious dialog line that says "if you have Speech Skill 90, click here to say the clever thing that wins the argument"), or some kind of abstract minigame barely related to conversation (the pie-wedge thing in "Oblivion"). I think the really successful version of the game I have in mind will need to combine types of conversation gameplay: getting information, befriending people, and persuading people. The way that a sane human might act, in contrast to how RPG characters act. But I need some happy medium between having to create a real AI that can converse, and rehashing the pure scripting method. I think part of the answer is to have a little bit of AI in the sense that an NPC keeps track of what it thinks a conversation is about; I've already experimented with that.
