Saturday, March 12, 2016

This week I’ve been working on passive conversations. These are conversations that you might hear while you are very stealthily not interacting with Wastrels or Wellies.

Active conversations are conversations that NPC's have with you, either while they're trying to persuade you to take your Joy, or if they have a problem they hope you can solve, like this guy, whose wife seems a bit under the weather:



We have two kinds of these. One I’m calling “Atmosphere.” These are the sort of conversations you might hear dozens of times. “Oh, there you are!” “Were you looking for me?” “Not at all – but there you are. Hahaha!” “Hahaha!”

These sorts of conversations are standard in video games. However, we’ll also have showcased conversations. These are conversations you’re probably only going to hear once in a playthrough. They’re longer, and they are about people’s distinct desires and problems. We’ll rig these conversations to play in specific encounters where you will, for example, have to stealth your way through a specific location in order to achieve a goal. So your reward for not killing everyone in the house, in addition to whatever loot we give you for being non-homicidal, will be learning about someone’s life.

The showcased conversations really came about because in my first effort at writing atmosphere, all the conversations came out very specific and personal – all way too memorable to be conversations that you might hear from any number of totally different people in totally different places. Asking a screenwriter to write undistinctive dialog is like asking a singer to sing off-key: all their ten thousand hours of training are telling them not to do what you’re trying to do. Fortunately, rather than scrapping the memorable conversations, we’re going to use them along with some more general conversations.

All of this represents yet another metastasis of the amount of recorded narrative in this game! This game is going to have a lot a lot a lot of voice work. Should be fun.

Read the rest of the team's update here.

Labels: We Happy Few

11:45 PM

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