Mechanics?

Mechanics?

It's been a few days and in that time I finalized where the intro starts and how to go about introducing the player to their heroine. I also want it to feel like a movie, so the episode title card won't appear until after the intro scene. Ah, but if I want it to feel like a movie, haha, I need to hit the "20 minute" marks for increased action to hold my audiences interest, right? I haven't taken any cinema classes, but I know this rule from somewhere. Well, that's hard to do with a self-paced story.

In any case, I think I've figured out the main mechanic: suspects. Hal has a journal and it will fill in as story points are uncovered. Kinda like Return of the Obra Dinn. Man that was a good game. However, this little game doesn't have planned the same kind of scene work. Go play it if you haven't. It's on Steam and ... GoG I believe. They have a website as well. Really. It's a good change of pace from Doom or CoD.

Suspects. This list will fill in when Haladie meets each villager. So she will be required to interact, which means quite a bit of dialoging. I wonder how much internal speech I should give her as she talks? It just occured to me that part of her detective ability is thinking on the spot about things. Not many stories are written from first person. And even fewer games (Tomb Raider, Psx is one that jumps to mind). I definitely don't want to hear what each villager is thinking! That would give the whole game away, haha! Plus that's too much dialogue.

Since it's a GBC game, I have a bit more VRAM to work with, so I'll have a few more pages available to store, a few more sprites to show. Only 116 characters on screen at a time though, so text will have to not drone on and on in that way I like to do.

Because I don't want to directly copy how Obra Dinn did their list and journal, filling out the suspect list will require finding story points, or events. Mostly this requires finding the npc and talking with them. I do wnat to add an Elder Scrolls style talk option for conversation tree as well as the Attitude adjustment. If you've never played an Elder Scrolls game, hey, that's okay. It's an RPG along the lines of Fallout (if'n you played that) set in the far away world of Tamriel. The conversation tree really kicks in with Morrowind, where talking with people depended on their attitude toward you, depsite your charisma. If you were a dark elf (because this was dark elf land) you got a lot more open and friendly conversations about things and could freely walk about and into places. Any other race was usually rejected from some places, and conversations were more difficult as the majority of people didn't want to share a lot of info. You could visit the tiny island of Skyrim and do a thing there, which was fun.

So, yeah, the part I want to incorporate is the over-questioning a topic. It'll irritate people and they'll want to talk with you less if you ask the same question frequently. They'll usually say so in coversation as well. Conversation choices will look a little like ES3 in that you have a list of single word or short phrase topics to choose from and the list will grow as new topics appear in the conversation. There is only so much I can put into the conversations as I don't quite yet know the limitations of the GBC storage for text. I'm assuming I can't create a lookup table of phrases and parse them as needed. I assume I'll be creating dialgue trees using the IDE dialogue items. I assume that will take a while and drain me mentally. Lot of assumptions here.

Did I explain that well at all? Was anyone able to follow that?

Suspects: talk to each person, add them to the list. While talking, topics are added to the list which can be asked about. Sometimes a "I don't know anything about that" will occur. Too many asks (three) of the same topic will shut down the ability to talk with that person for a day, or a story point, I'm not sure.

So that's the main mechanic. Schulz wants a list of people who could be the murderer, but you come with a list of others after you uncover the hidden story. He rejects the list initially, asking for way more information.

Oh.

Oh, hey, I think I gave away a little story there. Is that okay? I obviously don't want to spoil the whole thing, but I think I need some feedback. There's another story after the murder. Is that too much? I think it is. I want that to be a fun, "Oh, ho!" when you get to it. Which shouldn't take too long. It's, like, the second thing you do when getting to the village after talking with some people.

I have no music!

I would love to have some ambient and atmospheric music, light and backgroundy, for the walking around bits and for the mystery bits.

Another mechanic I'm planning out is inventory and object interaction. Inventory will be limited to pockets, though back in the day, pockets on women's dresses consisted of bags in bustles, haha. (Learning in Progress has a youtube essay on this.) But really, not too many items... or should that matter? Also, do I want to track inventory items when they are "dropped"? Transfer items to other containers? That's not a mechanic I'm certain exists in the GBC realm of games... or I'm just so used to it that I can't clearly remember which games do that. But do I want transferable items? Do you want that? What even are the items? Are items necessary? That seems like an annoying addition to a puzzle: Whoops, you don't have the key so you can't explore further. Ugh. I don't think I like that. Every game does that for one reason or a second reason, and only those two reasons. Usually to slow the story down and keep the player from skipping parts. In this game the "keys" are conversation points, which one can't just jump and skip around. Initially I was thinking the inventory could be clues to give to the sheriff. Then I thought items could be left in different places to have drama play out amongst the villagers "who took my tongs? well why were they in your bedroom!" But again, that's extra dialogue I have to add with the dialogue item in the IDE.

Hmmmmmmmm...

Object interaction is, however, important to any game's immersion level. When a player can interact with objects in the game it gives a sense of being there, of viewing the story from the character's perspective and not just watching them do the thing. How much manipulation should there be? How will objects be noted for manipulation in the game's scenes? Will that wall sconce twist to reveal a hidden passage? How will the player know? Does Haladie's expertise allow her the intuition or the observation skills to see that thing from her first stepping into a space? Should that be a part of the interface?

So many questions. So I put it to you, oh Patient Reader. Thank you for reading all this. How would an interaction for a detective be presented in a way that works for the player? So many options.

 - no object highlghting. Player has to touch everything to see if it does something or can be identified and described by the game

 - special object highlighting. The game marks an object in one way or another so the player knows that can be interacted with on for about to from

 - all object highlighting. Every object that can be described or manipulated is marked or targetable by the player character.

This is supposed to be a mystery/adventure/IF game, so I need a good balance that keeps the player interested. I personally don't want to highlight anything, so as to not annoy the player with flashing or outlining or whatever to attract their attention. I've played games that do that and I personally don't like it. Especially once I got used to what items can be manipulated. I've played other games where the object to manipulate had to be highlighted because there was no way anyone but the developer would know it was there to be used, which is bad design if'n you ask me. Elder Scrolls (again, sorry, but they did so many different things and I noticed) did a thing where a lot of the interactive objects are very similar in shape and size so you just know what it is and what it's for when, or if, you find it. Tomb Raider switched from two different lever types to using buttons as well as hiding movable blocks better.

In the PC version of this game I want to add lockpicking because a simple lock shouldn't stop the player from exploring freely. I want a similar thing in this one, and Thief Simulator has a fun and relatively accurate lock picking simulator mini-game. It doesn't account for real world things and breaking a pick doesn't make sense in the way they do it, but it has to be game-ified to make it a game. I'm not sure I want to have a mini-game at all in the GBC version.

But specifically in this IF story I want story points to open some areas, reveal clues, and create a narrative. I would certainly like replayability, which means taking a certain conversation branch leaves the player unable to go back and ask about something else. Ah, ha! I see you thinking: well, they could just reload the save and try again. Suuuuuuure, but the save happens at the end of the day, which means starting the day from waking up and going through all the things to get to that conversation, which might not happen. It's like in Moraff's World where digging a hole takes about 30 seconds in real-world time and doesn't feel worth it. Steve did that on purpose.

Oh. Right. I'm planning on having wandering characters. They'll go from scene to scene based on their daily activities. Hey, just because there's a murder to be solved doesn't mean life in the village comes to a halt. Not everyone is going to stand around waiting for conversation. Wait. Is that what you thought I was going to do? Just have characters at stock locations so the player could easily find them and talk with them? Sorry I mislead you. No. NPC's have things to do. Sometimes they wander out into the woods for activities, sometimes they are doing a thing and can't stop in that moment. Pestering a character outside conversation will have a similar affect to repeatedly asking a topic in conversation. You will repel people. Don't be a bother!

I don't know _how_ I will get them to wander (without storing multiples of the same scene with different actors), but the discord group seems pretty helpful so I can certainly ask them.

I do believe this is supposed to be a blog and not a journal entry or a personal dev note, so I'll stop here