A little somethin'-somethin' before GDC...
by Ted Southard · 03/16/2009 (4:15 pm) · 3 comments
So, before I go out to San Francisco to meet up with the folks at Garage Games for the Expo portion of GDC and show off Interrogative to hordes of game development professionals, I thought I would take the chance to show a bit leg for you guys and girls as well...
Everyone who has followed my blogs over the past two years has heard a lot of nebulous talk, a few cryptic (and frankly, crappy) screenshots, and a failboat load of promises. While many people have been excited about the prospect of Interrogative being a step towards deeper interaction with NPC's, it's understandable that more have quieted waited to see it either materialize, or be revealed as vapooware.
Of course, I'm not one to just lie to people, so after I worked out a number of bugs to support a cute (or rather: so-dumb-you'll-laugh) little chat "minigame" inside of Interrogative for GDC, I got a video clip of it uploaded to YouTube:
Edit: Tried bumping up the resolution to 700x525 to deal with some blurriness in the embedded one. The one on YouTube is actually a bit clearer, even while smaller resolution. Go Figure...
What you're looking at is, first, the player selecting the NPC and opening a conversation with it, and then prompting it about a context (subject) named "Trivia". The NPC asks if we want to play- and of course we do!
After that, we're prompted with a series of questions that are true/false, or looking for specific answers. I got one wrong on purpose just to show how there are hooks connected to the dialogs that can both affect variables inside the NPC (in this case the one tracking the score), as well as check variables attached to the NPC (score, again). These are handy for both mini-games as well as AI.
Once I received the results of the quiz, I changed topics to Pandemic, which is going to be a rather huge piece of conversation pie once the game is launched. Right now, it has about 15 lines of dialog in it, so you see a bit of me navigating the answers from the NPC to try and dig for more information before reaching the (current) bottom, and then clicking the open/close conversation button in the middle to end the conversation.
What I haven't shown are some of the features that do work, but which I have no content created for, such as selecting NPC's as contexts themselves, logging information (though that list on the far right shows what I have logged in past tests), gaining or removing contexts, or some of the other spiffy gizmos that are in there. I'll try to do what I can to get more content in there and upload at least one more video for GDC, but bugs like to breed in the nooks and crannies between code (or script, in this case, since Interrogative doesn't use a single line of C++ code except for the ODBC resource functionality it needs for DB calls), and I squashed far more than I thought I had to in order to make that mini-game work like I wanted.
Now, if any of you are going to be by the GG booth at GDC, I'll be there trying my best to pimp my game- such as it is, in its pre-alpha condition. But, the PR is needed for building a fanbase, and without that, these features can be the most advanced in the world, and the game will fall flat on its face at launch. So stock and programmer art it may have, it's getting pimped- thankfully, to a technically-savvy crowd that can hopefully look past the ugliness!
Everyone who has followed my blogs over the past two years has heard a lot of nebulous talk, a few cryptic (and frankly, crappy) screenshots, and a failboat load of promises. While many people have been excited about the prospect of Interrogative being a step towards deeper interaction with NPC's, it's understandable that more have quieted waited to see it either materialize, or be revealed as vapooware.
Of course, I'm not one to just lie to people, so after I worked out a number of bugs to support a cute (or rather: so-dumb-you'll-laugh) little chat "minigame" inside of Interrogative for GDC, I got a video clip of it uploaded to YouTube:
Edit: Tried bumping up the resolution to 700x525 to deal with some blurriness in the embedded one. The one on YouTube is actually a bit clearer, even while smaller resolution. Go Figure...
What you're looking at is, first, the player selecting the NPC and opening a conversation with it, and then prompting it about a context (subject) named "Trivia". The NPC asks if we want to play- and of course we do!
After that, we're prompted with a series of questions that are true/false, or looking for specific answers. I got one wrong on purpose just to show how there are hooks connected to the dialogs that can both affect variables inside the NPC (in this case the one tracking the score), as well as check variables attached to the NPC (score, again). These are handy for both mini-games as well as AI.
Once I received the results of the quiz, I changed topics to Pandemic, which is going to be a rather huge piece of conversation pie once the game is launched. Right now, it has about 15 lines of dialog in it, so you see a bit of me navigating the answers from the NPC to try and dig for more information before reaching the (current) bottom, and then clicking the open/close conversation button in the middle to end the conversation.
What I haven't shown are some of the features that do work, but which I have no content created for, such as selecting NPC's as contexts themselves, logging information (though that list on the far right shows what I have logged in past tests), gaining or removing contexts, or some of the other spiffy gizmos that are in there. I'll try to do what I can to get more content in there and upload at least one more video for GDC, but bugs like to breed in the nooks and crannies between code (or script, in this case, since Interrogative doesn't use a single line of C++ code except for the ODBC resource functionality it needs for DB calls), and I squashed far more than I thought I had to in order to make that mini-game work like I wanted.
Now, if any of you are going to be by the GG booth at GDC, I'll be there trying my best to pimp my game- such as it is, in its pre-alpha condition. But, the PR is needed for building a fanbase, and without that, these features can be the most advanced in the world, and the game will fall flat on its face at launch. So stock and programmer art it may have, it's getting pimped- thankfully, to a technically-savvy crowd that can hopefully look past the ugliness!
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