Adventure Game Conversation Design

Note: I have no immediate plans to make a game, but I figured I might as well start working out some of the issues in case I ever actually get around to making it.

Anyway, I have a concept for an Adventure Game, but the problem is that I can't figure out how to handle conversations.

My view is that conversation options shouldn't be "unlocked" by completely arbitrary and unconnected event flags. The character is physically capable of saying everything from the start, so it's silly to make it otherwise.

However, the problem is spoilers. Some conversation options will spoil things by their very existence. What I need is some way to make the options "hidden" so that someone playing for their first time won't notice them, but someone who already knows about it can use them.

What can I do?

Try adding an option in conversation where the user can type in his own topics to talk about — sorta like in text-based adventure games. That way, the user can prompt about things if he knows of them already. No spoilers needed.

But then it's just like guess the verb times a million. The users probably won't have fun trying to guess the exact message they're supposed to type in, even once they know the general idea.

Suppose the player discovers that Bob is embezzling money and wants to confront him. How are you supposed to know to type in "What did you do with the money?", instead of say "Why are you stealing from me?" or "I noticed something strange in the accounts."

Even once you know the secret, there's no reasonable way to guess what the expected input is based on that secret.

Have you played Trilby's Notes? Aside from its pant-wettingly tense atmosphere, what I liked was how Yahtzee (the guy behind the curtain) handled the text parsing. There's no need to type in the exact specific phrase down to a 't', but rather (as I can recall), he had a simple phrasing system which worked according to context:

i.e. At the beginning of the game, you type in "ask Siohban about idol" / "talk to woman about idol" (same effect), and Siohban's character would respond in conversation to the Player Character — telling you the origins of the idol.

And later, when much of the horror has gone on — if you ask her about the idol again, she would say stuff like how she'd never expected the idol to be possessed, etc.

So you wouldn't need put in every single individual response imaginable, that's tedious. You can have a rudimentary phrasing system in place, with a word dictionary covering the basic action, or subject at hand. Simple and intuitive. Don't forget to include alternate wordings too: like blind, curtains, coverings..

or Stealing, embezzling, thieving..

And I believe you'll have most your bases covered there. You can further tweak this out through play-testing. Listen to Yahtzee's commentary on the Special Edition version of Trilby's Notes, for extra pointers on this text-parsing method.

It's one possible way of getting past that "arbitrary unlocking conversation" thing; if you know it, you can try asking it. And if all this sounds too tough to implement for you, maybe I'll try brainstorming another way.

edited 6th Dec '10 9:40:45 PM by QQQQQ

I have an idea that can help...

When something is revealed to the player, certain words are in all caps and the game stores those words in a list that the player can open up and view at any time.

So, it would be something like this:

The player meets a woman named Alice, but doesn't know what to ask her about.

Upon talking to another person, the player is informed that "Alice knows of a SECRET PATHWAY into the gangleader's mansion."

Now the player knows to type in "secret pathway" when talking to Alice, and the other words around "secret pathway" are insignificant.

edited 7th Dec '10 6:27:18 PM by colbertimposter