joecamberwell

[joecamberwell]

Making interactive fiction characters have opinions

For the next release of The Secret of Madame Legerdemain, I'm experimenting with a new feature: Opinions.

I've written a lot of alternative dialogue in this game so far. Most of the time there are three different things you can say at any point. It would be nice if all those choices meant something, right?

I'd always planned to have some hand-coded ways that your words can come back to bite you later. But that's not practical to do for every dialogue option. For that, we need an abstraction.

Opinions are a way that I can do that. They work via a custom tag parser that listens for certain "opinion" tags - invisible to the player, but the game is keeping score behind the scenes. Later, I can open up or close down some paths, depending on what other characters think of you.

Here's a snippet of Ink code I've experimentally marked up with opinions:

She crosses her hands over her midriff, playing with something on her right hand. "The kind of idiot who proposes marriage to the lord's daughter."

* "Ah. I see the problem." [] # diplomatic 2 # trustworthy 5 mazel

"Indeed."

* "Ha. Spoiled little princesses aren't worth that sort of bother." [] # trustworthy -10 mazel "Calling the love of my life a 'spoiled little princess' wasn't your finest moment."

She narrows her eyes and sets her jaw.

"You're trying to make me angry. <i>Taeshad</i> if I know why," she says, resorting to Orcish. "She's <i>not</i> a princess."

This lets me do something fun as I'm writing. I can have things you say affect the opinions of either everyone who is listening or a specific person - and I can even add some specific thoughts for them to throw back at you at a later date.

You may also have noticed that there isn't just one stat for each character called "approval". I want characters' opinions of you to feel a bit more alive than that - so I'm creating what I call a set of traits, like diplomatic, trustworthy or cautious.

Traits go from -100 to 100, but a negative score isn't necessarily a negative thing. The opposite of cautious could either be reckless or decisive, depending on whether it's Mazel's opinion or Diego's opinion.

I thought initially of basing all the traits on the OCEAN (or "Big Five") personality model, but after some experimentation I think I need traits that are a bit more geared towards storytelling. After experimentally marking up one scene, I came up with the following:

      diplomatic

      open

      curious

      trustworthy

      altruistic

      cautious

      funny

This list is almost certainly too long and will need to be pared down a bit, but it's a good start. What personality traits do you think are essential for defining an interactive fiction character?

The Secret of Madame Legerdemain is a work in progress and has a public demo here:

#if game #interactive fiction #if wip #inkle #indie dev

[joecamberwell]

Here's something our D&D group made a couple of years ago that I thought was cool as hell.

Each of us sat down and recorded an introduction of us speaking in character, added some atmospheric music, then @kenzaidm edited the whole thing together with the art we had commissioned.

#d&d #original character #voice acting #Youtube

[joecamberwell]

IF feedback swap

Hi! Are you looking for alpha/beta readers for your interactive fiction project?

I'm writing a game called The Secret of Madame Legerdemain and I'm looking for some feedback from test readers - and I'd be very happy to offer feedback on your project in return.

If that's you, read on!

In particular, I'm looking for the following feedback:

1. What character(s) did you choose to play as?

2. Were there any memorable moments that you thought were great that you would not change?

3. Did anything make you want to stop playing at any point?

4. Was there ever a time you felt like you didn't know what was going on in the story?

5. Are there any choices you felt like you should have been able to make that weren't presented as an option?

6. Is the fact that you need to as play one of a fixed set of pre-written characters detrimental to the experience?

Getting in touch

In return, I'll happily play through your project and offer either general notes or any specific feedback you're looking for.

If you're interested, let me know in the comments and we'll connect. Private messages are probably better for the feedback itself so you don't feel the need to hold back on criticism!

Here's the game itself - it's a work in progress that probably has 20-30% of the eventual content:

#if wip #interactive fiction

[joecamberwell]

If you chose "Read on":

#if wip #if game #interactive fiction #fantasy writing #metafiction

[joecamberwell]

Want a finished game to play? I wanted to shout out two awesome games by @ink-splotch that helped inspire me to make my own.

Stay is a beautiful fantasy game with a clever solution to the problem that you can't play all the paths in a single playthrough of an IF game. It's so neat, and I immediately wished I'd thought of it!

More a Haunting than a History is a spooky modern fantasy game about going home to your weird little town. Kind of made me think of "what if the cast of Buffy went back to Sunnydale, CA after four years of being away at college?"

Both games have some lovely romanceable NPCs as well. Check 'em out - they're incredibly worth your time!

#interactive fiction #inkle #fantasy

[joecamberwell]

Why am I making The Secret of Madame Legerdemain?

Here's the story behind the story. For the last three years I've been playing and streaming D&D online with some truly awesome and talented people.

A slot came up for me to run a session and I pitched them this idea: come up characters who are so desperate for an impossible favour that they will risk almost certain death to retrieve a mysterious box.

Here are us goofs playing it:

My players knocked it out of the park with their backstories and motivations. Intrigue, honour, tragedy, double crossing, a cursed ancestor, and a searing love story.

I've always loved interactive fiction (the Sorcery series is a personal favourite) and the success of Baldur's Gate 3 got me thinking "huh, interactive fiction and D&D". And "if my made my own D&D game, what would the origin characters be?" So of course this story popped right back into my head, and I had to tell it.

So that's the journey I'm on: making an interactive novel that's really a love letter to some incredible characters made by my friends and to the worldbuilding we did together.

The idea is that the finished game will have three or four wildly different endings for each character - including the ones that actually happened, and some fascinating ones that didn't!

Want to see what I've done so far? You can play the public preview here:

#interactive fiction #fantasy writing #d&d #inkle #baldur's gate 3

[joecamberwell]

Enjoy fantasy novels and roleplaying? I might be making something you'll like. I'm writing an interactive fiction game inspired by a D&D adventure. You can see the progress at:

#interactive fiction #d&d #fantasy writing