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[Yolan]

Ahh, maybe I did not make it very clear. I want to capture that sense of things being 'held back' or 'concealed' that we lost when we moved away from keyword based dialogue, but not necessarily by actually using keywords that you type in.

It's more that:

1. A lot of dialogue will remain hidden, because of time constraints.
2. There will be some hidden 'keys' to unlock dialogue which are revealed through observation, eavesdropping, and by getting a guest sufficiently merry / drunk.

But you know what... now I am also intrigued by this possibility! I will need to think about it more. Perhaps a mixed system might be a nice solution.



 

[Parsely]

Oh I see! That sounds much simpler.

I'd be really excited to actually see the keyword entry be a thing, it's an older mechanic but it's special and has untapped value and I would love to see it revived and iterated upon, but it does sound really challenging to implement. Too easy and it feels like a gimmick, too hard and a key feature becomes inaccessible! If the keywords are some kind of bonus to reward good sleuthing without preventing you from doing basic gameplay I feel like that would be a happy medium.

After playing Return of the Obra Dinn I can see there's definitely room for some truly challenging sleuthing in the modern gaming scene as long as information is easily accessible and there are good quality of life features to minimize tedium and effort of collecting and referencing information, and the end result is rewarding. I'm looking forward to see how you handle this!

[Yolan]

You know, I really appreciate this suggestion.  I did a bit more thinking about it, and it actually makes a lot of sense. Seems like this solution was staring me in the face. As things go on you might
have a situation where there are potentially dozens of things you could ask a character about at once. Cramming this all in with a dialogue tree system requires nesting options and hubs. Eliciting it directly by way of keywords would actually be easier.

What I might do is simplify the cost of conversation options so that it simply takes up jollyness (emotional energy; EE), rather than time and/or EE. As EE recovers slightly after the end of each phase, it has pretty much the same effect of preventing you from talking endlessly with no penalty. It also lets me try something pretty cool...
 
...with a keyword approach, I can actually have each single key-stroke that you enter cost a point of EE. You have say a hundred points to work with, and you regenerate a good deal over the course of the day providing you are well fed. So it’s not like you will mind that much if a keyword is five characters long instead of four (although I'll have to try and avoid very long keywords unless they are more likely to give out good information). What it does do though is it prevents you from spamming different words, and it gives you an immediate almost-tactile feel that you are currently speaking and using energy when you type characters. The typing becomes the talking, in a way.

(UI wise, I would have each keystroke turn part of the EE bar gray, but only reduce it once you have hit the enter key.)

EDIT: thought a bit more and drew up a mock UI.

[Parsely]

This looks dope, cards are a cool way to represent your key info, not sure if I like each character costing you because then you have to make sure that longer words are actually worth more

[Yolan]

Yes, that might be a bad idea... hmm... for now I'll just focus on the basics surrounding this part of the game loop, and test some different ideas as I go.

[Yolan]

Doing some art work for the sake of updating the page etc. Gives you an idea of how the game should look once its closer to being finished. ;-)

Also carried out a pretty big update of the patreon landing page, where you can find more up to date information of what the game will be.



https://www.patreon.com/Innkeep

[Parsely]

Game is looking very pretty.

[Yolan]

 

Getting there!

[Yolan]

Hi all. It's time for dev diary #16!
 
Featuring:

- Player walking animation.
- Working candles
- Shadowmap - ambient light integration
- Spawnable guests linked to a dialogue window
- the sexiest barrels you ever did see
- less waffling!

[Yoink]

Haven't checked in in a while, but the game still keeps looking better and better!
Some really interesting conversation mechanics, especially! I am yet to see a game that tried some new, interesting approach to convo's and actually pulled it off well. This one looks promising! How does one go about recovering jolliness/EE? I might adopt such strategies IRL, I always seem to have a critical shortage of that stuff.    

[Yolan]

Thanks!! ;-)

Beer is probably one trick!
But also, you will recover some at the end of each "phase", which you can see marked by the tabs on the time gui window at the top. So you might exhaust them for a while, but you will recover some later on. The idea is to force you to mix it up, between serving, spying, and talking.

[Parsely]

That walk animation is great, it's a little thing but it adds so much! If I could make a suggestion though, get his arms moving and it would improve a lot.

[Yolan]

Thanks. I think you are right! I'm going to use the current animation as a base, and then work out the variations where he is holding drinks etc. in one hand while swinging the other.

[Retropunch]

Agree, the walking animation really makes a difference!  I'd really, really suggest changing the initial patreon videos for ones with the walking animation in - it gives it such a different  feel to it - from the initial videos where he slides around you could mistake it for a sort of number crunching management sim where stuff just moves around as an indicator rather than a more 'action' (in the loosest sense of the word) oriented RPG. Also makes the quality look much better.

[Yolan]

Thanks! Hmm... do you mean the youtube videos? These are just dev diary videos which show the current state of the game as of when they were made.