Dialog: The Problem

March 16, 2018

I’ve previously blogged about my sense that dialog trees in games are a fundamentally flawed game mechanic. That’s something that’s been bouncing around in the back of my mind for a long time. Over the course of the Sleuthhounds series I’ve tried different experiments to make dialog work better. Sleuthhounds: Cruise is no exception as once more I’m coming back to the drawing board to figure out how to make dialog a workable element of gameplay.

Right from the start of the Sleuthhounds series I knew that I wanted the main characters of Pureluck Homes and Jane Ampson to both have their own unique game mechanics. Something that was special to them based on who they were as characters. For Pureluck Homes it was easy. He was the deductive reasoning detective, so making a system for him where he could observe clues in the environment and then piece together what they meant on a form of deduction board made a lot of sense.

Jane Ampson was much more difficult. A former reporter turned novelist, I felt that her strengths would lie in how she related to the other characters in the game world. Since she was “all about the story” gathering details about a specific suspect’s story would fit her well. This led to a form of storyboard that I first devised for The Cursed Cannon wherein the player would gather story points and have to arrange them in order to be able to tell a logical story about that character. Ultimately this didn’t work well for that game and I removed it, although I did incorporate a slightly modified version as a poem creation puzzle in The Halloween Deception.

When the storyboard mechanic fell by the wayside for The Cursed Cannon I needed to replace it with something new that was still specific to the Ampson character. This ultimately became the timeline puzzle mechanic that has appeared in most of the subsequent games. With this, Ampson still gathers story points but she has to arrange them in an overall timeline of the events related to whatever crime she’s investigating.

While the timeline puzzle is a good fit for Ampson and works well in the previous games, there is one issue with it related to Cruise: it’s a long term puzzle. Ampson has to do a lot of poking around to gather all the story points needed to build the timeline. By contrast, Homes’s deduction board is a puzzle that can be done in place, meaning that Homes can take a look at a scene and immediately launch into and solve a deduction board. For Cruise I wanted to have a similar in place mechanic for Ampson in addition to the long term timeline puzzle.

Coming back to Ampson’s character, I again reflected how she is the “people person” of the sleuthhounds. My feeling was that whatever her in place gameplay mechanic would be it would have to be related to having dialog with the other characters in the game world. Hence my return to the problem of dialog trees.

At a high level, the overall problem goes something like this: The suspect is concealing a secret. I need to discover what that secret is. Without knowing what the secret is, how do I intelligently choose dialog options that will guide me to the secret?

This problem came back to my overall issue with dialog trees. Most dialog trees are set up as questions, or at least as prompts, to other characters. The player chooses a question and the character they’re talking to gives an answer. To be sure you’ve found out everything a character knows you need to ask every question. If you’re just going to ask every question anyway then what’s the point in providing a choice. The choice doesn’t matter and the information the character has essentially gets doled out to you in an extended cutscene that you have to periodically unpause (by selecting another question).

From previous Sleuthhounds games I had learned the dialog trees work much better when you turn them on their head. Instead of having the player asking other characters questions, it’s better if other characters ask the player questions and the player chooses the answer. With this method, suddenly the choices the player makes matter and by dint of the fact that they’re given a question they are also given some direction on how to answer it, i.e. on which dialog option to intelligently choose.

All that said, I couldn’t see a way to make dialogs where you had to learn something unknown from another character fit into the pattern of that other character asking you questions. Intrinsically to learn something that you don’t know you need to be the one doing the asking.

There started the search for something new or different that I could do with dialog to turn it into an interesting and engaging gameplay mechanic for Ampson. Over the next couple of blog posts I’ll be going through some of the options I’ve considered. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.