Dialog as Interesting Gameplay, Take 3

April 6, 2018

After two attempts to make dialog with a game character an interesting game mechanic, either by interrogation or by interview, and getting nowhere I took a step back to see where I was at. From those attempts I had learned that I needed to think simpler. I wanted a game mechanic that players could easily comprehend and work with, and that hadn’t emerged with my previous efforts.

The interview system showed character expressions as a visual indicator.

However, one of the ideas that had come up was the notion that you would have to pay attention to a character’s body language. In my second take at the dialog system I had put into place a closeup that showed the expression of the character you were interviewing. As your reputation with them increased they would look happier and more relaxed. As your reputation decreased they would look angrier and have more closed off body language (hunched over, arms crossed sort of thing).

In point of fact, the notion of seeing a suspect’s expression change wasn’t mine. It came from another adventure game I played many years back Martian Memorandum, the second in the Tex Murphy series of adventure games. In this game you picked topics to ask about from a notepad in typical detective interrogation fashion and their reaction would change based on what you picked.

A suspicious suspect from Martian Memorandum.

I distinctly remember there being some suspects that would look particularly squirrely when you asked them about specific subjects. Just based on their expressions you knew they were hiding something. I also remember being disappointed that there was no way to confront a suspect when you detected a lie. Instead you’d have to go off and find some inventory item or other topic of conversation that you could use to “break” a suspect and get them to talk more freely.

In thinking about Martian Memorandum I started wondering along the lines of what if you could press a character on a subject that they were obviously hiding something on. In some cases it was quite apparent when a suspect was lying but it occurred to me that this could be made as overt or as subtle as was needed for a given character. For example, a trained poker player might be better at hiding tells than someone who got excited at the slightest thing.

As I began thinking about these things it seemed to me that the player would likely need to see several responses for any given character in order to determine what their tells were. That was problematic when used with a typical dialog tree as you might use up all of the questions for a given topic before getting to a point where you knew when to confront the suspect. It felt like it would need a lot of dialog if it was structured as part of a typical dialog tree.

Then my thoughts went to detective shows on TV. One of the conventions of such shows is that the detective will be interrogating a suspect and will reach a critical point where they reveal they know the suspect is lying. The suspect then basically crumbles and reveals everything, without asking for a lawyer, whether the detective has any actual proof or not. It’s a bit ridiculous when you really think about it but since the Sleuthhounds series has a certain degree of ridiculousness anyway I thought it might be a good fit.

A suspicious suspect in Sleuthhounds: Cruise.

The result of all of this is the system I currently have in place in the Sleuthhounds: Cruise game itself. Here when Jane Ampson goes to interview a suspect that interview proceeds in linear fashion. The player doesn’t choose particular topics, but instead focuses on what the suspect says and what their body language is. At various points in the conversation the player has to decide if the suspect is telling the truth or lying. If the player sufficiently “reads” a suspect and gets enough of these truth or lie decisions correct then Ampson will confront the suspect and elicit the information that suspect is hiding.

There are a number of things that I like about this system.

• It’s based on the observable behavior of a character as opposed to trying to navigate the maze of a normal dialog tree.
• It presents options to the player that are very clear in their meaning.
• It’s a system that is waaay simpler to understand that any of my previous attempts.
• It doesn’t require gobs and gobs of dialog lines to be written (and later recorded and integrated into the game).

This system also ties into another concept that I like, and have implemented to varying degrees in previous Sleuthhounds games, which is the notion of success through failure. In this particular case, it will be entirely possible to go through a conversation with a given suspect and fail to pick up on the tells they have. In such an instance the suspect obviously won’t breakdown and tell whatever secret they have. Rather than bringing the game to a halt or having the player go through the same dialog over again this provides the opportunity to incorporate alternate puzzles into the game. For example, if the player fails to get some key piece of information from a suspect during one of these truth or lie conversations, then the opportunity will be presented later in the game to discover that same piece of information, if it’s important, while searching the suspect’s room.

I’ve only tried a couple of these truth or lie conversations in the game so far but for the most part I’m liking how they flow and play. They accomplish all the goals that I had for dialog and work well within the context of a mystery story. My plan now is to leave them be for a few weeks before going back to see how I still feel about them. If they still feel good then the next step will be to put them before some test players to get feedback from that quarter. We shall see.

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