Talking of Alternatives

August 17, 2018

With the bulk of the design for Act 2 of Sleuthhounds: Cruise done, implementation of said act has been steadily trundling along. Even with a design, every now and then a situation pops up that doesn’t work out quite the way I first thought it would. One such situation occurred as I was implementing a conversation the Sleuthhounds have in the ship’s infirmary.

During Act 2 it’s important to speak with the ship’s doctor, whom Homes has previously sent evidence to for analysis. At this point, Homes and Ampson have just started working together and so they’re not entirely on the same page when it comes to meeting with suspects. I thought it would be interesting then if both characters had their own questions that they could ask of the good doctor. And it was interesting, sort of.

[Ampson and Homes with separate lists of dialog options.]
Ampson and Homes with separate lists of dialog options.
Click to view larger.

In order to cut down on the player having to manually switch back and forth between Homes and Ampson to ask their respective questions of the Doctor, I tweaked the existing dialog system to allow both characters to have their dialog choices show on screen at the same time. In addition to saving on manually switching between the two characters this allows one of them to ask something which then might give the other one a new or different item to ask about. From a technical implementation point of view it was interesting to get this working and there are certainly some situations where I can see having this system in place being quite useful. This was not one of those situations.

As I began filling in the dialog lines for the different options I realized that this particular dialog was turning into exactly the kind that I feel don’t work: a straight info dump. One of the key problems with most dialog trees is that they become a disengaging, passive experience. This happens when the player is given a series of topics that they must click through one by one in order to get all the information to proceed. The result is essentially an extended cutscene that the player has to periodically unpause by picking the next dialog option. They then sit back passively while waiting for the next time they have to pick an option. The options aren’t choices they’re simply means of prompting the conversation to keep going and so aren’t interesting from a gameplay point of view.

In my particular case, I had six options between Homes and Ampson. The conversation with the doctor is also a critical conversation and I wrote it without any option for the player to even end it early. The result being a dialog that, once started, could not be finished without having to grind through each and every one of those six options. Ugh!

At this point I’m uncertain what to do. It’s important that the player get the information from the doctor in order to have the context needed to proceed through the rest of Act 2. I know I don’t want a passive dialog tree in here but I’m concerned about changing this conversation into a linear cutscene. The doctor has a fair amount of information to put across and just having a “talking heads” sequence isn’t particularly engaging.

For now I need to step back and think about this scene. Perhaps it needs to be broken up. Perhaps the player needs to be given some additional tasks in the infirmary, the rewards for completing them being the information the player needs. Perhaps something else is warranted here altogether. I don’t know, but when I figure it out then it’ll probably become another blog post in the future so keep your eyes open.