Paging Doctor Homes

August 24, 2018

This week I’ve been continuing to work on the scene where Jane Ampson and Pureluck Homes first meet the ship’s doctor in Sleuthhounds: Cruise. It was a sequence that was causing me some trouble as the doctor had a fair amount of information to convey but I didn’t want to get into a dialog tree that player’s would just have to grind their way through. However, I’ve now devised a way to keep the scene more interactive and still put across the necessary information.

When adding different environments into a game, occasionally ideas for funny moments present themselves. Sometimes these ideas make it into the game, sometimes they don’t. For example, in The Halloween Deception at one point there was going to be a food fight because it was set at a novelty goods manufacturer party and there was food readily available. In a similar way, when I added the infirmary into Cruise I thought that a fun idea would be to involve Homes and/or Ampson as the assistant to the doctor in some manner of surgery. I had even debated having that going on in the background as the player worked through the dialog tree when first meeting the doctor.

In addition to the surgery idea, I also had floating around in my head the thought that when meeting the doctor the player could be doing something else at the same time. In The Valentine’s Vendetta I incorporated a sequence where one character could ramble on and, while that character was talking, the player could choose to interrupt the character more or less at any time. In Cruise I was thinking of having the doctor speak with that same asynchronous method while the player did something else.

[Helping the doctor with her surgery (a work in progress).]
Helping the doctor with her surgery (a work in progress).

It should come as no surprise when I say I took both ideas – the surgery and the asynchronous dialog – and mushed them together. Now, when the player visit’s the doctor she pressgangs Homes into being her assistant. While the doctor is having a conversation with Homes and Ampson, she also issues instructions for the surgery that the player has to carry out. The thing that makes this a more interesting challenge than just following a set of instructions is that Homes, who the player is playing as at this point, does not do so well with squishy bodily innards.

As the conversation and the surgery proceed, Homes gets more and more faint. If the player doesn’t carry out the doctor’s instructions in a timely manner or if the player does the “wrong” thing then Homes gets fainter faster and can pass out. If Homes makes it all the way through then he suitably impresses the doctor so that she’ll be more inclined to help the Sleuthhounds later on in the game. If Homes passes out then she won’t be so inclined. The result is that the player will, at some point, experience different story beats based on how they do here. The idea isn’t to bring the game to a crashing halt if the player “fails”, it’s to provide a satisfactory story either way.

I have a few more things to tweak on this particular sequence, but I do like how it plays. It eliminates the grind of passively clicking through a lengthy dialog tree and replaces it with a genuinely interactive sequence. Interactivity is the unique aspect that games bring to the table versus other creatives forms such as movies, novels, paintings, songs, etc. At this point I don’t know if there will be other conversations that will be carried out in similar fashion but I do know I’ll be keeping an eye on any dialog that devolves into passively clicking through every single option available.