Streamline the Interface, Lower Production Time

September 20, 2019

Compared to the other Sleuthounds games, Sleuthhounds: Cruise is big. Very big. As I get closer to finishing the last of the side quests for the game, I’ve pulled a count of the number of lines of dialog that will need to be recorded. Doing so has helped to convince me to streamline some of the gameplay; a decision I was previously considering but was still a little on the fence about.

From the earlier games, there were three types of actions players could do that I had cause to wonder if they were worth the implementation effort. Those actions are:

  1. The ability to Look/Examine items and hotspots. I included this in the earlier games so that if the drawings of backgrounds or items were unclear the player could “look” at them to learn better what they were. However, since the game also has both a hotspot highlighter and flyover text on the mouse pointer that says exactly what items are, the value of the look option was questionable.
  2. The ability to combine different inventory items together. In the earlier games I created unique responses for all of the different inventory combinations. This added a lot of extra dialog lines to those games and would have done even more so to Cruise, which has over a hundred items. I’d already been thinking about removing this ability for Cruise as in the previous games I only used it a handful of times. Dialog considerations aside, it felt like an exception to how inventory items could be used, like the player had to solve the game interface rather than the game itself by figuring out that certain items could be used on other items in the inventory.
  3. The ability to combine inventory items with in room hotspots. Now this is one that I’m not removing entirely. Using inventory items on hotspots is key to progressing through the game. However, there are a lot of hotspot/inventory combinations that just don’t make sense (for example, using a game board playing piece on a lemon tree). Although I do like that the previous games have unique responses for even absurd actions, the size of Cruise is such that adding lines for all such combinations would grow the total line count to ridiculous heights. As a result, I’m planning to fall back to more generic responses along the lines of, “Those don’t work together,” (but, you know, better).

I haven’t made the above decisions lightly. I do feel that having the ability to look at all hotspots and to combine items together brings some measure of value to an adventure game. However, that small amount of value needs to be weighed against its production cost. Once I delved into the number of lines of dialog, it became obvious that the above choices were reasonable in light of the production cost that would exist otherwise.

When I’m implementing the various rooms in the game, I have coding templates for the hotspots that appear in those rooms. These templates include stubs for what Homes and Ampson say when looking at, using, or combining inventory items with each hotspot in a room. As such, even if the actual dialog lines haven’t been written yet, placeholders for them appear in the code.

When I pulled the dialog count for the game in its current state it came out to slightly more than 20,000 lines. To put that in perspective, Sleuthhounds: The Cursed Cannon, the largest of the existing Sleuthhounds games, weighs in at 2,377 lines of dialog.

When I delved into the numbers for Cruise I found that collectively, the placeholders for looking at hotspots and combining inventory items with those hotspots came to a bit more than 6,000 lines of dialog. The vast majority of these lines don’t advance the game in any way. They’re there to respond to incorrect things players could try or to provide look responses. Having nearly three times the dialog as The Cursed Cannon just to these actions seemed like a heavy burden on production. Given that I was already leaning towards taking out the mechanics that would bring all those lines in anyway, once I saw the actual numbers it became a simple decision to remove those gameplay elements to reduce the need to incorporate unnecessary dialog, much of which players would probably never encounter.

To be sure, 14,000 lines of dialog is still quite a lot. With the last couple of side quests yet to be implemented that number will also grow a little bit more. However, the proportion of lines related to actions that accomplish something versus actions that don’t will be much higher. I’ll also be looking to double up on dialog usage to help reduce the number further. For example, things like doors and windows and lamps probably don’t need unique descriptions when they’re used in all of the different locations in which they appear.