Gadgets and Gizmos Aplenty

While I'm hard at work on the nitty-gritty details of creating this piece of technology, I want to take a moment to reflect on the big picture and present the vision behind the project. Then I'll try to unpack how the technology helps us reach that goal.

The Dream

Anyone who has played the conversational games of improv comedy for any amount of time must be entirely ruined on video game dialogue. The possibility space of conversations in improv games is even more massive and sprawling than the well-worn routines of daily speech. Even so, video game interactions pale in comparison to the quality of ordinary banter between friends. And it doesn't have to be that way. When it comes to how video games handle dialogue between the player and non-player characters, a lot is left to be desired.

Conversations in video games are still comparable to side-scrollers, at best. Branching paths is an inherently linear structure. There is no wondering off the path to find the boundaries of the conversational world, there is no meandering, no trailblazing, no adventure. What would it look like to have open-world conversations in video games? What would it require?

For developers to simulate dialogue in-game, we have to break out of the one-dimensional renderings of characters' speech that we have relied on since the dawn of print. We need engines that simulate thoughts and ideas, then render those thoughts and ideas differently from different angles. Then we can design conversational worlds in-engine that players can navigate fluidly. 

The Technology

I've bitten off just as much as I think I can handle of this radical vision. Bitwise, as I explained in the previous devlog, is designed to encode information in a body of text. In effect, it generates new ways to say something, at times bringing new information and new emphasis to the original. It could be used as that unit which renders thoughts and ideas from a unique angle.

It is not going to build out a conversational world. It is also not going to navigate the player through such a world. It is simply the camera.

For now those other two essential tasks will have to be handled separately. Building out the conversational world, and by that I mean writing out the thoughts and ideas that inhabit the possibility space in a way that can be interpreted by the camera, will probably need to be done by a combination of rote methods and procedural ones that will be invented later. As for navigating the player through the world, that's up to the style of the narrative design and so cannot be easily generalized. I'm sure I will have much more to say about all of this when it comes time to focus on an application.

For now, it's all about the tech. Thanks for reading~