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[gimymblert]

We all love action, but most game are pure action. One under develop aspect of game is inter personal relation.

Let's discuss them, find the fun part or design some, of their aspect into FUN game  

Let's start with the gran daddy of all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_(video_game)

I Changed the topic for clarification

[gimymblert]

TO avoid clustering the discussion around the usual suspect game, here is a demonstration of a concept with social element into a pure action game (conflicting relation between you and the girl from opposing need). The whole discourse between the player and the npc is based on how you balance action, it is mediate by the gameplay.

It's a very old concept (2004) I had bury it because everybody was like ICO at that time but the concept was inspired by Princess maker 2 and Altered beast MD (I thought ICO missed an opportunity to make the relation dynamic and gameplay).

I propose this concept to attempts to steer this discussion away from clinging to the sims and explore beyond text parser and simple dialog tree.

You can discuss them, but I would rather hear new idea, new use or new implementation, but it's all up to you

S h a l l o w   h e a r t s

   Introduction
An errant warrior, a blessed young girl and cursed people. An adventure full with mystery!
You are an errant warrior who had fallen in a trap and arrived into a strange cursed land. There, the curse turned you in a pig. Zombies were attacking you when a little girl and a bishop save you. The girl has a strange power that cured away the curse. The bishop asked you to help them destroy the curse, as a warrior, you could fight and protect the little girl all the way towards a shrine, where everything had start. He and the little girl were too weak to make that journey, and the little girl is the only one that could dispel the curse. You are their only hope and you can't go away, without helping them, the shrine is the only exit to your world, and as long as the curse last, you can't quit.

   Features
   5 levels
   Vicious types of enemies
   2 main characters
   Emotional management

   Goal of the game
You have to protect the girl along the way to the shrine and try to save the cursed souls which are trap in zombies and pigs body.

   Gameplay, Partner time!
Command the girl
You can command the girl to stay somewhere or to follow you.

Save Of Souls
To save souls, you have to let the girl cure them, but she can cure only one soul at a time and it takes some moments. She cures the closest laying body to her.

Protect the girl
While the girl cures a soul you have to prevent attacks on her. However you can also kill bodies instead of just trying to stop them. The girl automatically runs away from enemies.

Girl's empathy management
But the girl react to your actions, the more you kill peoples that could be save, the less she likes you, and the less she likes you, the less she listens to you and does as she wants. According to her affinity with you, she will follow from more or less a distance. The further she is, the more difficult it is to save her from attacks.

Tension Management
The girl reacts to the tension of a moment, the more enemies that wander around, the closer she will stay from you. Over a certain level of tension, depending on how much  energy she have left, she will cling on you and embarrass your movement, so you have to calm her down by decreasing the tension. Each time you hit an enemy it decrease tension, but each time you take a hit, tension increase.

Energy
Once tension is low and the girl calm enough, she can cure you and herself. The more she likes you, the more often and the earlier she will cure you. If her affinity with you is too low she will only cure you when you are on threshold of death.

Weapons
You start with two weapons, your sword and your fist. Sword is the most effective weapon since it kills anythings quickly. However fist is the weapon of choice if you don't want to upset the little girl. Fist push zombies and make them fall without hurting them. In the middle of the game, you can find an arc that let you attack from a distance.

   Cursed Souls
Pigs
During your journey, you will meet pigs, this is souls of people with pure heart but were too weak to face the curse. If some pigs get killed by enemies, the little girl would be upset. There are three kinds of pigs.
Pink pigs: they wander around and don't care about you. They are easily approachable.
White pigs: they fly away from everything at sight.
Brown pigs: they approach you when they see you and try to attack enemies, but they are too weak and get killed very easily.

Zombies
Zombies are souls of people with heart too shallow for not being corrupt by the curse. There are three kinds of zombies.
Grey zombies: They wander around aimlessly and attack only when you are close to them. They don't chase you if you fly away.
Green zombies: These zombies attacks in priority the little girl and pigs. Beware if a pigs is killed, whether by you or a zombies, it will decrease the girl's empathy for you.
Red zombies: These zombies attack you on sight and chase you endlessly.

Demons
These are people whose heart was already corrupt, the curse just reveal their true nature. They cannot be cure and the girl don't mind if they are killed. Demons are stronger than zombies. There is three types of demon that come in two flavour, with and without wings. Demons with wings can fly over obstacle. One hit takes wings away.
Yellow demons: These demons chase the little girl and pigs in priority. They fly away when you attack them.
Red demons: Those have anger for you and will ignore the pigs and the girl.
Black demons: They attack anything they see first and harass it until it die.

   Levels
There are five levels, which are the village and the final shrine. Each level has 2 zones, the first zone is linear and is a transition that lend to a village or the shrine. The villages and the shrine are more prone to exploration. The first zone is always in isometric view, but the second can alternate side scroll and isometric view. Side scroll is mostly in use for in house passage. You can't pass a level if you do not have save enough souls, the little girl will refuse to follow you. When you save some souls, they can reveal information about the story or the level before they vanish.

[William Broom]

I'd like to see a game set in a high school where you play as a huge bitch. Like the game equivalent of Mean Girls. You spread rumours, betray secrets, seduce other girls' boyfriends, etc. But to make it more interesting (this is a videogame, after all) there could be a supernatural element. You've made a pact with a demon who feeds off your popularity, but the problem is that there are six other demons in the school as well, who have made pacts with other students. Each of these students is a boss, and of course each is associated with a different clique: jocks, goths, skaters, and so on. First your have to strip away their friends, then attack their self-esteem directly, and when they're completely broken your demon can devour their demon.

Strangely, I feel like if this was done right it would be far more disturbing than a game where you brutally murder people...

[gimymblert]

That's a cool concept, I can totally see it done!

Also this game may be a canvas for the design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_and_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_of_Siboot
http://storytron.wordpress.com/category/trust-betrayal/

I would like to see a system like this in game like mass effect and the underlying quips structure of Emily Short!

[Feral_P]

I'll just repost Theo from the other thread - I think it's the most insightful thing on there:

I think it'd be a better idea to make a conversation combat system more abstracted- think about how the Sims constructs conversations. On the note about created content, there was a Dreamcast game called SeGaGaGa that allowed you to engage in RPG-style insult fights with other characters... so there is that.

Really, the best way to consider a game mechanic for something like this might be to think of it as a metaphor. What is a conversation like? Is it a race to come up with a better quip first? Is it a trade of blows back and forth? Is it a dialogue you build together with your partner? Once you have some sort of metaphor, you have a way of building a fresh-playing game.

[gimymblert]

Conversation (natural) is seriously hard, I tried once I never recovered. I didn't tackle it yet in abstract form, I trade it for non verbal communication (position to infer formality or intimacy).

Aside from if it would be cool if someone came up with a great conversation system, I never tried storytron or Thrust and betrayal (both by crawford).


This little game is really neat about non verbal communication gameplay.
http://www.cecropia.com/

[HyperNexus]

I'm a bit lost by the way that social is being used here. The gameplay in Gossip to my understanding is not social, you do not interact with other people when playing the game. The gameplay is about balancing a system. However the theme is about social interactions because what you are balancing is relationships.

Facade is meant to emulate the potentials of actual conversations. I find the attempt to try and use natural language with a machine or game system a problem that is probably not worth spending too much attention on. At least for game designers. I feel that simplifying the language and trying to make that language expressible through mechanics is a far more interesting problem. You can say a lot with a limited language set. I'm hoping that Journey will highlight this.

William Broom, I've only played enough to judge the surface of it, so I may be completely wrong, but Dangerous Highschool Girls in Trouble is sort of like this. However I don't think the gameplay itself is social but the theme is about being social and relationships.

[tsameti]

Hey Gilbert!

That sounds like a fun little game there.
The way I figure it, no matter what you do you have to suffer through a layer of abstraction to achieve successful gameplay out of mock conversation.

I think the key point is choosing your restrictions in a way that emphasizes your game's theme, pace, and play.


I'd love to see a real-time strategy game from a commander/citizen perspective in which the game dynamically creates social groups, then assigns those groups to a graphical proto-dictionary. So when you bring up a communication with a person, you access their dictionary and your own to create pseudo-sentences and give orders/learn about your game society. God, it could get messy if not done well.

The way I might attempt a system like that is at the small-village level. You'd have to convince six computer controlled people to settle down and start farming, or something. Victory is having them prepared to survive the winter.

[gimymblert]

@Hypernexus
Butis conversation the only way to convey social?

Maybe gossip presentation is what have put you off but it's still a social game, all game fundamentally are about balancing a system.

I have post an example game right away to show that there is more to social than conversation.

Conversation itself a pretty interesting beast by himself because more than interface problem, there is also the appropriateness of the conversational flow: Irony is entirely contextual and not captured by surface word. A good conversational system (hence ai) should be able to deal with that layer of nuance, all the subtext and double sense.

I'd love to see a real-time strategy game from a commander/citizen perspective in which the game dynamically creates social groups, then assigns those groups to a graphical proto-dictionary. So when you bring up a communication with a person, you access their dictionary and your own to create pseudo-sentences and give orders/learn about your game society. God, it could get messy if not done well.

The way I might attempt a system like that is at the small-village level. You'd have to convince six computer controlled people to settle down and start farming, or something. Victory is having them prepared to survive the winter.

 

Harvest moon + the settlers?

[tsameti]

Yes.

I've got some guys I'll try to convince to join me on it. They've got a not terribly dissimilar idea in mind, but I'm the guy with the most time so I could probably incorporate a lot of my elements into their game.

Once I freaking finish my Son, Stranger demo. Arrggh.

[gimymblert]

I'm waiting for your demo
The lock tier concept look promising.
Would you present it in this thread too?

[HyperNexus]

@Hypernexus
Butis conversation the only way to convey social?

Maybe gossip presentation is what have put you off but it's still a social game, all game fundamentally are about balancing a system.

Conversation is not the only way. Multiplayer Doom or Mario Kart are social games. All you need is interaction with other people. Games that flirt on the edge of social are pretty interesting as well. Demon Souls and Nobby Nobby boy are sort of like this.

EDIT: There may be a case for replacing person to person interaction with person to computer interaction. I think doing so doesn't make the game social.

[gimymblert]

Yep there is surely a confusion now you point this

I'm referring social as social gameplay with npc, which is an underserve part of video games. I wanted a discussion about non necessarily fancy integration of this concept like those idea Tsameti had.

I would consider this still social game, I hardly see a dating sim as something else.

[tsameti]

Would you present it in this thread too?

Sure. Link is in my sig.

Edit: Post own game in OT thread = being a dick.

[gimymblert]

ON the topic of conversation, IF master designer Emily Short have a course about conversation flow:
http://emshort.wordpress.com/category/conversation-modeling/
And general guideline about gameplay and NPC:
http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/NPC4.htm

I think it's interesting to see how IF are done generally, there is a lot of good advice.
http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Craft#Making-Of_Articles

At AI GDC 2010 there was a lot of talk about social engineering in game:
http://aigamedev.com/open/coverage/gdc10-slides-highlights/
There is a lot of practical talk (utility and behaviour tree come in mind) about easing the jump from ai to authoring. The concept are not too difficult to grasp.

These talk (presentation below) are interesting:
http://files.aigamedev.com/coverage/GDC10_SocialGames.ppt
http://files.aigamedev.com/coverage/GDC10_InteractiveDialog.ppt
http://files.aigamedev.com/coverage/GDC10_SuspendingDisbelief.pdf

[tsameti]

@GILBERT

My turn to  I'm going to be reading for hours. The Short article reads less like a revelation and more like a list of things you can't afford to compromise on. The GDC talk is stellar. Utility theory sounds like a topic with a huge potential for exciting behaviors that I don't have the technical know-how to implement :D

@Nexus
Facade was a little disappointing for me. It really wasn't able to handle my first two run-throughs, and you're right, did more to illustrate the limitations of AI than to show off its promise.
However, Cleverbot has been mimicking human conversation for years. Could an adaptive database driven conversation machine be a better way to model a game like Facade? I don't know.

[gimymblert]

Utility is simple, it's a score then you pick the option with the highest score.

It's like RPG. The main concept is that you choose your scoring system that emphasis criteria of choice.

Basically different person have different scoring system.

Edit:
This may interest you as well
http://robert.zubek.net/software/breakup/

[baconman]

Could an adaptive database driven conversation machine be a better way to model a game like Facade? I don't know.

That's exactly what I hope to discover with my core long-term project, iMAGE Zero; as it (hopefully correctly) tests things like player-based reflexes, coordination, and decision-making by the way the players play. It's kind of like "procedurally generated ghosting" based on "tests" and player input, designed to respond to situations rather than simply tread a path through a level.

@ GIL

And that sounds a lot like the "motivation system" involved, as well. (Speedruns vs. completion runs vs. kills vs. not taking hits, etc.)

[tsameti]

GILBERT, your google-fu is astounding. The breakup is HILARIOUS and awkward.

I think I meant that Utility theory gets complicated once you start rectifying the math. ln bx / ln c compared against e^(gx-h) isn't exactly fun to tweak.


@baconman, I... so you're making a platformer game which sends player performance to a server which interprets playthroughs and uses it to help the local machine generate procedural levels? Huh. That doesn't touch on the issue of how to handle NPCs and dialogue/interaction, but it still sounds interesting.

[gimymblert]

LOL that's true, but I translate anything into simple term.


The way I jump other that "math" is that they represent curve, basically the advice is to avoid linear scale evaluation, I don't care the math I just get the concept.

Basically comparing those two "math" is comparing two curve that give identity and scale to the score.

SO 10 is not always 10 but how much of a scale based on a reference curve. It allow for more expressiveness in the scoring. You just need to draw the curve, that's what the math is for actually.

IN the sims, they don't use math, curve are hand edit in an editor.

edit
Well My google fu isn't that impressive, I have take a lot of time to survey those kind of information, It interest me a lot. That's 10 year now, I know where to look, but I'm only at the beginning of trying to apply it, small step by small step.
/edit

@ GIL

And that sounds a lot like the "motivation system" involved, as well. (Speedruns vs. completion runs vs. kills vs. not taking hits, etc.)

I didn't understand