Thanks, everyone! <3

How about lies? could someone retell the events in a way that isn't true? maybe it could create like a paradoxical 'past' with things not quite aligning. The same person in two places at once, for example.

You got it!

The way you wrote it makes me think about old murder mystery series like Murder, She Wrote or some Hercule Poirot, but you're the one doing the thinking (meaning the player).

I had to think of these series as well, I loved to watch these on TV when I was younger.

I do like these kinds of shows!

Really feels like you're having some big breakthroughs with what this project truly is.

Yes!

It definitely sounds like quite a lot of content to make, but hopefully it'll be a nice thing to work on when you need a change of pace from the other aspects of development.

Oh, for sure! c:

Maybe I don't understand the intent fully but can't you have the relationship on the connection instead of on the node "end point"? I mean each node could have a single end point but depending on the type of connection the meaning is different, and the type of connection could be labeled on the curve connecting the two nodes.

If I'm understanding you correctly, I tried mocking up something like that here too.

Ended up deciding against it because:

• You need to be able to focus on the fact that a particular connection exists for a specific character (e.g. "Fennel has a child" by selecting "child" on Fennel's node, but "Bayleaf has a parent" by selecting "parent" on Bayleaf's node, or "Fennel's child is Bayleaf" by selecting "Bayleaf" on Fennel's node etc.).
  
  
• You don't necessarily always have all of your nodes and connections visible at once so I want everything to be right there on the node itself so you don't have to follow the lines to see what the info actually is.
  
  
• You don't always have the full info (you know Fennel has a child but not who it is) in which case the right side will just say for example "(someone)" and there won't be any connecting line at all yet.
  
  
• I think it will be hard to follow and organise if you have all of the lines coming out of the same connector.

Bit wordy, does it make sense?

I can't imagine rewriting parts of the game in another engine just to prototype, I admire your dedication

Surprisingly quick to more or less copypaste some of the C++ code and adjust it to C#

Woah!! Congrats to you and welcome back team??!

I also did not expect things like giants in this game Looks amazing!

That bridge looks fantastic! Hope the full playtest was a success You're really progressing fast.

Thank you so much! Bit more on that system coming up below…

49

Information

Collecting it, handling it, using it. That's what this game's all about. If you've already read through the discussion in the thread since the last numbered update, there's not much new here, but this update is meant as the one-stop summary of the conclusions made.

Context

Quick reminder:

• The game plays out in two timelines: present and past. Before and after the town is destroyed by a flood.
  
  
• In the present, you find survivors through deduction based on your information, rather than directly through exploration (you can walk around and you can find information in the present too, but not people, as they're always hidden and inaccessible to you by yourself in one way or another), and bring them back to your "base". There you can talk to them.
  
  
• The past isn't true time travel, but a retelling from the perspective of the one you're talking to, so you'll have access to more of this timeline the more witnesses you have. But you get to play it by moving around it in it like normal gameplay, with control over the flow of time.
  
  
• You can take snapshots of moments in the past and use the information there as conversational options in the present. These are not photographs, as in earlier iterations of the game, but simply mental notes that the player character takes. There will be a few things in the present to snapshot as well when you explore that may connect back to something you learnt about the past.

Example

I implemented a rough version in the Unity prototype of some nodes and connections that will be used in the game's tutorial to teach you how to play and find your second witness with the help of the first one.



As you can see, this is how dialogue options work in the game. You, and your companion character(s) carry out a conversation using the information you've gathered so far in order to suss things out. I'll make sure to make it clear when you're midway through a conversational thread by keeping the stuff you already picked highlighted or put into a stack on the side or something like that.

The interface of course will be nicer. The mockup from earlier in the thread is a little more friendly (in the final game it'll fit into the watercolour style):



As discussed, there will also be ways to organise, sort and filter these in various ways, or to fade irrelevant ones out to focus in on particular connections.

Player's point of view

So, what you need to know about nodes in-game:

• In the past you can go into first person view and anything "nodeworthy" within sight will be focussed (receive an outline and a text label, or something like that) and you can store what you see as a picture on a node listing this information as seen in the mockup.
  
  
• Each piece of information is selectable as a dialogue option, and able to connect to pieces of information on other nodes. You can focus on a particular aspect of a situation ("it was Tarragon chopping" or "chopping what was they were doing") depending on your choice.
  
  
• Depending on what you know already, information can be partial, e.g. "(someone) is chopping the tree", and you can ask people in the present if they know who fits the description and fill it in that way.

Developer's point of view

I've learnt a lot about what's going to have to go into the full version of this while throwing the proof of concept together quickly in Unity, so I'm very glad I went for this first.

I feel like I've managed to distill the concept into something fairly simple for the player to understand at this point, but of course the game needs to keep track of a lot of stuff for this all to work. What does the player know, what does each individual character know, where are we in the story and would any of them have reason to lie or misremember?

I think making the player character an actual person with their own lines helps give weight to the story while at the same time making clear that the information is theirs in-world, and not yours, making it less weird if you've played the game before and already know something; the character still doesn't. And regardless, the node system means you can't even talk about something until you've managed to connect or collect stuff to spawn the node you need anyway.

Additionally, as you saw in the GIF, conversational threads with awareness of the previously selected nodes in order to make those connections! There was a bunch of convoluted hardcoded logic to make that particular set of exchanges come together, but I'm going to have to turn that into a robust and flexible yet manageable system for the full game. This prototype is helping me figure out what I'll need for that.

And I'm excited about doing so! It'll be a lot of work, not least on all the content in and of itself, but the game is finally feeling really tangible.

Nice octree, assuming that's what it is! Fun to see all the experiments, especially the hardware one. Looks like you're having fun!

Oof, they're both really pretty! I know you said it'll be tweakable anyway, but as a default I think the relative text size is better in the first one, so I'd prefer that in the second one as well. On the other hand, I think the contrast is better and easier to read in the second one. I think I liked the arrow on the side so the text can fill the whole height of the box better too.

It's tough to choose, but I think the second one is better given the level of everything else. I think this game can pull it off!

Hey, thanks!

That comet is really nice. And I like how your art style allows you to make a falling one by just cutting off some of the tiles I like the colours in the second to last pic in the thread a lot, that dark green really pops.

That looks great! And I hope the mechanic works out, will we be getting more playtest videos?

Fun to see your solutions! That 3D sideview is great too.

Putting some of it on the outside is a great way to vary it! Do you get a view of the valley below the dam we've seen before from there? Maybe the difficulty is fine as long as there's a checkpoint not too long before or something?

Breaks are good! Tree seems to be coming along nicely, looking forward to seeing traversal in motion. And getting increasingly curious about that villain.

Yay! Really helpful questions once again, let's see…

I guess this means info only appears there once you've learned it through testimony? For example, Fennel has no "Parent: whoever" info presumably because it's totally irrelevant (at the moment).

Correct! Card is empty until you learn something, tho as you saw what you learn can be partial. You might also have a profile on someone you don't know the appearance or name of yet, but who has a connection.

I think the rest of your questions can be more or less answered by saying that yes, there will have to be some reasonable limit to these things by design, making sure you're never getting too much all at once

So we might not see multiple identical unspecified entries at all, but if we do I imagine I'd make all of them yield the same replies from your companions until one of them gets filled in through this process.

Likewise I might just ensure no verb goes with more than one adverb, but if there are any exceptions I think perhaps they could stack on the right?

Agree, not quite happy with it, but I do think not having a separate node will be for the best, so need to figure out the best way to do it without it.

Like a gray box under Bayleaf and Fennel that says "child | parent". Bayleaf's "parent" handle would connect to the Fennel's "child" handle.

The problem with this is that "Bayleaf has a child" is one fact that you could choose to focus on in a dialogue, and "Bayleaf's child is Fennel" is another, so each of those needs to be available on the card*, and if someone has more than one child, I want an entry for each, not several lines coming out of a single connector, or we're back to the mess from the first mockup where everything was coming out of a connector at the bottom of the card.

I like this, but will you be able to expand the snapshot to see a bigger version while also highlighting elements? Seems like it'd be too small to be all that useful otherwise.

Yeah, you'll even be able to jump completely back into exploring the past at that exact time and place!

though maybe it could be useful to sometimes combine the fading-out of irrelevant info with the highlighting of especially pertinent info?

Possibly! Did you have something particular in mind? o:


* You select one of the labels on either side of the dividing line in a grey box separately, not the box as a whole. The dividing line is not necessarily the final design, because there might be more than two things that belong together, so I probably have to go with some kind of substack thing instead.

If you remember way back I talked about the snapshot mechanic storing information like this:

A system of "verbs" allows NPC's to see not just who is in a photograph, but what they're doing (such as hugging each other, or being dead). They can then react accordingly depending on what they are shown.

So I only showed intransitive verbs in the mockup, not acting on anything else, but for transitive verbs involving objects, you'll get things like "Fennel | hugging | Bayleaf" or even "Yarrow | chopping | tree | with axe", so I need the nodes to be able to express all of this, and to let you focus on any of these facts ("it was Yarrow chopping", "it was chopping Yarrow did", "it was a tree Yarrow was chopping", or "Yarrow used an axe to chop").

I'm wary of tying it to English word order, not to throw a wrench into localisation, so I need each piece of information to be presented in more or less the same way so that the interface works universally. I think a tree structure would work well for this:

Code:

Yarrow
|
+--> chop
     |
     +--> tree

The question is how to get the instrument ("using an axe") into this structure. It can't just be listed with the tree because Yarrow wasn't chopping the axe like they were chopping the tree, they were chopping with the axe.

I could split it into two separate verbs, "Yarrow | using | axe" and "Yarrow | chopping | tree" but then we kind of lose the direct connection between the chopping and the axe, plus technically they could be holding the axe in one hand and doing the chopping with their other hand using a machete or something, who knows? I think I want a separation between incidental stuff (maybe Yarrow is "wearing | hat" at the same time but it's not relevant to the chopping) and completely coupled stuff like this.

The instrument could just be on the same level as the verb, perhaps bringing back that line, since it's basically adverbial.

Code:

Yarrow
|
+--> chop | with axe
     |
     +--> tree

It looks a little convoluted when we only have one thing like this, but it's very consistent and extendible once we get multiple simultaneous verbs and/or objects. Plus we can use the line when people are doing something together as well, and it can be recursive!

Code:

[subject(s)] Oregano | Ginger
|
+--> [verb] carry | [adverb] with stretcher
     |
     +--> [object(s)] Fennel
          |
          +--> [verb] dead

Managed to solidify this right here and now in writing this response, so thanks again for the back and forth!

What does this mean for the parent/child stuff where the "subject" is already specified by the profile node itself? My idea before, the reason it seemed a bit backwards, was that basically on Bayleaf's card, Fennel was the subject of "being Bayleaf's parent". But I agree this is unnecessarily confusing, and profile nodes don't have to be organised just like situational nodes—there's a reason they're separate node types after all.

That said, I think info entries on profile nodes should still be internally consistent, and not every piece of info is going to be an interpersonal relationship, so what makes the most sense to also convey things like "Bayleaf works in the café"? I think inverting the whole relationship (e.g. "child of Fennel") is tricky to reconcile with this, but I think we can change the presentation to make it clearer, and make it like a list of facts (e.g. "parent: Fennel", "workplace: café") instead of "Fennel | parent"? It also needs to encompass having only half the information, like "parent: unknown" or even "unknown relationship: Fennel" (bit too long to fit, needs work).

Another change is to make any lines referencing a profile (including the parent/child listings but also most subjects, objects and perhaps even adverbial props) just connect to the profile node as a whole, and not its corresponding listing (so "parent: Fennel" doesn't connect specifically to Fennel's "child: Bayleaf" but to the top or bottom of the Fennel node).

Whew, sorry for writing so much! Gives you some insight at least!

A final thought is that I think lines between nodes should probably be faded out when no node is focussed, and then only lines connected to a focussed node will fade in with that node and those connected to it, to combat mess.

To finish this off, an updated mockup (excuse the discrepancy between Tarragon's snapshot picture and description, don't wanna make a tree-chopping picture just for this):

[EDIT:]

Thanks! Not directly, it's just what seemed to solve my game's specific needs in the best and most natural way There are other games that also use pinboards with lines/string to connect stuff, like Life is Strange, or Shadows of Doubt right here on TIG—and as is pointed out in that thread it's a classic representation of this sort of stuff—but I'm not sure about other games using it as dialogue options, tho I wouldn't be surprised

EDIT:
Wow, in the usual fashion, a cosmic coincidence hit, and a day after writing this I did stumble across something with quite big similarities (find "ideas", pick one, character comments on it, in a time travel context)! Looks cool: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1479890/Inua__A_Story_in_Ice_and_Time/

Well, that's basically what I meant now, maybe unclear haha

[EDIT:]

Hm, yeah. Maybe there could be different "views" or something. I think you want completely freeform sometimes when you care more about other connections and you just want to cluster nodes that are connected for some other reason. Could be a separate family tree view, maybe?

Or just a robust filter system to go with that fading out of irrelevant nodes.

Say you select the Bayleaf profile node to focus it, any nodes not connected to it fade out, so you're already filtering by Bayleaf's connections. If you focus specifically on the "Parent: Fennel" listing, only nodes serially connected to that will be non-faded (so nodes connected to Bayleaf in general will also fade out if they're not specifically connected to this piece of info).

Then additionally you can click some "sort" button to order things generationally like you suggest? And you can confirm this new positioning, or cancel to have the nodes revert back to your custom organisation?

I do like this sort of idea more than the separate views, since it allows you to use the same few tools for everything and it seems quite intuitive to me. If family connections really do become a big deal (I'm not sure they will) a separate static family tree view could still be available for reference I guess.

EDIT:
The more I started thinking about this, the more I started envisioning the actual control scheme as well as art for this… Like for gamepad you'd have a cursor on the screen basically like a mouse cursor, in the form of the tip of a paintbrush, and you press the action button to focus the node below it, or one of its info listings. Then you can use the shoulder buttons to follow a line on either side, so you can speed along all of the connections, back and forth? And when you make a new connection, that brush tip cursor will actually paint the line?

Will try to make it as non-messy as possible Perhaps even the child/parent node could be changed to one of those grey info listings that just says "Parent: Fennel" for instance, and then if you focus it maybe a preview of Fennel's profile pic shows, and if you confirm you jump over to their actual node on the pinboard?

Or is that more disorienting than just having the lines between the nodes? Lines makes it clearer at a glance but might get overwhelming once you get a lot of connections and nodes, tho I could try and come up with some good ways to filter nodes as well?

Could be a combination too. A dedicated grey info strip for each connection with its own line connector might still look cleaner than having five lines to different things all coming out of a single master connector on the profile node, the way it is in the mockup.

With an option to focus on nodes and fading out any that are not somehow connected to it, maybe?

[Situation:]

Today's update is a complementary mockup of the stuff I just described:



So I think you'll have a sort of "pinboard" where you can move nodes around as well as a timeline (bottom) to pick more nodes from to add to the pinboard. Will use different shapes to differentiate them.

Broadly, three types of node:

• Situation: the snapshots you take in the past, with those metadata info bits, and a speech bubble telling you whose testimony it was taken from. One already on the pinboard in this picture, and one on the timeline that can be dragged onto the pinboard.
  
  
• Profile: name and/or description of a person, place, prop or the like, like the four character profiles you see here.
  
  
• Connection: discrepancy, relationship, and so on, like the child/parent one here. These are always hooked up to at least one other node.

On the timeline you can change whose testimony you're looking at, and jump between the snapshots you've collected. On the pinboard you can draw lines between nodes, and if the game agrees with you, something will happen.

When you speak to a character in the present timeline, this screen will pop up to let you pick a node or one of its specific pieces of info (e.g. "person, dead" to ask who it is), perhaps even letting you select the line between nodes to ask about the connection.

Spicy character names are just for the mockup, taken from the ancient 2D prototype—I have proper names for some of them already but not everyone so I went with this for now.

I also tried making everything separate like this but too messy, so won't go with this:



I think what I can do, instead of stacking outlines around all the motifs in a situational node all at once, is to show the outline only for the currently highlighted piece of metadata, like so: