Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Conversation Indicators

In my last report, I finished adding stamina to the characters you can have in your party and optimized in-dungeon rendering in The Dungeon Under My House, my non-violent, first-person role-playing game and my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

Sprints 2024-25 and 2024-26: Conversation topic indicators

Planned and complete:

• Show indicator when Friend has something to say

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Trigger intro script when pickle jar acquired

I’ve been trying to put myself into the mind of a brand new player figuring out how to play this game, which has helped me see ways to enhance the game in small yet impactful ways.

Before now, if you were to start playing the game, you would have a quick bit of scripted dialogue, and then it would dump you unceremoniously into the bedroom, and it would be up to you to figure out what to do.

And it didn’t sit well with me because I was asking too much of a hypothetical new player: knowing to click on a particular character on the screen as opposed to one of the other characters or to one of the more obvious button-looking buttons, then knowing to click on the Ask button, then knowing what topic to pick.

So I decided to provide some guidance in the form of an indicator that says, “This character has something to say to you!”

This iteration was still clunky, I realized. In real life, if you see someone who clearly has something to say to you, you wouldn’t say, “Hold on. First, let me ask you something” and hope you picked the topic they wanted to discuss.

So I streamlined it. If a character has something they want to say to you, they will launch into it immediately when you click on that character.

Now, after you hear that you should talk to Pat to start their induction ceremony into the Explorer’s Club, there’s a very obvious question: which one of the six characters on the screen is Pat?

By this point, you would likely notice that Francis should match the look of the character in the bottom party HUD, and you have met Sam who urgently needed to talk to you from the outset.

So how do you figure out who Pat is?

Well, one thing I did to help is provide a “What do you want to do with XYZ?” box when you click on a character to interact with them.

Without it, you had to click once more on either the Ask or Tell button to get their name.

Now, I COULD make it so that immediately after talking to Sam you see Pat has a speech bubble over their head, but I think I like the idea that you have to essentially do some trial and error and get acclimated to who is who in the process.

Also while playtesting, I discovered that when you click on the shelves in the basement, it always plays the intro script that shows how the secret door appears. There was a simple way to address it, but it was a hack fixing a hack, so I ultimately decided to create a new type of trigger criteria.

When you acquire the jar of pickles off of the basement shelves, THEN the script would kick off.

And once the script runs, it disables that trigger, so the script won’t run a second time. Whew!

Now, you might notice something: where are the pickles?

Well, the original drawing of the jar of pickles on the shelf was tiny, and I didn’t think it would work well for an actual item.

So I am currently applying my limited artistic talents to make something a bit better:

And while I am sure I could have thrown this in, by the end of the week I was not able to dedicate the time to more game development, so you’ll just have to imagine that jar being in the animated GIF above, as I’m sure by the time you read this I will have that time to make it a reality.

Awkwardly, I keep finding myself wondering what to work on next, mainly because I have a lot of questions about the directions this project can go in. I simultaneously want to answer those questions, which I expect to look like a lot of thinking and writing, and I want to ensure that the project keeps moving forward in tangible ways, which looks a lot more like coding, drawing, and creating maps.

Which of course makes me want the time to do both.

Thanks for reading!

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