Today I took some time to review pending blog posts.
The latest post by Emily Short about the game Mask of the Rose caught my eye.
I haven't played the game yet, but the article talks a bit about the systems they used to improve player expressiveness when making choices, and I found it interesting to share with you.
In the article, she mentions that you can define certain "traits" of the character (for example, if they are melancholic), and this enables a certain branch of options that you can choose in dialogues. The same thing happens with the clothes you wear (this is also central in Woods Folk).
In Dance of the Spirits I do something similar, setting character traits early on in the preface, and then reacting to that.
This is an example of defining certain variables and designing the options around them to facilitate exponential explosion: at each moment of dialogue, we go through our variables and make sure that all possible combinations are taken into account.
It is the basis of reaction to state and consistent narrative design.
In addition to this, she talks about a hypothesis generation system, in which the player can select various options and create their own hypothesis of what happened in the crime.
What I found interesting about this is that the player's selection also enables dialogue options.
It seems like an excellent metaphor for confirmation bias.
Has anyone played it? Is there anything else notable?
It made me want to download it and play it in the next few days.
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