And dialogue options FTW. Also if you can, try to throw in other punches. Say, for some insane reason, you pounce a guy with a helmet. Then you would have to choose to punch him in the gut instead, or maybe the classic knee to the groin. And so on. EX.
[Left Click]:Punch
[Right click]:Select target

Oh and don’t stop making it by choice.If you HAVE to stop for medical reasons and it’s left uncompleted, I still want a game semi-finished by Tom Francis than no games by Tom Francis.

[Space]: (friendly line)
[Enter]: (aloof line)
[Shift]: (aggressive line)
[Left-Click]: Punch him

If the player tries to pursue the conversation, the spoken options slowly fade away as he does so, while the “punch him” option grows larger and bolder. Eventually the pouncee’s speech is just “wah wah wah, wah wah wahh” and LEFT CLICK TO PUNCH is covering most of the screen and flashing on and off.

Looking at the pounce makes me think about the Hunter in Left 4 Dead, and imagine a Gang-Garrison-style side-scrolling remake of that venerable Valvism.

At any rate, this update mentions useage of a mouse. I know that on keyboards, platforming games are not that good, by why use the mouse?

Looking forward to the second round.

Best dialog system ever?

Just picture it! Your little dude leaps, crashing down onto that dude with a gun, and then they launch into a full-on discussion of each character’s motives and desires. The player, stunned (and a little hurt) by the sudden injection of verbosity, interrupts the dialogue with a mouse click, commencing the face punching.

You should do it at the very beginning of the game. If that’s not an intuitive way to introduce the face-punching, I frankly don’t want to know what is.

As for milestones 5-7, relationship management should be the next frontier for game design. There are games like “Half-Life 2: Episode 1” and “2” where a companion NPC follows you around and tries to help you. But the next stage of game evolution is to turn them into autonomous individuals with their own goals. Instead of taking them for granted you would have to negotiate with them to get what you wanted, and this negotiation would be based on an implicit understanding of what your friend/colleague/ally/relative/lover/whatever will want/tolerate/refuse rather than the NPC offering the player an explicit “do this and X will happen” choice. In doing so you are forced to make a choice about what kind of person the player character will be, and therefore how the NPCs you have yet to meet will react to you.

This means that the single player game has to be treated as a multi-player game with AI participants rather than the scripted movie experience that it tends to be at the moment. Some people see a similarity between games and movies because so many action movies rely on spectacular special effects. But the essence of gaming is in the spontaneous events and interactions that arise from the player(s) situation rather than the set pieces. It’s about individual agency rather than the passive consumption of someone else’s vision.

Consider real life. You constantly have to interact with the people around you, and decide how to treat them on the basis of what relationship you have with them now and how you want them to relate to you in future. But you have to decide immediately what to do or say.

So a UI for relationship management must be context-sensitive, real time, and persistent. When you meet an NPC it should present you with a list of things that you can say to them which would be relevant to your current situation. It should require you to make a choice (and no choice = choosing to be silent) in as many seconds as you would have in real life. The way that NPCs react to you in future should depend on how you’ve treated them in the past, even to the point of the game becoming impossible to complete if you alienate the people you need as allies.

But if you have established the habit of treating a particular person in a particular way you are likely to continue it in future so the relationship management UI would have to reflect that. For example, if you treat a particular NPC with hostility when you first meet them then on subsequent meetings the user interface should make the hostile interaction options more prominent than the non-hostile responses. The degree of bias in the interface should reflect your past history with that character (and/or that class of character). It should also change according to the plot points you uncover in the course of the game, e.g. if you discover that an NPC you thought was a villain was really working for your side or vice versa.

Sometimes the opportunity to respond will be so fleeting that you fail to say anything or say the wrong thing by accident, as happens in real life. This exposes a tension between realism and player satisfaction that is as unavoidable as the eternal conflict between frame rate and jaggies. In a strictly realistic game you could condemn your whole campaign to failure in the first minute by making enemies of the characters you will need to have as allies, but only find this out a few hours later. Result: one unhappy player. In a game that is biased towards player satisfaction the NPCs will be unnaturally forgiving and the relationship UI will give you obvious prompts about what you should do.

The conflict can be partially resolved by representing other aspects of the human decision making process. For example, the relationship UI might offer you hints like “Your training says it’s usually best to do X”, or “Your mission briefing said to do Y”, or “Character A has promised to give you B if you do C”. The player is reminded of what his or her choices mean without being pressed into taking any particular one.

I’m not suggesting that you build all this stuff into your game Tom, but it’s where games need to go. Just imagine how radically different the next “Half-Life” game would be if you had to manage your relationship with an angry, grief-stricken Alyx. You would actually have to become a character instead of a walking gun platform.

Would it be art? Would it be fun? I don’t know, but I think we need to find out.

And chin music looks entertaining. So, that’s good.

Slides are definitely good. I’m planning on having a little skid when you land fast at a low angle, too, but I’ll save all that stuff for when I know how for sure what kind of levels it’s going to have.

Nonomu: nah, it was never going to be about detective work. The frequency of violence is yet to be determined.

Try jpcampbell (fearsome ‘at’ symbol) gmx.com

Also, now that the character design is finished, it’s a good time to name the protagonist. How about Batman?