{"id":113376,"date":"2020-05-25T09:51:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-25T09:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/363531"},"modified":"2020-05-25T09:51:00","modified_gmt":"2020-05-25T09:51:00","slug":"dreaming-spires-dynamic-narrative-layer-by-layer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/05\/25\/dreaming-spires-dynamic-narrative-layer-by-layer\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreaming Spires: Dynamic narrative, layer by layer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. <\/small><\/i><\/strong> <\/p>\n

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Pendragon<\/a> is a narrative strategy game being made by inkle<\/a>, the creators of 80 Days<\/a> and Heaven’s Vault<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our last game, the IGF-winning Heaven\u2019s Vault,<\/a><\/em> was a 20+ hour adventure game that plays out differently for every player, and every time you play. It worked by combining a standard adventure game world with a highly contextual, dynamic dialogue system. The world provides the input – what do you find? In what order? – and the dialogue system spins it out into a narrative.<\/p>\n

For our next game, Pendragon<\/em><\/a>, we wanted to push that idea further. Is it possible to make the entire narrative out of contextual dialogue? Instead of tying the conversation engine to something rigid, like an adventure game world, we\u2019ve tied it instead to a procedurally-generated Chess-like strategy game. Boards, moves, pieces… and combinatorial explosion. <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how it works.<\/p>\n

The Blueprint <\/strong><\/p>\n

Heaven\u2019s Vault<\/em>‘s dialogue system consists of an enormous bucket of short conversations, tagged with what discoveries make them relevant, and a system for deciding what to say next. <\/p>\n

That system – which is driven by what the player finds in the world, and also what they talk about – is ultimately the thing responsible for delivering a coherent and engaging narrative across the game\u2019s 20h running time.<\/p>\n

A game of Pendragon<\/em> – which is roughly as long to play through as 80 Days<\/em> – consists of a series of \u201cboards\u201d. Each board is created based on the required difficulty (which increases across the course of the game). It\u2019s given a setting type (\u201cweird forest\u201d, \u201ccrumbling ruin\u201d, \u201cvillage\u201d), and then populated with appropriate enemy pieces (\u201cwolf\u201d, \u201cbear\u201d, \u201crogue knight\u201d, \u201cblacksmith\u201d) that the hero party then attempt to fight, sneak and talk their way past.<\/p>\n

The system for the narrative is like Heaven\u2019s Vault’s<\/em>: an enormous bucket of lines of dialogue, or lines of description, tagged with what\u2019s required to make them fire. But it\u2019s also quite a lot more structured too, with layers of content arranged from highly specific down to highly generic. <\/p>\n

The Ground Floor: Responding to Game State<\/strong><\/p>\n

The basic tags are all tied to the gameplay. Who\u2019s moving? What kind of move are they making? What consequences does the move have on the game state? Which other pieces are involved in this move? <\/p>\n

We test these using a \u201cplay\u201d condition which takes three parameters – a description of the piece doing the move, a description of the move, and a set of things the move and piece mustn\u2019t be. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n