The Next Step
Fuckin’ Shakespeare, I know. But this insipid nonsense represents an important step forward for Mouthwash, because Maryam (an NPC) is now capable of having goals: in this case, making Roni (the player character) happy and…
Category Archives: Mouthwash
A Mystery to Herself
Hey, so blog’s on hold this week after all due to personal matters. I’ll be back in a week or so. I’ll have a bit more to say about Mouthwash then, since I’ve actually made…
Mouthwash: Viewpoints
In previous discussions of Mouthwash, I’ve mentioned that there are four domains in which actions can take place: goals, emotions, viewpoints, and relationships. I’ve talked a bit about goals and emotions, which brings me to…
Mouthwash: Emotions and Stats
The time has come to check in again on the Mouthwash conversation engine. Earlier I mentioned that speech acts in Mouthwash have effects in four domains: goals, emotions, viewpoints, and relationships. Basically, this is meant…
Conversation Games in the Wild: Deadwood
One of the things I’ve been doing in the course of developing the Mouthwash conversation gameplay is to analyze transcripts of TV shows with good dialogue. The idea is to have some good examples to…
AI and Character
I’m starting to set up some of the basic AI programming in Mouthwash, my work-in-progress conversation system. (Some background here.) I wasn’t planning to get to that stuff so soon, but it became apparent pretty…
A Brief Introduction to Mouthwash
Previously, I’ve talked about conversation systems and my discontent with them. Talk is cheap; so in addition to complaining about it, I’ve been working on an engine called Mouthwash to make these ideas more concrete.…
Words as Actions
Shortly before my blog’s hiatus, I wrote this post, in which I talk about the kind of conversation systems you see in games. I was particularly concerned with the lack of variety as compared to,…
Conversation in Games: Trigger, Branch, Repeat
Bento Smile’s Air Pressure Why is there so little variety in conversation systems in games? Conversation is one of the most essential and frequent things humans do. It is a common source of interest, drama,…