A Character Who Remembers Everything Still Has to Choose What to Say
A player returns to a workshop after a difficult mission. Three things have changed: they repaired the owner's machine, brought back a rare tool, and arrived badly injured. The owner has a line for each event. Which one should play first? That small scheduling decision can change the character. Noticing the tool first suggests one set of priorities. Noticing the injury first suggests another.…
A character who can recall every event must still decide what to say about them. In the game Hades, dialogue choices for characters are determined by factors such as the timing and relevance of events. Supergiant, the game's developer, improved dialogue handling in their December 2020 patch notes, noting that certain events now have higher priority. However, the notes do not specify how much each change affected player attachment.
The design exercise presented here involves a hypothetical workshop owner named Iona. Three distinct reactions are created for her: immediate concern (offering a seat after seeing the player's injury), acknowledgment (noting the machine's repair and thanking the player), and personal interest (inquiring about a rare tool). Each reaction has specific reasons for being selected and reasons for becoming irrelevant.
This approach prevents all remembered events from being treated as equally urgent and allows for character-specific choices.
A practical event record is proposed to answer five questions: what happened (event description), how the character knows (different explanations), when the response can play (location, conversation state, prerequisites), what can outrank it (urgent or story-critical events), and when it should retire (consumption, expiration, change, or optional status).
The system should select reactions only from those that are currently valid, avoiding contradictions. If no valid reaction exists, ordinary dialogue or silence can be used.
Inkle's Writing with ink documentation provides conditional choices, text tracking, and alternatives that can be used to build an authored reaction system. However, these tools do not automatically determine which memory should matter to a specific character. The prototype should keep two facts separate: the player's actions (repairing the machine) and Iona's reactions (acknowledgment and curiosity). The delivery boundary, persistence, and interruption handling should be considered to ensure a smooth player experience.
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