So, before I go out to San Francisco to meet up with the folks at Garage Games for the Expo portion of GDC and show off Interrogative to hordes of game development professionals, I thought I would take the chance to show a bit leg for you guys and girls as well…

Everyone who has followed my blogs has heard about the Interrogative system, and even seen a screenshot of an early test version of it. Well, time has passed and Interrogative is getting bigger and stronger every day, just like a well-fed feature should. With Garage Games being so kind as to let me have an Expo pass for GDC, I’ll have the chance to show this feature off to whoever comes by the Garage Games booth.

But many of you who read these blogs aren’t able to go to GDC. And of course, I can’t leave you hanging, so after I worked out a number of bugs to support a cute (or rather: so-dumb-you’ll-laugh) little chat “minigame” inside of Interrogative for GDC, I got a video clip of it uploaded to YouTube (the YouTube version is a bit sharper looking):

What you’re looking at is, first, the player selecting the NPC and opening a conversation with it, and then prompting it about a context (subject) named “Trivia”. The NPC asks if we want to play- and of course we do!

After that, we’re prompted with a series of questions that are true/false, or looking for specific answers. I got one wrong on purpose just to show how there are hooks connected to the dialogs that can both affect variables inside the NPC (in this case the one tracking the score), as well as check variables attached to the NPC (score, again). These are handy for both mini-games as well as AI.

Once I received the results of the quiz, I changed topics to Pandemic, which is going to be a rather huge piece of conversation pie once the game is launched (you can find a little bit about it on the Epic Frontiers site right now, but it’s slated to be greatly expanded). Right now, it has about 15 lines of dialog in it, so you see a bit of me navigating the answers from the NPC to try and dig for more information before reaching the (current) bottom, and then clicking the open/close conversation button in the middle to end the conversation. When it’s done, Pandemic, as a subject, should have hundreds, if not close to a thousand lines of dialog.

What I haven’t shown are some of the features that do work which I’ve talked previously about, but which I have no content created for, such as selecting NPC’s as contexts themselves, logging information (though that list on the far right shows what I have logged in past tests), gaining or removing contexts, or some of the other spiffy gizmos that are in there. I’ll try to do what I can to get more content in there and upload at least one more video for GDC, but bugs like to breed in the nooks and crannies between lines of code, and I squashed far more than I thought I had to in order to make the features for that mini-game work like I wanted, so no promises. In the end, it will be more about the stability of what I have than moving the development as far as it can go (but we’ll see about trying to get a bit advancement done anyway).

For those interested, I’ll be at the Garage Games booth during the GDC Expo, and I will also be attending (and sponsoring) IMGDC in Las Vegas in April. If you’re going to be in Vegas for that, I’ll most likely be demoing in a common area (booths are expensive).