New set of dialog trees for villagers

[kcig]

I have written new dialogue trees for everybody in the village. It is still kind of rough so there is room for changes.

I tried to give everybody a purpose/backstory and not have any interactions that feel like they don't give you new information.

Basically - Before you try to pursue Hilda, the only people you can interact with are Hilda and the Blacksmith. if you max Hilda's affection, before you marry her, you have to max her father's affection by having enough weapons and talking to everyone in the town. Afterwords you can marry her and have babies or whatever.

If you kill the blacksmith, that means you can't talk to anybody because Hilda is crying and you can't talk to anybody in the village if you don't have permission from the Blacksmith (I think it was mentioned by one of the writers on Community that he's the leader of the secret potion making cult, but that detail didn't have time to make it in the episode beyond having his picture hanging up in the cauldron room. So in my head, you have to get his permission before you to talk to anyone). After you kill the blacksmith, pretty much you have to leave the town. When you go to the treeline map, Hilda stops you in a cut scene, and regardless of your affection level, she asks you if you will marry her to save her from the fate of trying her luck in the forest or marrying a male villager. You can revel in how fucked up it is that she would beg her father's murderer to marry her.

If you say yes, before you can marry her, you have to have a house built for yourself in the town. In order to build a house, you have to befriend the carpenter and have enough sticks to ask the carpenter to build it for you. (the idea is loosely based on Gotz from harvest moon fomt, because at one point he gets depressed and stops building things for you, and you have to rebuild his affection). Was considering also giving the option to marry the carpenter once you befriend him, and then he all at once builds new abedtown for you to show his affection, rather than to marry hilda and slowly rebuild the town. Then I guess Hilda would have to then try her luck in the forest or marry the poker guy or bartender.

Even if you don't kill the blacksmith, if you want to upgrade the town to new abedtown or equivalent, then you have to befriend the carpenter.

Some features that would have to be added or tweaked for this to be fully realized without any compromise:

• Some of the potion recipes might have to be tweaked so that it fits a general formula of health related potions only using inanimate or inorganic ingredients (sticks, rocks, leaves, boulders, etc), and potions that mess with your physical stats (speed, jump height, etc) are kind of considered more evil and use weird ingredients that come from body parts and animals.
• Maybe certain potion recipes would be able to be equipped as weapons, so that when it is crafted in the cauldron, it would go into a weapon slot instead of a consumable slot.
• Might be fun to make it so that trees in the immediately surrounding forest levels can be cut down into lumber (using the axe) for purposes of rebuilding the town.
• Would have to restrict the dialogue trees of the townspeople based on whether you have the blacksmith's affection level up first
• Would have to make affection based either on the amount that you have talked to the npc ( hilda, carpenter) or the number of weapons you have (blacksmith)
• Would need different sprites for the town in progressive states of repair (eg, the steps between the town in ruins and new abedtown.)
• Would possibly need to make new abedtown buildings for other members of Greendale 7. Either that, or just one for Hilda, so that if you marry Hilda and are not playing Abed, then the whole town would be a monument to Hilda. I don't know if this could be done procedurally or if the whole tileset would have to be redone for any characters.

Thoughts?

[8bitgentleman]

So I've got a few questions/comments, take a deep breath there are a bunch:

1. First off thanks for writing this all down there's a lot of great stuff here and the more dialog/script stuff that's out there the easier it is to add new stuff to the game.
2. Alright first comment - I'm against hiding the earning of affection. While that might be more realistic there's no obvious reward for the player and there's no way to immediately tell that what they're doing has any effect. This might lead to the whole thing being overlooked
3. Do you have any thoughts on what Hilda's other commands do? A few have been figured out but not all ( see Maximise Hilda's Affection #1893 )
4. If you try to talk to the villagers before talking to the blacksmith maybe they could mumble something about not having permission ie you haven't talked to their cult leader.
5. Instead of the old woman giving away recipes I think she should give you a potion book. If you have the potion book then you gain the ability to pick up recipes and read them via the tooltip in the inventory. I love her turning you into a toad though!
6. Attacking trees could be potentially problematic how does the game know if you're attacking a tree or an enemy that's in front of the tree etc. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it would take some work.
7. I don't like the idea of hilda chasing after you if you try to leave after killing the blacksmith. Seems a bit forced ( in addition any scenes beyond super basic ones are a nightmare to code). I think it would be better if she asked you the next time you try and talk to her.
8. I'm 100% behind the revamp of recipes. As of now most of them are random and that definitely makes it more difficult to brew them. We've talked about adding an additional button ( if we're going off NES controller buttons then we actually have an unused one). I've never used a potion mid battle simply because it's a pain to go through the menu. Not everyone agreed however we did compromise on pausing gameplay when the inventory is opened.
9. Restricting/changing dialog trees based on affection has been a wish of mine for a while. I've got a branch (showHide) with it semiworking but I haven't been able to iron out all the kinks. My knowledge of adding and removing items from lua tables is limited.
10. It's relatively simple (code wise) for NPCs to give affection to the player for a variety of reasons and talking to them/having certain items could be one of them.
11. It would be much simpler to just have an upgraded town be hilda based instead of abed as you suggested.

I think that's everything I noticed. If I didn't comment on something then I'm behind the idea. Great work!

[kcig]

Hiding affection level - Obviously we're on the same page that no matter what solution we land on, it should be dead clear for uninitiated players what is happening. Basically I don't want to see any numbers or have her say "Your affection level is 400", I guess just stylistically it feels very clunky to me. I'm gonna bring up Harvest Moon again - in the SNES version each girl in town would have a diary you could read, and it would have between 1-6 hearts based on her affection level, and at 6 hearts you get the option to marry her. Each new heart level she says new things to you. I think it would feel more organic if we do it a similar way in this game. Maybe whenever you increase affection level or inquire about it, a meter of 6 hearts appears over her head. Each interaction is worth 1/2 of a heart. So it's more visual rather than having to read. With blacksmith it could be smile faces instead of hearts to indicate friendship level.

Potion book - that's a good idea, it could also save the ones you had previously found in the earlier forest levels. I think the blacksmith's wife and the old woman could at least give you one or two recipes to start out with, on the off chance that the player didn't previously pick up any potion recipes. The only thing that makes me iffy is how to integrate potion making into the next islands, if you have to find various potions in the levels. when would you ever use them again? If you could complete the game without potions, then why would you ever use effort to make them? So my idea was to have the potion-making be an aspect that can be fully explored within the first village, and then you could take it or leave it based on your own play-style in the next levels.

Hilda cutscene after killing the blacksmith - the only reason I thought to have her chase you out to the village-treeline map is because that is I think what must have happened in the episode to Abed. I don't know if Abed could have been so close to marrying Hilda before they decide to flee the village, and then in the start of the next map is where Abed, standing next to Hilda, agrees to stay with her in the village so that she isn't forced to marry a male villager or try her luck in the forest. But I suppose that could also be accomplished by making it the first thing she says to you if you try to talk to her again within the village map, since we don't really know what happened between the cut in tv show. That would work. Whatever maximizes easiness to code with authenticity to the episode.

I haven't personally tried to code a cutscene so I can't really say if a particular cutscene would be hard or easy to do. Same with the ability to cut down trees with your attack. While I want to be authentic to the episode where that evidently was possible, I could see it being time-consuming to make each tree have a node that only accepts damage from an axe, and persists as a tree stump when you reload the map. [or half baked idea that just occured to me- it could be like pokemon where you go up to a tree and get a dialog option to cut] If we just make sticks more abundant in the forest levels, it would accomplish the same goal without too much overhead. The carpenter would only require like 5 sticks to complete a job. It would play out like a quest, where you request the carpenter to build a thing, and he makes you collect x sticks, and you bring them back to him and he builds it.

Stuff the villagers could say before you are allowed to talk to them by the blacksmith
In my head, the knight was installed by Cornelius under the pretense of protecting the village, but really he's there to keep an eye on the villagers. The blacksmith doesn't let anyone talk to him so that knowledge of their alchemy cult doesn't get out. So it follows that they wouldn't directly say anything to you as an outsider until they know that the blacksmith trusts you.

• We don't talk to outsiders. If you want to buy supplies, you can talk to the blacksmith, then get out.
• Uh, I'm sorry, I have nothing to say to you.
• I cannot talk to you. Please leave our village, sir.
• You should talk to the blacksmith first. I don't know if we could trust you if we tell you about our magical alchemy cult. Haha, I meant that as a joke.
• I'm not allowed to talk to outsiders.

So I guess the knight, you should be able to talk to him whether you have talked to the blacksmith or not.

In the next week or so I'll think about Hilda's commands and also try to scratch out some designs for sprites for lower levels of renovating the village.

[8bitgentleman]

Affection - The heart system could work, I'd just be worried about confusing the player between the hearts and the Love emotion popup but that's a little thing that could be easily changed. Maybe the hearts are even a different color for different gendered NPCs.

Potions - I've always had it in my head that each separate area (Town, VoL, Gay Island, Castle Hawkthorne) should have some place to brew potions. In VoL it could be someone's house where they left a pot on or maybe a general store, it could be a part of the gay bar on the island and maybe there's a hidden room in the castle with potion supplies.

Trees - I'm torn on this. I think being able to cut down trees would be awesome but I just don't know how to go about coding it without getting in the way or normal attacking. Maybe only the trees in the level after the town could be cut down since there are no enemies there anyway. We could change the color or size of the trees to make it more obvious that they can be cut.

Those villager talking points look good we just have to make sure that the player understands that he should talk talk to the blacksmith.

[coolcoolcoolabed]

Maybe on the trees issue you could press interract instead of attack.