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For the past week, we've been working on a very important part of our development: the design tools. Modders should take notice too, as we're planning on releasing these either with the finished game or soon after it's done.

The design tools were developed in C# with Windows Forms, and give a pretty good idea of how the game's story is structured. Currently, the whole thing is split into two programs: the general design tool and the story design tool.

Character Archetypes:

The stories in The Kingsport Cases are incredibly complicated and branching because of the procedural writing, so we need tools to organize the huge amounts of information we need to deal with. The central units of all of this is, as with any story, the characters involved.

In this game, we want characters to be able to repeat believably across multiple stories. That means that, instead of writing specific characters, we need to write character roles. The characters themselves are different from playthrough to playthrough, but each character placed into a story has a role to fill. These roles are tied to every part of the story, from their goals (Plot Directives) to the knowledge they have and their relationship with the player.

Procedural Dialogue, and why we're not crazy

Each personality and trait has a set effect on relationships with other characters (an introverted person is going to find a bubbly person annoying, for example), and these relationships have an important role in dialogue. For the dialogue to take all of this into account, we can't just set up dialogue trees for every possible set of cases in existence. That would take literally hundreds of years, and we don't have that kind of budget. That's where our special dialogue tool comes in.