Update log
Full Innkeep update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Greetings everybody! It’s January, and we’ve been back to work on Innkeep for a couple of weeks already. In fact, a few core gameplay systems have recently firmed up through further prototyping, and I thought it would be nice to share some details about them.
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Events
- UI and audio
In Innkeep, the fantasy of being an innkeeper has a few different components. Yes, you’re serving food and drink, cooking, putting more wood on the fire, bustling about. But it’s also a game about listening in on conversations, and about talking to people, trying to set them at ease so that you can wheedle more information out of them. That’s something I’ve been firm on from very early on. What I wasn’t entirely sure of for quite some time was just how conversations and charming could be implemented. I definitely had a general direction I wanted to go in. But it needed to meet several requirements…
Paused, Time Sensitive, and Unfolding
First, as I wrote in this old article on how dialogue might work in Innkeep, I wanted RPG style paused dialogue, where you can take your time to read fairly lengthy strings of text. This is because Innkeep is a game about living in a particular world, encountering the other people who live within it. The guests are unique characters with their own particular backgrounds and stories to share.
Another core element of the Innkeep gameplay loop is that your time is limited. Limited time means that you must be selective about who you eavesdrop on, who you spy on, who you talk to, etc. The basic idea informing this limitation is called “ content as reward ”. Your experience of the game might be quite different to somebody else’s, depending on how you develop your character, what conversation choices you make, etc. So, while the conversation system needs to pause for player comfort, it still needs to be time sensitive in some manner.
On top of this, we also want conversation options to be uncovered gradually, rather than available all at once. As the player spies on their guests, eavesdrops on their conversations, or smooth-talks them, they can discover entirely new topics to talk to them about. Sometimes these topics might even be secrets that a guest is actively hiding from the player!
In summary, we needed a system that allowed for paused dialogue, yet was time sensitive, and would allow for the gradual unfolding of new discoveries and conversation topics.
Enter, Storylets
A starting point that we have stuck with is the master’s book, a UI element in the form of a journal, where we may access information about our guests. But this was only part of the puzzle. Something else needed was a way to organize conversation options, and present them in a manner that allowed for maximum narrative freedom, while still also providing a sense of ‘mechanics’ for the player to get to grips with, encouraging intentional play. The answer was ultimately a version of something outlined in Emily Short’s blog, particularly her writing on a concept she refers to as “Storylets”.
Storylets are an amount of content (like a paragraph of text, or a few lines of dialogue), which are accessible on the basis of certain prerequisites, and have certain results. These prerequisites are expressed as states, like “Stranger”, “Comfortable”, or “Likes Cats”. Thus, they are “qualitative” states. Importantly, the player is generally made aware of what those states are, and often of what states might be needed in order to do something.
For
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