This month I was far more productive with my still-not-named episodic RPG project – Using two monitors makes life so much nicer.

This month also marks a special occasion as I’ve now been working on the project in my spare time for one whole year now.

Time sure flies..

This month I’ve added features for NPCs to the map/world editor and spent a little time working on the datastructure for NPC dialog trees. The thing with dialog trees is that they’re not actually trees – But rather directed graphs. When you think of modeling conversations as a series of nodes which represent the state the conversation is in and a set of response options which represent a transition function to another state in the conversation, it’s actually quite simple.

I’ll be using lua scripts for the dialogs, that way I can easily add conditional responses – For example you wouldn’t want to accuse someone of murder unless you had gathered enough evidence to support the claim.

Also I’ve decided on doing a ‘pilot episode’ which will probably be a 3-4 hour long game to test the engine and actually produce a finished product before the turn of the century. I’ve sketched out some details for a side-story which will take place in the same world as the other episodes, but will involve a different protagonist.

See you next month.