NPC reactions to events (Patreon)

Heya everyone,

The last few days, I worked again on more and more NPC interactivity. This time, I implemented a system that will trigger a dialog from the closest NPC (if there are any of course) every time an event (accident, fart) is occuring.

Now, this got me working on it for a few hours, since I had to 1) check if there was any NPC in a given radius and 2) only trigger the event on the closest one to avoid concurrential interaction that could crash the game.

Then, I got stuck a bit on the dialogs. My initial idea was to handcraft some dialogs for relevants and named NPC, and for the others, have a bunch of generic sentence that I'd import from a csv file. 

This got me stuck for an entire day, and I had to give up. I'm using a pretty robust dialog system that allow me to pass powerfull commands through the dialog, but I can't compile raw lines on the fly while the game is executing. This bummed me a little since I wasted a lot of time on this.

What this mean is that I'll have to handcraft every single line for every NPC that will trigger a reaction. This is of course good for variety but in time-spend-wise, I was hoping to cut a little corner here. 

Oh, and for thoses wondering, I could have used the chat-bubble spawning, but while this would have worked for the generic, random lines, this wouldn't have worked for deeper interaction. The ultimate goal here, you might have guessed, is to work toward a caregiver NPC that will follow you around and be able to react on events (like take you for a change in case of an accident). This require me to use the dialog system, because I need to be able to cast commands from the dialogs. 

Overall, I made some good progress on the logic side. The "bad" news is I'll have to spend a good time working on writing a lot of reaction dialogs, and this can be a bit tricky as I don't want it to feel re-used, bland or things like that.

So, that's it for today ! I hope this is the direction you all want to see, as I think NPC interactivity is definitely one of the most important point in a game like this. 

Now, I'm gonna focus on some world building to a change of pace - See ya next time !