Getting rid of the interface - conversation trees

Without any sort of preamble: do you think it's possible to implement meaningful conversation between the player and NPCs without an interface?

Now for some postamble.

I'm making a shooter, but I really want to make it rich in other forms of interaction than shooting people. Dialogue with NPCs, alternative gameplay like hacking and support abilities, infiltration and platforming. Trick is - I don't like UIs.

Things like infiltration and platforming are easy to do (without a GUI) because they are an extension of the control system of the game: as soon as you have the ability to move and jump, you have the potential for platforming (the other half of the recipe is levels that allow and encourage it). As soon as you have enemies that don't cheat, you have the potential for infiltration and stealth. UIs are designed to give the player feedback about the state of the world, but this can be accomplished other ways in these two areas. Feedback from platforming is quite intuitive - you're either where you wanted to be, or you're not! Feedback from stealth is trickier, and relies on the player observing the actions of the AI.

Hacking gameplay can be accomplished using a GUI without breaking immersion too much, since these actions will be carried out using equipment and computers anyway. It'd be really nice to have some sort of Doom 3-style real-time computer interaction, but just popping a GUI isn't unacceptable.

This philosophy extends to my planned design of things like sensors - instead of adding a radar to your HUD, I'm planning on making sensor items like the scanners from Aliens, which must be equipped, activated, and looked at. Even ammunition and health HUD elements are being done away with (health is a no-brainer, but ammunition will have to be dealt with more subtly... though I'm not averse to just not letting the player know how full their clip is. No problem in expecting your players to actually pay attention to what they're doing. Additionally, some weapons could have ammo readouts, which would be a nice distinguishing feature).

But now we come to conversations. Because I'm ambitions, I'd love to do something on the order of Deus Ex's conversation gameplay - to the point where situations can be resolved by carefully choosing what you say, or you can find out extra information that allows you to circumvent other challenges in the level.

But how do you do that without sticking a list of options in the player's face?



I've had some thoughts on this issue. It's a tricky one, and no mistake. It stems from the basic problem that we don't have enough inputs to relay the amount of information in a conversation. Whereas character control can be accomplished with as few inputs as you like, depending on the degrees of freedom of your characters, the sorts of things I'd like characters to communicate is far richer.

For simple squad commands, which will be a part of the game, assigning dedicated buttons to actions like 'find cover' and 'attack there' is fine. There is a small finite set of actions that a squad can be ordered to do, and they don't change based on the scenario, the particular location, or the status of individual members.

It becomes more difficult to find generic buttons for more complicated expressions. For example, we (friend who's doing writing and I) planned on having a fairly open level where you roam a suburb, looking for a suitable place to make a temporary base of operations. We didn't want to make the victory condition automatic (as in, trigger zones), since we want players to actually think about the location they choose (hopefully we can build consequences into it). Similarly, it's no good to have a 'press button for hideout' context action appear in certain spots. It seems like a great organic way to do it would be to allow the player to initiate a conversation with one of their squad suggesting that this might be a good location, and the squad member will respond depending on whether the player's in one of the locations we've predetermined.

But as I was saying to him - it doesn't really make sense to have a 'suggest we make camp here' button, especially when it's not relevant to other missions.

Some interactions can be accomplished organically. For example, instead of a generic 'intimidate' dialogue option, aiming a weapon at a character can serve this purpose. (Note: I always envisioned the dialogue system being completely unintrusive in terms of regular gameplay. So you could have conversations while walking around, fighting enemies, sorting your inventory, etc.) With the freelook mechanic I've got setup, a quick up-down head motion could serve as a generic 'affirmative' response, and a shake for negative. But you can't push these sorts of things too far.

I've had more thoughts, but I'm too tired to write them out. Open the floor!



EDIT: Actually, no.

Inventory access is another area I haven't really thought about, but will be incredibly tricky to deal with. I'm not a fan of Alone-In-The-Dark style visual inventories. Especially in the context of a shooter - I know my pistol's in my pocket, I don't need to pause and open up my entire backpack to just grab it. At the moment I've actually worked up a HL2-style inventory UI that's fairly unobtrusive - when you select a 'location', a list of all the items in the spot drops down and you can scroll through them, selecting the one you want to equip.